What I Learned from the Newbie Blogger Initiative

Posted by on Jun 4, 2012 in Blog | 2 comments

Newbie Blogger InitativeAbout a month ago Syp started the Newbie Blogger Initiative on his Biobreak Blog.  Since then about 100 sponsor blogs and 100 newbie blogs have joined the initiative.  Probably more than 5000 blog posts (my halftime count was 2540) have been produced by them in the month of May. I am a bit late for the NBI conclusion party, since I’ve been traveling for a week, but here’s a list of changes and ideas inspired by a month of community building among MMORPG bloggers.

  • Added 120 blogs to my RSS reader. This count isn’t final, since there some blogs that joined late. I will have to cut back that number, since I just can’t handle the volume.
  • Followed about 120 IDs more on twitter, effectively changing my plan for its use.  Initially, I thought to tweet only new articles, follow gaming companies and some key people in the industry. It would allow me to keep track of news, but to keep out the chatter. But in the end, that’s not the way it works. In order to be a member of the community, you have to interact with the community. Just linking new blog posts will be seen as pure noise and ignored. It did help that I found tdash and hootsuite as  Twitter readers helps me to manage the noise levels.
  • Aggronaut’s article about  the Google Reader Blogroll helped me managing my own blogroll and the MMONBI newbie and sponsor lists art the World’s End Tavern helped me keeping it up to date.
  • Changed the WP permalink structure, without yyyy/mm. It sounds innocent, but having dated links as a result of a Google search decreases the chance of being read. Until recently it WordPress advised against it for performance reasons, but those problems have been resolved since the most recent WordPress versions.
  • I decided against using livefyre in favor of commentluv. In the end livefyre will just collect to much data about me and my visitors. And it’s missing the commentluv functionality, most importantly the link back to a commenters recent post
  • Due to this post at TL-DR, I’ve become more diligent in tagging my posts, not necessarily the visible tags, but the Meta keywords, which are usually only visble to search engine spiders
  • I am using Photodropper now for stock photography. It allows me to insert creative commons licensed pictures into my through a pretty simple search in Flickr. This was mentioned in some discussion on the NBI headquarters forum
  • From Hawtpants of the Republic the headquarters forum comes advice about RSS footer, a plugin to add a copyright notice into the RSS feed. Unfortunately this has become necessary, since eventually you will find your content on some scrapers website.

There are more items on my To Do list because of the Newbie Blogger Initiative. It’s all a matter of getting myself organized again.

And here’s the big link dump to all newbie and sponsor articles, originally posted at Biobreak.

New blogs to check out:

Sponsor advice posts:



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Friday is Link Love Day

Posted by on May 4, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

It is a frequent occurrence, that our fellow bloggers publish a weekly wrap up about things that happened the past week, things they have read or stuff that’s still on some notepad and never grew into a blog post. Here’s my first one.

What happened last week?

  • Syp’s of Bio Break started the Newbie Blogger Initiative with great success. Right now 75 sponsor blogs and 60 newbie blogs are part of it. I played it safe and signed up on both sides 🙂
  • I got my Adsense back, without any explanation from Google and a “reboot or power cycle” kind of response to my trouble ticket.
  • Elder Scrolls Online got announced. Lots of things written about it throughout the blogosphere.My only concern: If they can’t provide a PC style interface and insist on console type controls, I won’t look no further. Channeling Roger Murtaugh. “I am to old for this sh*t”
  • My wife got Beta access to Mists of Pandaria. I’ll have a peek or two.

Things I read elsewhere

What’s left on my notepad?

  • Make a To Do list. ✔
  • Check off the first thing on the To Do list. ✔
  • Realize you have completed two  three things. ✔
  • Reward yourself (in progress)


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