Trying something new

I'm toying with an idea for this blog.  A long time ago I wrote a post where I mentioned briefly that posts on this blog tend to be somewhere in the middle when it comes to length.  Usually more than 500 words but rarely more than 1,000, the average being around 750 words for most posts.  I'm playing around with the idea of making my goal become 1,000 words per post, again with a 500 word range so the shortest would be 750 and longest would be 1,250 words.  I didn't do this in the past because I felt when posts get longer, people lose interest, that and I tend to ramble about the topic, it becomes very easy for me to lose focus, take a tangent, and end up talking about a completely different topic.

So what's changed?  Well I've been thinking about the time I spend editing these posts, and how much content I actually remove.  Believe it or not, posts often exceed 1,000 words when I draft them, but a lot gets gutted in the edit to make them a bit shorter.  When it comes to movies I've often seen deleted scenes and wondered why they were removed, often they make sense of things that are never explained in what was left in place.  I know from this experience it can be frustrating when you want to see the whole thing and don't want an edited version.

The shortest post you should write for a blog, or any website where you regularly update content is 200 words.  Anything shorter than 200 words, and Google and other search engines will ignore it, either by ranking it as low importance, or by ignoring it completely.  This is because with such brevity it is hard to get an idea of the content and analyse it.

The first two paragraphs of this post were 251 words long.  That gives you an idea of how short a post would actually be if I only wrote around 200 words per post, and yes, I realise this post in itself has become very meta, but if you are a writer or a content creator I think this will help you, and if you are a reader it might be interesting to get an idea of the thought that I and others have to put into what we create online.  I write posts for myself first and foremost, as a sort of diary for me to look back on and see the journey I have been on.  I write posts to document my thought process and the change in my attitude over time, in essence I write in order to be able to judge whether or not I am growing and to identify what changed in my life as I grew.  Having said all of that, I also format these posts and structure them in a way that is at least somewhat coherent, in the hope that you can follow them - they do have to be readable after all.

You are a reader of this blog, as are many others, there are also machines that read this blog.  That might sound like an odd statement to make but it is true.  The Internet is combed over by small programs called bots that read content.  Some do so for the purposes of indexing the sites for search engines, others do so because they are looking for something in particular.  Whether you come here as a human or as a machine, ultimately the thing that will help you most is to be met with content that at least reads as if there was some thought put into it, rather than a 1,000 word wall of text documenting the ramblings of someone's internal monologue - I try to avoid that as much as possible.

One thing that I have noticed however when I go back and read some of my old posts, is that they often have a beginning, a middle, and they don't always have an end.  That is to say, they don't always have a conclusion or some point that brings the idea to a close.  Some end with a question for you to contemplate, whilst others acknowledge the fact they are open ended, usually because they focus on a topic or question to which I personally can't give you an answer or give you any further insight.

Tying up every post in a way that gives closure isn't something I can promise.  As much as I would like to be able to offer you that luxury, most of the topics I write about concern whatever is rolling around in my head at that moment.  Sometimes they are things I thought of days ago and made a note to write about.  Then there are a few topics, a handful at least that I always come back to because they are the things I think about in life most of all - Psychology, Religion, Politics, LGBT issues - although admittedly I haven't wrote that much on here about the last one which is surprising considering I am a gay man; it's just that I don't think about my sexuality that much if I am honest, it factors into very few things in life - most complications come down to social interactions which thankfully society seems to be moving forward in regards to, even if it can seem to be moving very slowly at times.

What I can promise however is to try and leave more content in my posts and stop editing them so heavily.  I've realised that I often cut things out because they don't seem important to me, or at least not important enough to increase the word count.  Like the deleted scenes from movies however I can't be sure that things that seem obvious to me are actually obvious to you the reader.  I don't mean that in a condescending or arrogant manner, it's just a complication of the fact you're writing about yourself and you already know your life story, it's hard to remember what other people already know, and to be able to accurately judge what other people will be able to relate to.

The things I choose to cut might be of more interest to those reading than they are to me and since other people do read this blog then I should at least give you the opportunity to judge for yourself.  If page views drop with the increased length then I'll go back to my old 500 - 1,000 range.  For now the new range will be 750 - 1,250 in the hopes that you'll get a more complete view.  Whilst there are some topics I could write a 10,000 word thesis worth of content for, I think that really would be extreme so I'll try to avoid exceeding the upper bounds on that range.