sacha chua living an awesome life

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How I use Feedburner to give people the option of different blog update frequencies

Categories: blogging, wordpress Tags: , , Posted on May 21st, 2013 by Sacha Chua

I’ve been thinking about how to make it easier for people who want to keep in touch but who don’t want to be overwhelmed by my daily posting schedule. Instead of trying to come up with the Best Way on my own, I asked what people wanted. Out of 26 votes (as of the time I wrote this), ten people wanted weekly newsletters and three people wanted monthly newsletters. That probably means that even more people would like those less frequent update options, so I decided to spend some time figuring out a good way to offer that.

Since I already do weekly and monthly reviews, the easiest way would be to make those reviews available in a separate feed that people can subscribe to over RSS or e-mail. I’ve been using Feedburner as a way of making my feeds more browser-friendly and as a way to handle e-mail subscriptions. Although I’d been concerned about the long-term longevity of my feeds in case Feedburner shuts down, it turns out that you can set up your own domain name by following the instructions under My Account > MyBrand.

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I set up my feeds to use feeds.sachachua.com instead of feeds.feedburner.com. That means that if Feedburner goes away, I just need to change my DNS record to point to my own server and write my own redirect rules. I wish I’d done this earlier! Anyway, if you subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/sachac , please switch to using http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac instead.

With the new feed URLs in place, I created Feedburner feeds for my weekly and monthly reviews. Category feeds are built-in, so all I needed to do was tell Feedburner to handle http://sachachua.com/blog/category/weekly and http://sachachua.com/blog/category/monthly . I customized each feed to include a short message pointing to the other feeds (Optimize > BrowserFriendly), change the URL, and enable e-mail subscriptions (Publicize > Email Subscriptions).

image

Then I modified my WordPress theme to include links to the new feeds. To make the feeds available from the feed icon in many browsers’ address bars, I added the following code to my <head>…</head>:

<link rel="alternate" 
  type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="Feed (~daily)" 
  href="http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac" />
<link rel="alternate" 
  type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="Weekly reviews" 
  href="http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac-weekly" />
<link rel="alternate" 
  type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="Monthly reviews" 
  href="http://feeds.sachachua.com/sachac-monthly" />

Result:

image

I also added links to the feeds in my sidebar using the Appearance > Widgets > Text widget.

Now, people should be able to easily subscribe to whichever frequency they want. =)

On another note: I was surprised and delighted to find that many people wanted daily updates. Thank you! I’ll try to make my headlines useful so that you can guess right away if you would be interested in something, and we’ll see if I can write weekly review headlines with keywords as well.

If you blog a lot, I hope you find this tip handy!

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/24832

Categories: blogging, wordpress Tags: , , Add Comment »

Thinking about what I want to do and where I want to go with this blog

Categories: blogging, sketches, writing Posted on May 17th, 2013 by Sacha Chua

A friend of mine is a big fan of Firepole Marketing and other blog-related marketing sites, so a lot of his advice for me has been focused on building audiences and information products. It’s been quite useful—look, I finally got around to all these little design tweaks!—but there’s something niggling at the edges of my brain, and that’s usually a sign I should slow down and reflect on it. I notice that I hesitate.

I need to sort out what I’m hesitant about just because it’s unknown or something I’m shy about, and what I’m hesitant about because I want something different.

What I want from blogging

The things I love the most about this blog are:

  • Sharing all these small, varied things I’m learning about, and not worrying about sticking to one topic, making sense, or writing too often
  • Having these amazing conversations spanning miles and years (Raymond Zeitler, Clair Ching, Chris League, and a few other people have been commenting for more than five years – I’m so lucky!)
  • Bumping into all sorts of amazing people through chance conversations and connections
  • Following the thread of our shared curiosity into new questions
  • Answering people’s questions with blog posts from when I was trying to figure things out too
  • Knowing that no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s something I can learn from and possibly share

There’s a lot of good advice out there for people who want to “monetize their audience” or build a business around blogging, but… maybe I have the space to explore something different. What would this blog look and feel like in another ten years? More of this, I hope, and better. Better at learning, better at sharing, better at organizing, better at connecting.

Sometimes people pay more attention to what they pay for. Hmm, maybe optional payment, or saving payment for individual help? I don’t have a mental hangup about being paid for consulting, because that’s stuff that clearly creates a lot of value for my clients and doesn’t really give me things I can widely share as a way of helping others. I don’t have a hangup about earning a little bit from affiliate sales (since it’s entirely optional, and only the stuff that I like, and I point out non-affiliate links or alternative ways to get things like borrowing books from the library). I’m sort of okay with the idea of making collections of blog posts and sketches and selling them for a nominal fee as an experiment, although I’m tempted to just make them all freely available and then perhaps add a pay-what-you-can system or a donation button.

