Blogging From Scratch

I’ve been extremely busy with offline commitments for the past few months which unfortunately caused me to neglect my sites. Since I don’t forsee any break in activity for quite awhile I am going to install a pre-made skin until I have the time to re-work a new skin. I will then just try to publish a handful of posts so that my readers can read some great content.

Expect the first post late this week but from there on out we should have a good amount of new content steadily.

In this post I’m going to give you a little bad habit that I have. I call it the overwhelming effect. What happens is that I get overwhelmed with a project although it’s more like overthinking. For example, I’ve been very busy over the past few weeks and haven’t had time to work on Blogging For Scratch, this has made all my plans for the site kind of fade away. Now as I try to get back into the groove I realize that there is so much to do that I don’t know where to start. At this point I get frustrated many times and just forget the project. This time, however, I’m going to go another route and re-think my strategy and launch a second attack to rejuvenate this site.

To help me keep track of what my plans are and to help me to force myself to go through with the plans I’m going to post a few bullets here. This will help motivate me since I already made my plans public I feel obliged to get to work on them.

• Re-structure site, although the current structure seemed good at the time I feel that it really hurts the overall experience for the reader. A blog should allow the reader to read new posts easily and the featured post segment doesn’t do a good job of doing that.
• Re-design, you may be thinking why I want to re-design so quickly. Truthfully, the last design was on the right path but I never quite finished. I will use elements from that design, re-arrange things and come up with the new theme.
• Update pages. I need to update the different pages that the site has including the about and advertise pages.
• Remove expired ads, empty ad blocks. I really don’t want to pursue and advertisers at the moment because I feel the site needs a whole lot of work and I want that to be my main focus right now.

There are a lot more updates that I want to make but I have a good start so this will get me started, I’ll update you as I go along.

The past few weeks have been busy thus the lack of posts. Now that the new year is underway things are starting to settle down and we can finally get back to business. Over the next few weeks I’m going to write some posts on the development of this blog before moving into some monetization articles. The new theme still needs a lot of work and you’ll see changes in the near future.

In December I made a bunch of goals, I unfortunately did not meet any of the goals, however, I feel that I made a lot of progress. I think I made a big step in understanding where I wanted to take this blog. By figuring out what you want your blog to be you’ll be able to create better goals for yourself and give yourself a good path to get yourself there. I won’t be making any goals for this month as I work through the development of the site but be sure that next month we’ll be back in full force.

The last thing I wanted to mention was the site may be down for a few days as I transfer the blog to my servers.

For those of you who celebrate Christmas, merry Christmas! For those of you who don’t, have a great day anyway. As I told you in my last post, things have been extremely busy which is the reason for the lack of development on Blogging From Scratch. I’d just like to give you all a reminder that your friends and family are much more important than any blog that you could have, even if it makes your living.

I don’t have a gift ready for you at the moment but be assured that 2009 will bring some great resources and articles from Blogging From Scratch. I’m also in the planning stages of a few other sites that you may be interested in so stay tuned, I hope we can make 2009 an awesome year!