Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

As you may have noticed, I usually post something every couple days. I haven’t posted an article for the last few, largely because I have a load of work to do, but more importantly, because I think I am suffering from blogger’s block. Could it be?

It’s not that I haven’t been visiting my site, if you have a good eye for design, you will have noticed some subtle CSS design changes. It’s not that I haven’t found anything lately to write about either. There is plenty. It’s just I keep doubting whether it’s interesting enough? Or has it been written about before? Or is it technology based?

Now that I have the best tech award I feel kinda obliged to write purely tech articles. Thanks guys, you’re all stressing me out here! I think I’m going to keep the mix though, as obviously that’s what people liked, so why change the ingredients?

I thought about testing one of ProBlogger’s tips to combat blogger’s block. Darren Rowse, the King of blogging, has written a great article on this matter, defintely worth a read. I’m not going to change my blogging environment though, and more specifically, I’m not going to: “go to a friend’s house or cafe” to get my creative juices flowing again. I think my mates would probably beat me if I knocked on their door, and asked if I could blog at their house. I’m not that big a nerd, no offence Mr. Rowse.
I then thought the best way to overcome my block, was to blog about it. So that’s what I’ve done.

As mentioned, I was in Hermanus over the weekend, so I missed the blog awards ceremony. Which means I missed my 5 seconds of fame, BUT, I did have an adrenaline pumping adventure of my own. Shark Cage Diving.

Being quite terrified of these sea monsters, I thought cage diving would either cure me of this fear, or make me fear them even more. I swam at VoelKlip beach that afternoon, so I don’t think the latter applies.

Worth every rand of the 850 it cost me, plus my stomach contents, cage diving was an experience I’ll take with me to the grave. Being within an arm’s distance of 3m Great White sharks is an out of this world experience. Being on a small boat, in big swell, is another story. I learnt two things though, great whites have a lot of teeth, and small ocean fish love regurgitated boerewors rolls.

The shark cage we thought we were going in, and the cage we actually went in
(Take Note: bent, thin metal poles)!

A 3m Great White chowing my regurgitated boerie roll.

I’m back from my long weekend away to Hermanus, with a pile full of emails in my inbox from my mates, ripping me off for winning the best SA blog about Tech at this year’s SA Blog Awards.

Firstly, I’d like to thank everyone for voting for me, I really was not expecting an award, especially not best tech blog, as there is some very stiff competition, namely PCStuff, DotNet and Techblog.

To my mates thanks for the, what I like to call, compliments. Yes I’m a nerd, but a very cool nerd. I got a heart-felt email from my mate, Stox, trying to make me feel a little bit more special:

“Just ignore them buddy..

It’s all about votes at the end of the day, and you are clearly more popular and have more mates than the other ‘nerds’ that submitted their sites. Hell, even my DAD voted for you!

On that note, apologies once again to my pops, dave, brett, gary, bruce and ivan. We are still trying to figure out how the hell you got on this reply-to-all list, and what it is going to take to get you off it. In the meantime, if you would like Mark to be your next president, you can vote at http://www.nerds-unite.com/president/Mark%20Geoffrey%20Forrester. Then just tick as many of the “Personal Attributes” boxes that you want and hit “Submit”. Easy as that.
For example, I ticked “twat”, “idiot”, “rapist”, and “thief”. I figured that this would be the bare minimum to needed to get mark competing with most of our politicians.. If you think that’s not enough, you can tick more. Just remember, Mark has a blog award under his belt.. Most of our politicians think that a blog is what you call that big tomato sauce stain that appears on your shirt at lunchtime, after you rested your hotdog on top of your massive belly to reach for your coke..”

Haha thanks for that Stox, what an honour getting nominated for president as well, please go vote for me guys ;)

What this award has given me, besides nerd status, is direction, expect a lot more from this site.

Found a great article on Problogger today that answers a question that has bothering me for a while now. How often should I blog? I’m sure all bloggers ask themselves this question, well at least the bloggers who actually care what their readers think.

Darren Rowse, a blogging guru, who owns or at least part-owns about 8 big blogs and makes bucket loads of cash doing so, brings up some interesting points in his article.

• Although posting frequent blog articles gets you a lot more hits (I can vouch for this one), it can create RSS fatigue. More importantly it can lose you a lot of loyal visitors. When you frequently visit a blog, either by a bookmark in your browser or through your RSS feed, and you find 20 new articles on the site, your not going to sit there and patiently read through every article. The clutter of articles can stress the reader out, causing them to move on somewhere better, even unsubscribe to your RSS feed. Darren calls this “Reader Burnout”.I don’t dig (excuse the pun) receiving 50 new articles, via my RSS feed, from Digg or Engadget every day. Usually I just scan over my feeds every couple days and read through the ones that interest me. I do get a little frustrated when I have 587 feeds marked unread in my RSS reader though.
• Darren also points out that with the more amount of articles posted, the less likely you are going to recieve much reader participation per article. The less you post, the more comments you are going to recieve. Quite true I think.
• Post length is also a factor that must be taken into consideration. Many big blogs, that recieve loads of visitors write lots of short posts. Personally, I prefer shorter posts that surfers can read in under a minute, and allow them to move on to the next interesting one. I don’t think there is a right or wrong when it comes to post length. Obviously, writing a 5000 blog article, that takes 45 minutes to read, may bore readers. If you are going to write longer posts, just make sure they are informative and entertain the reader.
• The more you post, the more open doors (referrals) you will have to your blog from search engines and your RSS feed.

So how often should you blog? Read Darren Rowse’s article and form your own opinion. There is no right or wrong answer. Just try get a feel of what your visitors like from your web stats.

A comment under Darren Rowse’s article sums up this saga quite well:

“My opinion is that the posting pace should relate to the type of the site/blog you have and not only based on what your viewers are able to read. They read the stuff they are interested in. “

What do you guys think? Please comment and let me know your thoughts on this subject.