I am working with a colleague to finally finish up the new design I have been talking about since forever. The whole design will be wrapped up as an open-source WordPress theme and will be available on Github for public use. This new theme will open up a huge chunk of time that I have been devoting to getting this off my back. I plan to fully devote that time towards more quality writing. In addition, I am working on getting my life a bit more organized and structured so that I have time at least three days a week to spend writing. I have also ridded myself of Mint for the last time. That application sucked so many hours out of my life that I find it embarrassing to even think about it. These actions should ensure a higher level of quality and consistency for writing. There has not been a deficit in ideas, just a deficit in time. Lastly, I have a pretty interesting idea for how to collaboratively write long-form content. I should have more about that in the next few weeks.

As for the new way of writing, I am curious what you thought of it, if you even noticed it at all. I would love to hear if you found it more useful to have a level of observation added to each post or if you didn’t mind just having content simply reference other work. I’d really like to see this post to generate a discussion as to what you would find helpful from this blog and what you would expect to see in the weeks/months to come.

The Blog as the Hub

Two or three years ago, I was finding the process of writing for my blog increasingly challenging. I no longer had the spare time to write long-form content consistently and I did not feel comfortable just tossing out half-baked ideas. Concurrently, I was spending a tremendous amount of time posting content of smaller lengths on Flickr, Delicious and Twitter. These services had a plethora of third-party tools which made it easy to post content to their platform. While WordPress was working well for me, uploading an image and putting it into a post was not nearly as fast as it was for services like Flickr or Tumblr.

I changed my blog to act as an aggregator of all the sites I posted to. I found the suite of tools to post to services such as Flickr and Tumblr to be far faster and efficient than what I had used for WordPress. I ended up using WP-O-Matic to pull content from all these different services and post them onto my blog. Overnight, I was able to post four to five basic posts a day in roughly 30 minutes. In addition, I was able to foster a community of followers not just on my blog, but on Tumblr, Flickr and Twitter. This was great because it gave readers the flexibility to consume my content whereever they preferred.

I cannot emphasize how well this worked in theory. I had a collection of great third-party tools which were focused to make it extremely easy to post content to a specific service. I would then post across all those services depending on the type of content and WordPress would soon aggregate and publish it on my blog. The diagram shows the basic flow of how content would get published, starting with the tool used to post it, to where the content would originally reside to its eventual aggregation into this blog.

The diagram is pretty simple and, once again, in theory, so was my process. If the tools were sophisticated enough and each inter-connected piece supported each other in an ample manner, I *truly* believe the process would serve as a model for rich media blogging. The problem is, it did not.

Too Many Sacrifices For the Sake of Convenience

WordPress was never truly intended to act as a content aggregator. WP-O-Matic does a lot to make up for that, but there are some insurmountable obstacles that it simply cannot overcome. First and foremost, RSS was simply not the optimal format to pull in the data. Each service I was aggregating from had their own little idiosyncracies of how they chose to format their data in RSS. More often than not, this resulted in some very bizarre titles and copy on my blog.

Another large issue was that I had to make the decision to send content from each service into a separate category that had nothing to do with its subject matter. This meant that Tumblr content would be added to the ‘Tumblr’ category and so on. This resulted in all but worthless categorization for the readers.

The reliance on third-party services also would be problematic at times. Whenever Tumblr would be down, my blog would essentially be at a standstill. This was not frequent, but my heavy reliance on entities that were out of my control proved to be a letdown at times. In addition, formatting of content/media were almost completely out of my control and in the hands of the third-party services, thus tremendously limiting the options I had and the final quality of my posts.

At the core of all these problems though was the fact that my whole process and, for that matter, my whole blog relied on automation from a WordPress plugin. WP-O-Matic was the lynch pin of this concept and when it let me down, I had little to no options. For that reason, even when the plugin clearly had become stale and was not being actively developed, I just crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. There simply were not any other options and my whole process depended on it. This should have been a clear red flag.

The most constant and noticable issue were the duplicate posts. This would happen 2 or 3 times a week and there were times where the duplicates would just keep coming in. If you are a subscriber to this blog, you no doubt have experienced this. I must share my dismay for putting you through that and my surprise that you have stuck it through.

Takeaways

So, after two years of blogging in this manner and ultimately throwing in the towel, what have I learned (the hard way)?

