Most of you know that I have a tendency to get into these blog redesign rabbit holes. I am on the verge of falling into another one. Maybe.
This blog has been around in one form or another for about 12 years. It started life on Diaryland (because I am ancient) and then moved to LiveJournal before eventually moving to WordPress in 2008.
There have been so many themes since I started.
I have a cyclical love-hate relationship with blogs and social media networks in general.
Here are the phases:
I am currently in stage 5: rediscovery.
Here are the blogs (new and old) that I am excited about currently.
Jennifer is actually one of my neighbors! When I am not bumping into her at the Cedar Springs Tap House brunch, I’m keeping up with her excellent travel photography.
I recommend:
A recent WordPress theme update forced me to do a massive manual update of the 2,000+ posts on this blog.
Although layout and coding changes always threaten to mangle the appearance of my old posts, the bulk of the content remains, thankfully.
My semi-annual dive into my archives was sobering, with all of the usual angst regarding whether my best years are behind me.
I also noticed that many of the blogs that I used to read have gone silent or disappeared altogether.
I’m not going to rewrite Frank Chimero’s seminal Homesteading Blog, but I will state the obvious – personal blogs, particular law blogs, tend to have a very short lifespan.
There are always the usual concerns about a potential employer (or opposing counsel) finding your blog, but there is something else at work here – Facebook.
Whether you suffer from a lack of ideas or have way too many of them, a content calendar can help you organize your thoughts and stay on track.
Here is a free Microsoft Excel Blog Content Calendar to help organize your blog.
The file includes a blank template and a tab with a completed example:
Free Blog Content and Strategy Template.
Let me know whether it is useful!
According to Wired, the creator of this account wanted to “poke fun at all the people hashtagging photos with #liveauthentic and #socality. The homogeneity of their authenticity and universality of their socality all but demanded satirization.”
Apparently Socality is some sort of hipster Christian movement, but I doubt many of the Instagramers participating in the hashtag know that.
Road trip. Ready for this weekends adventure in the mountains! 🌲🗻 #vsco #vscocam #socality #liveauthentic #livefolk #kinfolk #visualcoop #finditliveit #getoutside #letsgosomewhere #neverstopexploring #exploreeverthing #exploremore #explore #adventure #lifeofadventure #pnw #pacificnorthwest #thatpnwlife #northwestisbest #thegeatpnw #greatnorthcollective #socalityportland #pdx #communityfirst #oregon #upperleftusa #peoplescreatives #wildernessculture #instagood A photo posted by Socality Barbie (@socalitybarbie) on
Karen Swallow Prior wrote in The Atlantic that the core marker of hipsterdom is “the claim of authenticity, a claim that paradoxically, is undermined by the very self-consciousness required to stake such a claim.”
This is exactly what Sociality Barbie satirizes.
I actually hate taking selfies. I find the practice narcissistic, socially awkward, and oftentimes tacky.
I have an acquaintance who constantly takes selfies. His Instagram account consists of variations on the same picture – duck-face selfies.
Going to brunch with this guy is terrible because he likes editing photos on his phone more than talking to the people at the table.
You know there’s a problem when you knock over mimosa flutes while extending your arm for a selfie.
Simply, awful.
The profile is of Emerson Spartz, a Chicago-based internet entrepreneur. Spartz runs several successful websites, including OMGfacts.com, a clickbait site.
Most of the articles on Spartz celebrate him as the “king of virality,” but the New Yorker piece actually gets into the mechanics of OMGfacts.com’s parasitic model.
The company’s success can be attributed to two algorithms: The first algorithm scans the internet for trending memes and content, which they repost. The second algorithm allows the site to quickly test and implement the headlines with the highest click-through rate.
Turns out I’ve amassed a little over 2,100 entries over the past 10 years.
This coincidentally works out to about a year of full-time work.
Slogging through the entries was an interesting, yet depressing undertaking – a parade of old aspirations, failures, exes – it was also a testament to the power of journaling.
Memories are fallible, so I’m grateful for my little digital scrapbook, even if it is not always flattering.
These types of cleaning projects are necessary every few years because links break and upgrading a WordPress theme tends to badly malformat old posts.
I won’t get into geeky things like landing page quality scores, but that’s a factor too.
