Category Archives: LearnerBlogger

The Commenting Conundrum

OK. I’m just going to come out and say it.

My name’s Michelle and I’m a stataholic.

There.

I know what I’m meant to say is that I blog for myself, I don’t care who reads it (if anyone) and I never really bother checking my stats. If you’ve mentioned my blog to me out and about in  Real Life, this is more than likely the line I will have trotted out in a (possibly) convincing manner. On a good day, I’m so convincing that I even start to believe it myself, until a quick peek at my wordpress dashboard brings me down to earth with a crash.

This isn’t just about blogging – my obsession with measuring up to self imposed standards runs through all aspects of my life. Run around the block without collapsing? Start planning for a sub 4 hour marathon. Figure out how to make a link no-follow? Oh, yay, I’m going to learn to code and build my own website by the end of the month! Make the perfect fried-egg sandwich? MasterChef here I come!

But the difference is with having a blog is that it’s easy to measure your progress, or lack of. A quick flick around the analytics and you can see how many people read your posts. You can see where they are in the world, you can see how long they hang around reading your shizzle, you can see where they came to the site from (I imagine the person who ended up at LearnerMother because they were searching for ‘Teeny Dicks Tumblr’ was VERY disappointed).

Having this knowledge at my fingertips means I constantly have a stick to beat myself up with. I always want to come out ahead of last month, to reach the next milestone, to have the post that goes viral, to get that call from Lucy Mangan to say she’s up the duff again and could I just look after her Guardian column for a few months.

One accepted way to get more readers to a blog is to read and comment on blogs written by other people. I already do a lot of reading around but not so much commenting – if I like a post I’m much more likely to tweet the blogger to say so, and reshare it, rather than going in and commenting on the post itself. I feel like it’s  a much quicker way of showing my appreciation, and to be completely honest, it’s much easier than getting caught up with captchas, disqus, the weird and wonderful G+ comment system – all of those give me blood pressure!

However, in a quest to get my blog ‘out there’ a bit more, and also to find some new blogs to read and enjoy, I’ve recently made a concerted effort to go out there and comment on other people’s blogs via a couple of blogging groups on Facebook. This has been brilliant in some ways – I have discovered some amazing new blogs to read, my stats have improved, a couple of fun review opportunities have come my way, and my blog has become more ‘visible’ in the blogosphere – I’ve had a couple of shout outs from established and well respected bloggers recently, for which I am very grateful.

So where’s the problem, I hear you say, because there’s obviously a problem if she’s still wittering on about this after 558 words…well, you lovely folk, HERE is the problem.

It’s that I am very much a part time blogger. I try and post twice a week, plus a photo at the weekend. In a normal week, I can carve out two or sometimes three bloggy sessions of around 90 minutes, squeezed in before work, or during dead time waiting outside clubs, or the like. I try and limit all blog related activity to those sessions, whether it be writing, social media, tinkering with the layout, or mending my site when I’ve broken it (to be fair, it’s mostly the amazing Ryan from SW Broadband who does the mending).

Add commenting into that list and it dramatically reduces my time for actual writing. I try  to comment on a wide variety of blogs, and reply to all the comments people leave, even with just a brief ‘thank you’ – and of course I visit, read and leave a comment back on the blogs of people who’ve taken the time to visit mine. And I quite like doing this, to be honest – dipping into other blogs means I’m always learning something, or getting inspiration about something I could write about. But – and it’s a big but – I don’t have time to write! And when I do get something written and published, it tends to be rushed, unpolished and even, on occasion, have an auto-correct induced ROGUE APOSTROPHE  *shudders*.

Since one of the reasons I started this blog was because I wanted to write, I’m left in a bit of a commenting conundrum. Carry on with it, and reap the benefit in terms of my stats, Google page rank and Tots100 score – while knowing I am not writing as well as I could or should? Or give the commenting a rest, accept the inevitable drop in readers, but know that I have more time to write as well as I possibly can, every time?

I guess I know the answer, in my heart of hearts. It’s all very well using commenting as a way to chase the stats, but when I spend more time in a week commenting than writing, then it defeats the object of having a blog. So I’m going to pull back a bit from the quest for more readers and try and concentrate on just writing stuff, which is after all the bit I enjoy. And I’m going to take the inevitable hit on my stats and tell myself that it doesn’t matter. In a very convincing fashion. Hell, I might even disconnect Jetpack and Google Analytics…but then how will I know if anyone’s read this post?

*hits publish, runs to stats*

Why I need to follow the Daily Mail

I love Twitter, for lots of different reasons.

I originally signed up back in 2008 because it seemed to take the bit I really liked about Facebook – the short status updates – and cut out the rest of the crap. Once I’d signed up I wasn’t really sure what to do – I only knew one other real life person on Twitter, so I followed them, and a couple of celebrities, and dipped in and out occasionally but didn’t really do much with it.  Six years later and things have changed – I spend a LOT of time on Twitter. I manage five accounts currently – three for work, one for the blog and one just for me.

Twitter is the place I go to for news, both mainstream and industry related; for something to read when I’m bored; to keep up with what’s going on in Cardiff, occasionally to have a rant; and often for a quick chat with a small bunch of folk who despite never having met, I quite like. It’s where I go to peek into the windows on different worlds that have always interested me – medicine, education, writing – as well as learn about stuff I’m interested in for work, or politically, or just because it takes my fancy at that moment. As such, I’d have said that using Twitter has made my world bigger rather than smaller – I get to listen in to, and take part in, conversations that I’d never be part of in my day to day life.