The tools you use should enrich your process not drive them

While still very enamored with pieces of the publishing method, the whole process was driven by the functionality of a WordPress plugin. In retrospect, this limited the quality of content as well as the type of content I would post.

Keep your toolset simple

Reliance on third-party plugins and half-supported applications was my ultimate undoing. At some point, I spent more time massaging the tools than actually using them for their intended purpose. Keep your set of tools small and simple. The more complex and inter-connected your system becomes, the more likely they will eventually fail you.

Automation is great, except for when it isn’t

I cannot tell you how unimpowered it feels to have a system work against you and the only way to make it stop is to pull the plug. I love the concept of automating simple tasks, but it is often not worth the trouble.

Ease of publishing and quality of content need to be balanced

To this day, I firmly believe that making the publishing process easier for yourself will ultimately provide a better experience for the reader. The less hassle it is to create content, the higher likelihood that you will *actually* create content in the first place for your readers. That said, if that easier process comes at the expense of a significant drop in quality, you are defeating the purpose.

Next Steps

This shift in thinking is going to have a significant impact on how I move forward. The redesign that I have been working for is now conceptually defunct. I am trying to determine what is salvagable and what needs to simply be gutted. The blog as it stands will be going through an even more significant transformation behind the scenes. All of the hacks and strange ways I used the blog to make this old process work will have to be removed. It is going to be a lot of work, but it will be well worth it. I learned some really valuable lessons on the way that would never have been as primally understood if I had not gone down this path.

Up until I decided to make the serious effort to increase subscribers, this site had two links to my RSS feed. One on the header that I added merely for formality, and the other on the sticky footer which I assumed would end up generating the lion’s share of clicks to my feed. My thinking was that since the RSS link on the sticky footer was persistent, larger and more visual, it would invite more clicks than a small and simple button in the top navigation. I was unbelievably wrong. Not only did the link in the header outperform the link in the sticky footer, it was outperforming it 2.5 to 1. From the data I was pulling in, I came to two conclusions: 1) I literally had no idea how people were using my site at the micro level sense my assumptions were so off and 2) the amount of clicks to my RSS feed was significantly lower than I was expecting to see. Due to the numbers (or lack thereof) that we coming in on my two RSS links, on May 18 I added a very large subscribe message just below the navigation bar. That made a significant difference in the percentage of visits to RSS clicks — in fact, I received significantly more clicks in 10 days with the promo link than I did in almost a month without it. The unfortunate side effect is that I devoted a tremendous amount of space towards promoting my RSS feed and I still was not getting the amount of clicks I was hoping for. I continued to tweak the links on the site to varied success.

Throughout these two months, there were 4 significant periods in which the site went through which saw a very different click rate on RSS links. Below is a slideshow of how this site has changed in the past month. Click through the images to see the changes throughout the month.

Below is the complete breakdown of how each link performed through each of the 4 periods. An interesting thing to observe is how the header and footer links’ click rates continually drop with the added emphasis on the promo link. This is a perfect example of how individual elements in a layout do not exist in a vacuum — the elements you place on a screen are going to affect those surrounding it. We all are undoubtedly aware of that in a theoretical sense, but rarely do we as interface designers look to the numbers to back it up. The other highly fascinating finding is how the most dramatic increase in clicks was due not to any changes in design, but by simply having the subscriber count increase.

• April 22 to May 17, 24,227 visits

  

  Link	Clicks	RSS Click %	Click/Visit %
  Header	25	71.4%	0.103%
  Footer	10	28.6%	0.041%

• May 18 to May 28, 9,309 visits

  

  Link	Clicks	RSS Click %	Click/Visit %
  Header	29	70.7%	0.311%
  Footer	9	21.9%	0.096%
  Promo	3	7.32%	0.032%

• May 29 to June 13, 12,467 visits

  

  Link	Clicks	RSS Click %	Click/Visit %
  Header	46	85.2%	0.369%
  Footer	5	9.62%	0.040%
  Promo	3	5.77%	0.024%

• June 15 to June 22, 8,986 visits

  

  Link	Clicks	RSS Click %	Click/Visit %
  Header	57	78.1%	0.634%
  Footer	11	15.1%	0.122%
  Promo	5	6.85%	0.056%

• Aggregate Click Rates

  

Basic web analytics just does not cut it

I check my web analytics often. Too often. However, your basic statistics such as page views, bounce rate, etc. only address the macro view of how your site is performing. I had a sense that certain areas were either working or not working, but I did not have empirical data to back it up. After a little less than a month of slowly tracking more and more custom events, I have a better idea of how people are using my site than I ever have — I truly regret that it took me this long to implement such a simple element. Moving forward, I plan to implement custom tracking events for all my future projects. It just does not make sense not to do it.