Anyway, we’re doing well, so I have some space to focus on learning and sharing. =) I want to make the most of that opportunity. Can you help me figure out what would make this better while keeping it real?

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/24824

Categories: blogging, sketches, writing 8 Comments »

Poll: How often would you like to receive e-mail updates? Also, quantifying my blog posting history

Categories: blogging, quantified, wordpress, writing Posted on May 16th, 2013 by Sacha Chua

I’ve been posting practically every day for the past 3.5 years, and I write about a variety of topics. I’ve been thinking of ways to make it easier for people to keep in touch without E-mail newsletters seem to be a Thing. Right now, the e-mail subscription form on my blog is the default provided by WordPress, so people get daily updates (which is probably a bit much). I’ve been thinking of making it easier to subscribe to weekly or monthly updates. Would you find something like that useful? I’d really appreciate it if you could answer this poll!

How often would you like to receive an e-mail digest of my blog posts?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

(Don’t see the poll? Try viewing this post on my website.)

Aside: I was curious about just how long I’ve been keeping up with this ~1 post a day thing, so I graphed my blog posting history. It turns out that I’ve been pretty consistent, although there were days when I didn’t have anything new posted. I schedule my blog posts using Editorial Calendar and I sometimes send people sneak previews of upcoming posts using the Share a Draft plugin. This lets me smooth out the spikiness of my writing habit into a more predictable publishing schedule.

blog-posting-history

To generate this graph, I extracted the timestamps of all my published posts with the following SQL query:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(post_date) FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type='post' AND post_status='publish' 
INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/timestamps.txt';

… and then I graphed it with cal-heatmap, removed in-between labels in GIMP, and used Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to hand-write new labels. =)

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/24804

Categories: blogging, quantified, wordpress, writing 6 Comments »

Quantifying my habit of writing, and things I’ve learned along the way

Categories: blogging, quantified, writing Posted on May 8th, 2013 by Sacha Chua

Leo Babauta wrote about the power of writing daily, sharing what he’s learned from about five years of daily writing. It got me curious about how consistently I write.

Since I schedule my blog posts, my blogging history doesn’t give me useful data. Fortunately, I can get that data from my time-tracking. Here’s a graph showing how much time I spent writing between January 2012 and April 2013, with the greenest areas for days of about 4 hours of writing. In total, I spent 346 hours writing, for an average of 0.7 hours per day or 5 hours a week. I wrote during 254 out of 486 days (58% of the days), or roughly every other day.

My longest streak of non-writing was 8 days of not writing (September 2012, when I was on a trip with my family). My longest streak of continuous writing was 12 days of writing every day (June 2012).

image

imageI usually start writing between 7 PM to 9 PM (after dinner), but I also write at other times. With the more flexible schedule I get to have these days, I go on a writing sprint whenever I want to.

One of these days, I should put together a graph that takes into account how long I spend writing, too.

It turns out that I write a lot, although it doesn’t feel that way looking at it one day at a time. In 2012, I wrote around 133,000 words for my blog. This is slightly more than the number of words in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but nowhere near as awesome. I clocked 268 hours for writing during that year, so that works out to a really low 8 words per minute. I already know that the bottleneck is my brain, not my typing speed, though. =) The time includes writing non-blog stuff as well as discarded posts, but hey, it still gives me a good general idea.

Anyway, some quick non-data thoughts on what Leo said about the benefits of writing, and what I want to add:

  • “Writing helps you reflect on your life and changes you’re making.” I do this a lot with my blog – looking backward to review decisions, looking forward to explore the possibilities. Not only is writing a good excuse to ask yourself these questions, but having a record of your reflections, reasons, assumptions, and predictions also helps you make better choices.
  • “Writing clarifies your thinking.” It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand something if it’s just inside your head. Once you try to explain it to other people, though, you’ll quickly find gaps. Writing is one of my ways of thinking out loud. My thoughts are fuzzy and elusive until I sit down and write a blog post, a note, a list, or draw a mindmap or a sketchnote. I figured that it’s okay to be wrong in public from time to time, and it’s better than never knowing about mistakes.
  • “Writing regularly makes you better at writing.” I suspect that rewriting is an even more useful technique for better writing. I don’t do as much rewriting and editing as I probably should, although I often revisit and write about old topics based on new questions or ideas. That said, writing is great for practising organizing your thoughts and figuring out how to communicate them, and regular blogging is a great way to experiment with different techniques.
  • “Writing for an audience (even if the audience is just one person) helps you to think from the perspective of the audience.” I like writing for myself, and I also like writing for other people. It’s fun to answer questions or to build on other people’s thoughts.
  • “Writing persuasively — to convince others of your point of view — helps you to get better at persuading people to change their minds.” I’ve mostly given up on persuading people to change their minds, having read quite a few argument/rhetoric/persuasion books that made a lot of sense to me. Now I go for the low-hanging fruit of sharing tips and ideas for people who’ve already decided, and helping illuminate the possibilities for the people who are on the fence. =) Still, practice in examining and organizing my thoughts helps a lot when it comes to making better decisions or helping other people with theirs.
  • “Writing daily forces you to come up with new ideas regularly, and so that forces you to solve the very important problem of where to get ideas.” Since I write about whatever I’m learning about, writing encourages me to keep learning. I don’t promise a particular set of topics, though, so I don’t feel that pressure to keep coming up with good material. Besides, there’s so much to learn and share!
  • “Writing regularly online helps you to build an audience who is interested in what you have to share, and how you can help them.” This is actually pretty darn awesome. Connecting without small talk, yay! =)

