RSSMay recap
June 3, 2009
kosmo - See all 763 of my articles
Another month in the books – where do we stand?
Number of readers
Slow and steady wins the race, right? We haven’t seen a monstrous explosion in traffic, but we are seeing slow growth in number of regular visitors. If you have a friend who would like the site, have them swing by for a visit. I’ll try to set a pitcher of lemonade and some chocolate chip cookies on the back porch.
Content
For the first time the blog featured at least one post on every single day of the month! I missed a couple of days in April, but with the full team in place for May, we had 100% coverage.
We were able to stick much closer to the schedule than we had in past month. Our goal is to stick as close to the schedule as possible, so that our loyal readers will know what to expect each day of the week. Obviously, life will throw a monkey wrench into the plans from time to time.
We’ve rebranded The Soap Boxers as a “web magazine” as opposed to a “blog”. What’s the difference? Many blogs tend to be focused on a specific niche. Clearly, this does not deascribe us, as our content covers a broad range of topics. Nothing has actually changed in regards to the type of content we are delivering; we’re simply choosing to use a different term to describe ourselves. Is it much ado about nothing? Almost certainly.
We have been talking with a number of potential guest writers, from a variety of backgrounds. Hopefully at least 1 or 2 of these folks will produce articles that will be ready in June. I think they all have interesting stories to tell.
Site design
You may have noticed a few minor changes to the sites as we try to improve the experience for our readers. First, you might notice the “Browse The Archives” link at the top. This links to a page that will show every article in the history of The Soap Boxers.
The “share” bar at the bottom of each article (right above the box that contains “categories” and “tags”) allows you to share articles with friends via email or by using a variety of social networking sites. Previously, we were using a different method for this functionality, but we like the bar much better. If you like one of the articles, share it with others! If I’m ignoring a particular social networking site, let me know – I might be able to add it.
We live in an electronic world, and hopefully many of you refrain from printing most of the time. However, when you do print articles, they will look much nicer than they have in the past. Blogs typically look pretty lousy when printed, because of some of the gobbledygook that prints along with the main text. I’ve worked to de-goobledygook things so that only the good stuff prints.
What’s next?
We’re excited about a giveaway what we’ll be doing at some point in the neat future – hopefully July. We’re still keeping things under wraps, but if you like The Soap Boxers, you should enjoy the freebie.
We’re also actively soliciting ideas for Fiction Friday stories. Leave a suggestion in the comments section (or drop me an email). Bear in mind that I try to keep the stories around 800ish words, so a couple of sentences would be a sufficiently long suggestion.