Blogger's Secret

Bringing a project to an end (no, not this project, not yet)

There's quite a few successful blogging projects that have reached the end of their run. Hopefully, you'll just be getting started now - but if you do decide to finish things up and leave a partly done blog online, here's some ways that you might do that with grace and ease.

One reasonable approach, especially if things go completely awry on the first try, is to unpublish the entire weblog. This is harder to do if you have people who have made links to it or a lot of comments that are there, but if a project you're doing gets a start and no traction you can back out if your software supports it. I did this for my brief "Note to Self" weblog, which really didn't belong as a published work in the first place. (Really. What was I thinking?)

A second plan is to write a last post, or a featured post, that describes what happened to the project and how it is that it's on hiatus. You may use this to direct people to the next thing you're working on, or just leave people to review the archives. This is much preferable to just leaving someone hanging in mid-thought with a post that promises more soon, a soon that never comes.

A nice example of the latter is on my friend Kate's "Four Obsessions" weblog. She writes this nice last post for now:

This blog has gone dormant for the time being. Who knows, maybe it'll wake up some day. Or maybe it'll pretend to be a princess and sleep for 100 years...knowing our household allergy to princesses it probably won't be the latter. But for now it's going to enjoy its snooze.

If you really, really miss me (ha!) I'm still updating the Picky Eater Chronicles (as I make progress which, I tell you, is sloooooow) and my books read list (since I have no memory, I have to use it pretty frequently to check and see if I've already read a book.)

This Blogger's Secret weblog was in a similar dormant state for a long time; I had started it in 2008, and posted a few times in 2010, but mostly it was a project defined but just waiting to get the energy to happen. The stored energy in your dormant blog can be a springboard at a later time to restart, or it can be a nice bit of closure to a project well done.

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Wordpress uses the terminology "Make this post sticky" to put it on the top of your layout. Typepad says "Feature this post". I don't see a one-step way to do this in Blogger, but you can simply make the most recent post be your last.

Know when a project comes to an end

Crain's Chicago has a piece on bloggers quitting (January 17, 2011) with all of the stories of people deciding to give up on blogging because it didn't generate as much business as phone calls, and people giving up blogging because they got a new job or had a kid. Good reasons all; the one I see the most around Ann Arbor is giving up blogging when you are done with graduate school.

The good example that I see from it is the account of Aleen Bayard, who gave up on blogging about New Zealand (New Zealeens) because she moved back to Chicago.

Not every blog has to be a permanent effort. If you write about something, and then no longer need to write about something because the world has changed and you with it, that's fine.“I wrote one post when I got home and realized that I had something unique to say in New Zealand but not as much as a Chicagoan back in Chicago,” she is quoted in Crain's as saying.

If you're done with a project, you're done - no harm in that. There's a useful structure of writing for a finite amount of time (e.g. a year) on a single topic, but if that doesn't do it for you, then simply don't be shy about putting a project to bed. Find the time to write one last post, call out the highlights from the effort, wrap up some conclusions and put together a tombstone that says "I'm done". A well-ended effort is that much more satisfying to read than something that seems to end in mid-thought.

The Blogger's Secret: How to be an expert on anything

The Blogger's Secret is a method and a system for developing and sharpening your expertise on a specific topic.  It can be expressed very simply:

Write about a topic twice a day for six months and you will be recognized as an expert in that field.

Hidden inside this simple method is a system for making it possible to sustain this output and to weave a set of connections (in your work and in the world) that go beyond a simple cut and paste of other people's words and ideas.

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This weblog has been an attempt to put these ideas into practice.  It's been a demonstration of systematic and deliberate efforts to write with authority while still learning what there is to learn. It's not currently being actively updated, but will stay online. (See the posting on "closure" to understand that ending a project is as important as starting it.)

The underlying idea is that you can become expert simply by being persistent and methodical and public in your efforts to learn.  One constraint that is clear at the start is that your blog constructed for this purpose cannot be about anything and everything that comes to mind; as soon as someone describes it as eclectic or has a hard time pinning down what you are doing, you have strayed from a purpose.  That doesn't mean that random synaptic firings are bad, just that they have no place in a Blogger's Secret style blog.

An advantage to this style, however, is that you don't need to know what you are expert at until you become that expert.  The unique writing atmosphere of weblogs means that you and your readers and the search engines will guide you there.   Once you have pinpointed where you have a unique expertise, you can adapt what you write to explore it at more depth.