Your design choices, no matter how informed, are guesses

The more I look at the patterns that are coming in from my custom events, the more I am convinced that I would never have predicted these outcomes. The results that came in not only surprised me, they surprised my peers. Without being able to peer into the future, our choices are guesses. They may be educated guesses, but nonetheless guesses. The good thing is, we are not building a car or a house. We do not have to get the optimal design on the first shot. Our designs are be easily changed after the initial design — and they likely should. There are simply too many variables to keep track of and address correctly. Better to acknowledge our decisions are simply guesses until we can get some hard data to inform future choices.

Think, do, react

Designing the initial idea gets you halfway through the process. However, it’s really that set of decisions that occur based off the objective and subjective feedback from that initial idea which finishes the job. Sweating the details on the initial design may be important on a philosophical level, but it may end up just being wasted cycles. I played baseball all the way up until the beginning of my freshman year of college. Playing sports to that point taught me the importance of trusting a decision and committing to it. In most sports, there simply is not the time to dwell on how to handle a scenario — you simply have to make the choice you think is right at the moment. There is a strong chance it was not the best choice, but that is all a part of learning how to play the game. The important thing is to analyze your play after the game and learn from the poor choices in order to avoid them in the future. I really to think this train of thought can be a strong guide for how to consider design. I am not saying to only make snap decisions, but it can be far too easy to overthink problems that may not even be answerable with your current understanding of it. Better to be aware that you are making the best decision you could come to with the clear understanding that it is likely not the perfect one. We should all think before we do, but the magic happens after we react.

I will be going into the gross details on the data I have received on how people have been interacting with this site. I think you will be just as surprised I was.

While I have taken this site seriously for years, much of the time it has consisted as more of a sandbox to do as I please. From this week on, I am going to start managing this site as a serious property. I will work to keep a weekly log of what I consider to be the vital statistical metrics (more on that later) signaling its growth/decline. In addition, I will write about my lessons and discuss if my theories actually panned out.

I am also going to put this site’s content through a pretty serious refinement phase. I will be using an analytical approach throughout this process and will write about my theories and how they turn out. In a sense, I am finally going to give this site’s content the treatment it deserves. My hope is that some positive results will spring from this. A consequence of this however is that project releases like coordy and Iconic are going to be less frequent.

Without getting into too much detail just yet, here are a few rules which I will abide by:

No promotion

One of my biggest pet peeves that I openly admit falling for is the allure of promotion. For reasons I will delve into further detail in a future article, I feel promotion is an ultimately counter-productive activity that rarely pays long-term dividends. Therefore, I will personally resort to zero promotion of the site during this experiment. Rather, I am to work on making my own site work towards specific goals and guide users to areas I hope they find useful.

I will write/produce what I personally find to be interesting

This is not a project to pander to the crowds in an attempt to muster more traffic. My goal is to try to create a place that genuinely interests people for all the right reasons. There will be no schedules, no quota to meet. The intention is to keep a steady stream of content coming in, but I will not turn this blog into an assembly-line of mediocre content (subjectivity aside, of course). Additionally, I will keep the format of this blog as broad as I possibly can. A niched blog is a myopic blog.

No dumbing down

There will be zero, repeat zero, top 10 lists published. Titles will not be sensational. Content will not be abridged to coax people into reading. Opinions will not be disingenuously controversial. If you are interested, you will read it. Otherwise you will not. Simple enough.

Iteration, iteration, iteration

Publishing of content will only be phase 1. I will be spending a lot of time refining formats to find better ways to build trust and make the presentation of content more effective and efficient.

No more than 10 hours a week of work on the blog

I am not going to lose sleep on this project. I strongly, believe however that blogging does not need to be a full time job in order to create interesting and worthwhile content. The goal is to spend no more than 10 hours total a week (including any maintenance/development that i sometimes necessary). One major reason for instituting this rule is to keep me focused on writing rather than tinkering with the blog.

Open books

As has always been the case, all statistical data will be completely open for you to confirm my reports. I have no problem admitting when I am wrong, so when one of my theories is dashed into oblivion (which I full-heartedly expect), the results will be clear for you to see.