Perils of Blogging and Other Self Inflicted Drama
Blogging on a platform like Ghost can be very freeing. I feel totally independent and in 100% in control of my own content and moderation and not subject to any CEO's whims. It is very fun and nice after years on social media platforms being dicked around by various insane billionaires.
The downside t0 all of this is when it comes to things like monetization and SEO. Ghost has some SEO built in, but I've spent the last few weeks trying to set up Google adsense. Mind you I'm not really a super tech geek or a coder so I have to learn on the fly. For some reason Google wasn't reading my site. I was also trying to index my blog with Google so search engines would find it.
I was up until midnight spending hours upon hours trouble shooting trying to figure out just WHY nothing was able to crawl this site. Turns out some of my DNS info on my site's host wasn't filled in right. That's a lot of technical stuff even I don't fully understand. I got it fixed and Google is now reading the site. Except I managed to lock myself out of adsense for 24 hours so I'll try it again tonight. Fun times. It was making me wish I'd just gone with something like Wordpress or Substack even.
Not that anyone actually cares about any of this, I just wanted to give you guys some insight into what having your own website entails besides financial cost. Lots of administrative stuff and housekeeping behind the scenes to keep the lights on and so people can find it.
That said, when I finished, my eyes felt glazed over and my brain felt like much. I ended up falling alseep a short time later. It takes a lot to short circuit my crazy brain, but this just about did it. I also changed my layout into something I think is much more reader friendly. When you look now, you'll see that blogs are now indexed by topics and tags making it much easier to find things. There is also a search bar at the top. So with this layout I think I'm done messing with the look of the site for a good while. I'm pretty happy with this.
Sometimes it feels weird to blog about blogging, but I know other creatives follow me who are considering doing just that. And I don't mean to act like my way is the right way or the only way. What is the right way to reach your audience is subjective and everyone has different goals and knowledge. So just weigh everything in and do what works best for you. I do highly suggest getting a blog for content so you can maintain a presence and following that is not part of the major social media outlets. No telling what will happen with them and this way you maintain some control over your own email list and following.
In other news, I can watch the Super Bowl after all. The situation with my wife's work got resolved, so we won't have to travel out of town and can watch the game in peach, except for a certain orange figure being there. I'm going to focus that Taylor Swift will be there also and enjoy seeing her being happy.
I don't have much else to add. This is a slightly shorter entry, but I think its ok to break things up sometimes. I hope if you watch the game you enjoy it and stay safe this weekend. Thank you all for reading and feel free to subscribe and comment. If nothing else, bookmark this page so you can check back for new fun updates. Hopefully later today or tomorrow I'll have something more exciting than the ins and outs of blogging and SEO maintainence. Until next time!