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.
Since this content still seems to be valuable to some people, I’ve started a salvaging project of sorts.
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.
One thing that I’m not bringing back is the comments section.
Comments are too hard to approve or moderate, and most meaningful conversations happen on social media anyway. Feel free to tweet any feedback @dennisjansen.
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