Recently in design Category

Over on Eileen Flanagan's Imperfect Serenity, there's an interesting post on blog publicity, "Blogging dilemmas," inspired in part by Robin M"'s recent "How did you get here?" post. Both bring up interesting questions about the role of blogs in community building and the location of that line that separates good blogging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Readers will probably be unsurprised to learn that I use Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quaker blogosphere. I act as a kind of community organizer and my searches are for interesting posts talking about Quakers (until reading Eileen's post I hadn't check my Technorati "rank" in months). Many people's first introduction to QuakerQuaker.org is getting linked from it, and I suspect I've accidentally outed a few beginning bloggers who hadn't told anyone of their new blog!

I have a professional blog on web design and analytics (with a somewhat off-topic but satisfying post on top at the moment) and separating that out has allowed me to use this personal blog, QuakerRanter, for whatever I like. Most regularly readers would say it focuses on Quakerism and cute kid pictures and while those are the most common posts, the most read posts are the minor fascinations I indulge myself with occasionally. Quaker plain dress is something I practice but don't think about most of the time (806 readers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfairly unpopular baby names (627 visits). I've also detailed some outings to semi-legendary South Jersey haunts (317) and score high on searches to them.

The conventional wisdom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would probably say these off-topic posts are distracting my core audience. Perhaps, but they're infrequent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps people to know I'm not just obsessed with one topic. Being a part of a real community means knowing each other in all of our quirks. I'm more tender and forgiving of other Quaker bloggers when I know more of their story: it puts what they say into a context that makes it sound more lived, less ideological. There's certainly good reasons for tightly-focused professional blogs (I'd drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they started posting kids pictures!), but as more people read posts through feeds and aggregators I wonder if there's going to be as much pressure for personal, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus.

We all have diverse, quirky interests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pander to particular audiences and boy, are they boring! A certain degree of idiosyncrasy and subjective orneriness is probably essential. Personality is at least as important as focus.

PS: I'm also interested in making sure I don't loose the core audience with all my side trips, hence the "latest Quaker posts" at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will eventually get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Reader after Eileen's is Avinish Kaushik's Blog Metrics: Six recommendations for measuring your success. Parts of it are probably a bit technical for most QR readers but it's useful for thinking about blogs as outreach.

Warning: Geek to follow: Thanks to readers for their patience these past few days as I've transferred QuakerRanter to a new web host. My old account had multiple sites on the same server, including QuakerQuaker.org and MartinKelley.com and every time there was a problem on QR it would take everything down. After probably a year of troubleshooting and never quite fixing the problem QR is off on its own (on Bluehost.com, I wanted to see what CPanel was like).

I'm also rebuilding the site to be more compliant with the new Movable Type template structure, which motivates this new look. I still like the old minimalist design ripped off of Kottke and might bring it back or might experiment with something else that fits the new stream-of-life direction the blog has been taken with its Twitter integration.

I can't really blog about the most interesting financial development of the day, which has to do with the end of a certain witness of fifteen years but if any F/friends want to know feel free to drop me an email.

Off now to see if the town Halloween parade has been washed out by rain again (today is the rain date and it's pretty soggy if not actively raining). Expect pictures of cute boys in matching butterfly outfits...

An update on my post about online magazines and the new Movabletype charges… The folks at MT have listened to all the feedback and implemented new policies which are much more sensitive to the needs (and resources) of small nonprofit and community groups. It’s really good news for all the independent publishing happening via blogs. Look for my “powered by” symbol to change to the new 3.0 version as soon as I install it.

Lately I’ve been watching how people navigate my site and other Quaker websites I maintain. I’m finding interesting patterns. One of the most fascinating is that “insider” Friends generally come in through a link, read one page, then disappear from the site without comments or emails, while “seeker” Friends come in via Google and start merrily skipping around the different parts of the site. It’s almost as if these two user groups are using different media altogether: it’s an unrecognized internet divide that is important to understanding how we should build websites and how we might navigate net culture. More importantly, it speaks to how we can spread the Light of Quaker understanding ever futher and wider.

I think it’s fair to say that internet search engines have changed how many of us explore social and religious movements. There is now easy access to information on wonderfully quirky subjects. Let the Superbowl viewers have their overproduced commercials and calculated controversy: the net generation doesn’t need them. TV viewership among young adults is dropping rapidly. People with websites and blogs are sharing their stories and the search engines are finding them. Here is a taste of the search phrases people are using to find Martin Kelley Quaker Ranter.

An Atlantic County Methodist Episcopal Meetinghouse. Picture from NJChurschape

One of my favorite sites is the amazing NJChurchscape.com—that’s New Jersey Churchscapes, put together largely through the efforts of Frank L. Greenagel. It’s a true labor of love, a cataloging of church and meeting architecture in New Jersey. It has beautiful photos, great stories, readable essays on architecture. In a state where everything below Cherry Hill often gets ignored, South Jersey gets good coverage and there’s a lot from the old Quaker colony of West Jersey. This month’s feature is on the meetinghouse, a building of endearing simplicity and it raises a lot of questions for me of how we relate to our church buildings.

I’m starting the process of putting my whole site onto MovableType, even the old static pages.

It’s obvious that the Center is just a holding pen for big bus trips. It’s not as much a museum or national shrine as it is a highway rest stop. On your left’s the super-sized cafeteria, on your right the store for crappy hats and t-shirts. And for this we rip up Philadelphia?