I am also aware that soon-to-be law students navigate this site very differently than most readers.
Many of law students start from my senior year of college and work their way forward. Now that’s a little easier to do because I’ve fixed most of the egregious formatting problems.
Cleaning up the archives also means that I’m ready to ramp up the new posts – and I have a lot to share!
Thanks for sticking around.
I got Photoshop from a friend and taught myself HTML within a few months of receiving my clunky new Gateway computer.
A small clique of emerging teen graphic designers / web developers took me in. We treated websites more like temporary art installations and compulsively redesigned our work.
The primary focus was on intricate collage-like designs, with no attention paid to utility or loading time. Clout was measured by your appearance on link lists and guestbook entries. Feedback was given in AIM group chats.
Then came Diaryland, Livejournal, Myspace, and eventually, Facebook.
Suddenly, everyone was online. We were no longer cool or special, and the makeshift art collective dispersed.
There are more content creators than ever on the web – even my most technologically inept friends are on Facebook and Instagram – but there are still relatively few people creating meaningful long-format work.
That’s why bloggers like Frank Chimero and Jakey Emmert are important.
That’s why I’m still around as well.
Instead of writing, I wasted hours wringing my hands over blog aesthetics.
If I’m going to spend time writing, my blog has to look good, right?
Worries of widgets, UX, and mobile compatibility became more important than new entries.
I snapped out of it while reading Liz Danzico’s interview on The Great Discontent. She has a great bit of advice on learning to communicate effectively:
“Also, we live in an age of sound bites, and there is something about learning how to speak effectively and in small ways that is important. Say big things in small ways. Twitter has helped hone that a bit; it’s important not just in writing, but in communication of all kinds. That is not to say that long-form writing isn’t important, but if I were to give advice to my younger self, I would say that it’s important to learn to communicate succinctly.”
Danzico’s advice made me realize that all of this fretting about blog aesthetics was unnecessary and getting in the way of succinct communication.
Perpetual redesigns are fine when your website is an art project, but this is a blog, and the primary value proposition here is the content, not the appearance. (And frankly, some of my favorite blogs are simple, cluttered, or even ugly.)
I’m implementing this “cut the bullshit” approach in my professional life as well. Now my work emails, conference calls, and meeting agendas are dramatically shorter.
Apparently life is far easier when you stop obsessing over extraneous details and get to the point.
Who knew?
I recently considered adding a “top posts” widget to the sidebar of this blog. It was a pretty simple widget – it displays my 10 most trafficked posts, updated every 24 hours.
When I previewed the widget, I was surprised to find that none of the top posts were recent.
This prompted me to open Google analytics for the first time in ages.
Although I obsessively check the web traffic of my clients, I rarely check the analytics for my blog. Traffic and conversions aren’t the goal here.
Almost all of my most heavily trafficked blogs were 2-3 years old, and it was pretty easy to figure out why: law school orientation.
This was one of the top law school student blogs back in the day because I was one of the only consistent bloggers writing without a pseudonym.
I graduated and stopped the textbook-induced navel-gazing, but my old advice posts remained.
Sure, the old posts are in a bit of a sad state – WordPress themes and URL structures changed, links broke, YouTube videos were taken down, text styling got wonky…but the meat of the content is still there.
I remember binging on law school blogs when I started. Most of that involved trekking through the archives of writers who had long since graduated and abandoned their blogs. The information was crusty, but endlessly fascinating and helpful.
So, I’m slowly going through my archives and fixing all the formatting and linking errors. Perhaps this will make the information easier to consume for fledgling law students in the future.
Comments are too hard to approve or moderate, and most meaningful conversations happen on social media anyway. Feel free to tweet any feedback @dennisjansen.
Jakey is a local celebrity, best known for his standup comedy. Through his blog, Jakey has basically become Minneapolis’s gay Carrie Bradshaw. (Seriously – the posts are hilarious.)
I remember feeling amused and a bit jealous while reading Jakey’s blog.
Geoff and I agreed that there was no way that we could write about dating, work, and bar creatures without major repercussions.
As a comedian with a retail job, it seemed like Jakey was free to write about the ridiculous experiences that most of us go through but can’t speak publicly about.
I used to believe that the best bloggers were in special situations that made it “safe” to write. (Remember when Heather Armstrong got fired?)
