What I Want to Read on Your Blog in 2008

Welcome to a new year, the second to last of the "zeroes" decade (or third to last, if you're the type of person who usually sits in the corner at parties wondering why no one will talk to you, like I am).

It seems like this decade went by pretty fast. It seems like only yesterday that it was September 11th. Ah, how time flies when you're having fun. Sniff.

Blogging for a New Year

I had a few blogging ideas for the new year. I was thinking of setting a kind of schedule for this blog, e.g. Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday news, Thursday session report, Monday analysis, and so on. But I don't know if that's right for me. It puts too much pressure on me to stick to a schedule, without actually providing for better content.

Another idea is to add links to my previous years' posts once a week. Unless there are a lot of links into a particular post, older posts don't get the attention they deserve. This could be a way of providing new readers with links to still relevant material.

I'm looking to do a redesign of the blog sometime soon.

I also have another idea I'm kicking around for a fresh new site about board games. It's still in its infancy, so I'll keep that under wraps for now.

What About You?

What are you going to do this year to create a great blog?

Its no longer news to throw up a few posts that look just like someone else's blog. If you're going to join the blogosphere and want to be noticed, you need to do a few things:

• Make a nice blog design with the content easy to find and read.
• Provide a few options for feeds.
• Find a few new things to do that just about nobody else does, or nobody at all does. There are plenty of things that nobody does in board gaming that would make great blogs:
  • A Monopoly Game a Day
  • What's hot or unusual on eBay
  • Unusual dice or cards
  • Gaming in different countries
  • Gaming and religion
  • Gaming materials
  • Civilization games
  • Game ideas from current events
  • Recruiting gamers
  • Celebrity games
  
  That's off the top of my head and took about a minute. I could come up with a hundred more in a few hours.
• If it's once a day, put in an hour a day. If it's three times a week, or once a week, make sure you set aside the time to do it.
  
  Don't worry about feedback, links, or anything else for the first few months. Do it for the discipline you gain just from doing it. As the year goes on, you can start putting the chrome on.
• Think more about your readers. Especially if you tend to write a lot of content that is all about who you gamed with and what you played. You can write it in a way that's more than just a personal record.
  
  Some nice formatting with bullet points and lists about general thoughts makes a better read for people who don't know you than a few longish paragraphs.
• Stop apologizing for not posting. The last post on every blog that peters out is one in which the author promises to post more often.
• Write lots and lots of crap and don't post it. Then go through and make the good parts into posts.

Of course, if you're not into blogging, don't force yourself. There are lots of other things to do. For me, blogging is one of the guaranteed parts of the day that makes me happy.

Yehuda