Writing is well worth the time for me. I wonder what would happen if I doubled the time I spent on writing, maybe splitting the extra time between research and editing… Hmm.

Is writing worth it for you, too? What’s your experience like? How would you increase its benefits?

zenhabits: Why You Should Write Daily

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/24759

Categories: blogging, quantified, writing 3 Comments »

Blog analysis for 2012: ~133,000 words so far

Categories: blogging, quantified Posted on December 26th, 2012 by Sacha Chua

I reviewed my blog posts in 2012 and rated them on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 indicates my favourite posts – the ones I want to keep around and refer back to, or the ones that represent key moments in my life.

image

I’ve been pretty good at keeping to ~1 post a day, although travel and family time meant I was away from my computer during much of September.

Year-by-year comparison:

image

Observation: I write fewer posts, but I feel better about them.

Number of words in 2012: ~133,000 (~ 380 words per post)

Observation: Fewer words, but bigger ones.

Looking at the three-word phrases I used the most, I can see that I continue to use my blog for a lot of planning. They’re mostly the same as last year’s words, except that “a lot of” has dropped down to fourth place from second.

  Times  
  This year Last year
I want to 238 158
so that I 115 94
that I can 113 76
a lot of 89 126
be able to 86 86
in order to 67 55

For comparison, here’s the analysis from last year, and here’s the post spreadsheet with ratings.

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/24281

Categories: blogging, quantified 7 Comments »

Sketchnotes: Custom Post Types & Custom Fields (Wes Bos, #wpto)

Categories: blogging, meetup, sketchnotes, wordpress Posted on July 19th, 2012 by Sacha Chua

20120719-wpto-custom-post-types-wes-bos

Click on the image for a larger version.

Wes Bos talked about custom post types and custom fields, sharing plenty of tips on how to use Advanced Custom Fields to make the user interface much simpler. You can find his slides at http://wesbos.com/talks/wpto .

Like this? You might also be interested in another WPTO sketchnote (The Publishing Side of WordPress – Andy McIlwain). Check out my other sketchnotes for more. Enjoy!

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/23582

Categories: blogging, meetup, sketchnotes, wordpress Add Comment »

Experiment! Stories from My Twenties PDF

Categories: blogging, writing Posted on June 26th, 2012 by Sacha Chua

I find myself procrastinating posting this, so that’s probably a good sign that I should face my fear and get this out the door. =)

I spent a few weeks rereading all of my blog posts and picking my favourites. I cleaned them up, added pictures and updates, and organized them into chapters. Now, for less than the cost of a cup of yummy hot chocolate, you can check out this PDF compilation of the highlights of my past ten years of blog posts.

I designed the PDF for reading on laptops, tablets, and other large screens, but I’ll put together an EPUB version for smaller e-book readers if people want one. Check out the preview to see if it works for you. =)

There are tons of things I can do to tweak this. I might revisit it in August (when I turn 29) and again when I finish my twenties. In the meantime, though, it’s better to share this (warts, potential misunderstandings, and all), fix it up a little, and then start on the next book! I’ve got “101 Things You Can Do With Emacs” bouncing around my brain…

Small steps!

If you do buy it and want to hear about any updates, e-mail me your receipt (sacha@sachachua.com) and I’ll add you to my list. That way, if I release an update, I can send you a link to the PDF. Enjoy!

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/23524

Categories: blogging, writing 5 Comments »

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Copyright © 2001-2012 Sacha Chua (sacha@sachachua.com). Please feel free to reuse content under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Sharealike license unless otherwise noted.

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Stories from my Twenties: Highlights from a Decade of Blogging

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