Resolutions: Two Months In

On January 1st, I published my new year's resolutions. Here is my update.

  1. On Day 1, I enacted comments on the site, the lack of which was the #1 complaint about the site. After two months, 52 comments, on at least 100 posts. (That just counts Just a Gwai Lo. I got less than 10 total of all my other sites.) Not even close to what I was expecting. That said, the sites I know of that receive a lot of comments generally seem to have the following three properties: they have very faithful readership, or at least a small but very faithful subset of their readership take time out to comment; they almost always ask questions at the end of what they write; and they tend to write exclusively, where I tend to quote exclusively. Maybe some more consideration and original writing is in order.
  2. My resolution to "date more" has stalled at the implementation stage. So far I cannot claim that any dates took place between the days January 1st and February 28th in which I was involved in some way.
  3. Reading only one book, a quarter of another and 20 pages into a third do not qualify as spending more time reading offline materials.
  4. I get an F on the score for spending more quiet time away from the computer. Nobody to spend it with is one reason, but mostly laziness is to blame.
  5. Finally subscribing to less than 250 feeds is a success. That said, I still too much time spent staring at my computer screen, and possibly too much time spent on "the dark web", which means weblogs that talk significantly about non-technical matters or that don't belong to the "blogger blogosphere" (that is, weblogs that talk about weblogs).
  6. If by "sane workout regimen" I meant "no workout regimen, then hooray, I've succeeded in my last resolution! But seriously, my sleep schedule of late has been a lot more sane lately than December or January, so I claim real success on that front.

Comments

Does anyone really read the Rules to Posting a Comment? Richard, it's real brave of you to even post your resolutions! So here's another comment you can 'count' on. :)

I've also been thinking about starting another new blog with "more consideration and original writing" & photos. Very time consuming, though.

If you were in here in NY with me, I'd definitely help you "date more".

"Reading only one book, a quarter of another and 20 pages into a third do not qualify as spending more time reading offline materials." damnit. What about borrowing books that I don't read at all before returning them to the library?

I get an F on the score for spending more partying time away from the computer. Nobody to spend it with is one reason (bf doesn't like to party), but mostly poverty is to blame.

I still haven't gotten the hang of feeds... I have subscriptions on Feedster, I think, but I always forget to go there. I just go to the blogs directly. (P.S. Feel free to consolidate all my comments. I have short attention span, as you know from my emails.)

I think your problem with comments is that we're all so used to *not* commenting on your entries that we can't seem to switch to thinking of your writing in terms of something we can respond to. Perhaps you need to go comments-fishing at the end of your entries, i.e. ask a question for your readers to answer. Get people in the habit by reminding them they can comment. That's only if you care, though.

Yeah, some of the sites I read that get a lot of comments ask a question at the end. On my Hunter S. Thompson post http://www.justagwailo.com/filter/2005/02/26/hst I added a question at the end, so maybe I'll do that more. There's also the problem of the number of comments not showing up on my front page. That's actually out of my control (save some more RSS magic), but I might be able to put links to comments on posts on the sidebar or something.

I resolved to read a book a week this year. Looking back, that was stupid, because I should have known I wasn't going to keep up with it--much as I wish I would. I've read three books in the first two months. So don't fret too much about failing that one, I guess :)

Gillian makes a very good point & suggestion, says short attention span girl who is leaving her 6th comment to one post!