Because I generally filter work/blog people through to the relevant accounts, my personal timeline has become curated into a circle of people just like me.  Well, not *just* like me – that’d be a LOT of muppets. But people who have broadly the same outlook on life as me, or people with whom I’ve got something in common.

On my own timeline, I don’t tend to give people second chances – if someone tweets a racist comment once, they’re unfollowed. If someone advocates violence – unfollowed. Horribly sexist, or misogynistic? Unfollowed. Bully other people through twitter? Jump on the judging bandwagon about other people’s life choices? Behave in a generally ignorant way? Tweet something from the Daily Mail in a non-ironic or non-disgusted fashion? Unfollowed.

I get my current affairs fix from people who rail against injustice and stupidity. Polly Toynbee. Zoe Williams. Deborah Orr. George Monbiot. Owen Jones. Caitlin Moran. Fleet Street Fox. Jack Monroe. I follow people and organisations who are about making the world better – The Do Lectures. Nesta. The New Economics Foundation. UK Uncut. The World Development Movement. Fixers UK. UnLtd.

Well, this is all very lovely, isn’t it. My twitter timeline is like a lovely warm bath of me-ness.  And, relax.

But. BUT. I’ve only recently come to realise the problem with this. I have forgotten that once I get out of the bath of me-ness, there’s a whole other world out there. Because I follow the folk that are constantly raising awareness of how fucked up the UK is, I’m sort of of the opinion that there’s some hope. That, like me, everyone realises that the current political climate is about demonising the poor, about creating a subservient underclass, about creating myths to set the majority of us against one another, so we’re too busy scrapping to realise that our masters are rubbing their hands in glee at their ever increasing bank balances. Until recently, I genuinely believed that everyone knew and understood that, and I equally genuinely believed that because everyone knows that, our world would change for the better, and soon.

I had the shock of my life recently. I found myself idly wondering how badly UKIP were going to get trounced in the forthcoming elections, and how long it would be before they were a distant, slightly humorous memory. So I did some research, and whaddya know, they are actually on the up, and in a big and scary way. I mentioned this to the Husband, horrified, to be met with the reply ‘well, you spend all your time reading stuff, surely you KNOW that?’

No – I didn’t know that. I’m ashamed and a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I had no idea. My timeline is full of the Premier Inn YOU KIP poster, people tearing up UKIP flyers, and amusing and witty put downs of Nigel Farage. It’s full of people writing brilliant articles that have me nodding my head and make me furious along with the writer, and the mistake I’ve made is to assume that everyone else is nodding their head and is furious too.

I thought my timeline made my world bigger. In actual fact, I have made my world smaller.

I’m going to do some following this morning, of people that I would probably punch if I met them. Dishface. Farage. Littlejohn. The Daily Mail. I feel a bit ranty about adding to their so called standing in the world by following their gobshite, but if I don’t follow them, and people like them, then I’ll remain in my lovely bath of blissful ignorance, and that’s a bit too close to joining them rather than beating them.

Thanks for reading.

Now listen very carefully. I shall say this only once.

Hello you lovely lot *waves* um, it’s me, again. Right. Ahem. Er, it’s about the Wales Blog Awards.

Now I know a while back I asked you kindly to give me a shout out in the Mum and Dad Blog Awards for Best New Blog, and lots of you did – for which, a huge thank you/diolch yn fawr iawn. I didn’t make the final cut but I was really chuffed to receive nominations in the New Blog category, as well as a few others – including Most Entertaining (I presume that means accidentally) and Best Family Fun, sadly a view which my kids don’t share!

To be honest, I found asking for votes a bit cringy. Worse even than asking people for sponsorship – that’s hard enough, but at least you can big up the fact that you’re asking for money for a Good Cause. Unfortunately there’s no way of pretending that votes for an award will do any good for anyone, except provide a temporary boost to my sense of self worth and give the long suffering husband a night off while I go to the awards shenanigans.

So it is with a grimace and a wince that I write this…

Right. You might have read my post a couple of weeks ago where I rather gobsmackedly shared the news that I am a Wales Blog Awards finalist for ‘Best new Blog’ category – I still cannot even believe I am writing that, by the way! Well, all the blogs in the final are also up for the People’s Choice award, which is decided by – you’ve guessed it – voting.

I actually wasn’t going to ask for votes for the People’s Choice Award. I’m up against so many amazing blogs, and also let’s face it, there really isn’t any way to make a begging post an interesting read, whichever way you dress it up. But then I read that the winner gets the chance to write four pieces for WalesOnline – and you know what, I really, REALLY want to grab any chance I can to get some proper writing experience under my belt.

Now listen very carefully. I shall say this only once…and then we shall never speak of it again. If you enjoy the blog, and if you could suspend your disbelief enough to put ‘LearnerMother’ and ‘People’s Choice Award’ into the same thought bubble, and then hold hold hold that thought whilst you do the one-click voting thing here, I would be simultaneously utterly gobsmacked at your poor taste and at the same time embarrassingly grateful. There, I said it! Phew! *mops brow and uncringes self*

And as always, whether you vote or not, thanks for reading!