I realized today that this notion is crap.
This blog is worth maintaining solely for the digital scrapbooking factor.
I love, (and am sometimes horrified by) my ability to read what I wrote 10 years ago.
That’s amazing, but only possible by sticking to it.
I’m also jumping on Frank Chimero’s “Homesteading” bandwagon. Frank noted that the web has become a completely siloed place where we abandon our blogs in favor of places like Instagram or Tumblr. (Many of my old blogs were akin to Instagram posts.)
Although I’ll still post to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. I’m going to step up my blogging game.
Blogs are still the best way to generate thoughtful in-depth content, and blogs like this will likely outlive the social network of the moment.
So hi.
I’m back.
I finally fell into a sustainable workout routine, started spending more time at home, and I have a boyfriend again.
I met Abo at Lush. He’s from Minnesota and, like so many of the other Minneapolis gays, he’s a Target boy.
We spend a lot of time walking the dogs around Lake Calhoun.
The dogs are a little salty with me right now because I dragged them on this epic, 12 mile walk today around Cedar Lake, Lake of the Isles, Calhoun, Linden Hills and Lake Harriet. Anyone from Minneapolis knows what a ridiculous trek that is. It’s unseasonably warm, so the four hour walk was gorgeous though.
I just met a student from my old law school at Dunn Brothers. I managed to calm the 1L about her upcoming final. I also gave her some leads about clinics and jobs.
Those who succeeded in law school were either the manic-workhorses or those with solid mentors (or, more likely, a combination of both.) The quick advice from an older student is invaluable and something I found in the form of blogs.
The conversation made me realize that there is a subset of people who view blog authors as ersatz mentors and role models. I was one of these people and definitely relied on bloggers (like her and her and them) for advice and support.
Several people have noted that things are much quieter around these parts. Blogging was easier when I was in school because I was busy exploring the city, surrounded by hilarious people, attending drag shows, and living in a crazy apartment building full of drug dealers, passive aggressive notes, and schizophrenics.
Back in Florida Carlos and I would trek up to Wilton Manors to the T. Palace drag show.
This is one of the best performances we saw:
I remember thinking how strange it felt recording the drag show. An amazing performance was going on in front of me but I was watching it on my camera screen. It was a tradeoff though because without the video, no one would remember the show.
This implicates that whole art vs. life / creation vs. consumption dichotomy that I spent way too much time thinking about during undergrad. It’s something that Oscar Wilde and Truman Capote grappled with too. It goes like this: you can either be out partying and socializing or you can be at home, working and creating. Each can fuel and yet compromise the other.
So my experience at the Noel Leon show was compromised by the recording, but that recording preserved the memory and allows me to share the experience years later. Fair trade?
I got click-happy during some domain cleanup and accidentally deleted my blog.
This blog was way overdue for a new header, and I decided to feature Harley this winter.
He’s disgusting by the way…
Yes, the drool gave him the leaf-mouth-earrings. Sigh.
Things are lackluster on this blog and I apologize. It is getting hard for me to write. I still read friends’ blogs and I am a little jealous of their anonymity.
Things were fine when this blog’s readership consisted of friends, law students at other schools, and a few scattered classmates. That’s over now. The unexpected byproduct of this year’s increase in local readership is that random people are getting really pissed off.
My readers are aware that I usually write anecdotes. I typically attribute quotes to a pseudonym and change some facts around to obscure the speaker’s real identity.
The tree leaves colored, launched themselves from their branches, and blanketed every corner of Minneapolis. The leaves are crunchy too! Walking around feels like smashing Sun Chips, minus the faux-healthy chip grease and glaring janitor.
My blackberry keeps seizing and restarting so I decide to take it to the Sprint store near work. The Sprint store is busy and understaffed. The Sprint tech tells me to leave my phone and come back, so I decide to walk my dogs at a park near my office building.
I arrive at the park and get 10 steps from my car when a security SUV swoops down from a hill and informs me that no dogs are allowed on campus.
So I throw the dogs back in the car and unsuccessfully try to find parking near the Mississippi trail. I try Minnehaha park next, realize that I forgot quarters for the meters, and then end up back in Minneapolis.
The dogs and I eventually tumble into Loring Park.