Giant Girl Ruined my Vacation

Now you all are going to think I'm crazy. Too be honest, if I hadn't seen it myself, I'd think I was crazy too. In fact I'd still be questioning my own sanity if my fiance` hadn't been with me and seen it too. I was driving through a quiet town in the middle of farm country one day, when all of a sudden I saw a girl who must've been at least 18 feet tall strolling through town. That's right, I said "girl", not a woman. Despite being 18 feet tall, she still looked just a kid. Maybe not a little (probably the wrong word) kid, more like a teen-aged kid.

I was in my little car gawking at her not paying attention and ended up hitting a telephone poll. We ran for cover as she terrorized the town. Eventually the police showed up along with animal control and the national guard. I was shuffled away behind police barricades, but not before I saw the poor girl collapse from all the tranquilizer darts. The last thing I saw before being pushed away by the authorities was her being tied down.

Later, a local doctor treated my fiance` and I for some bumps and bruises from the car accident and a particularly pushy police officer. He was a nice fella, Dr. Crisp, I think was his name. When I talked to him about the girl he seemed more concerned for the girl than frightened.

With the exception of the local newspaper, The Daily World, no paper treats the story seriously. Waiting for my car to be repaired I ended up staying in the small town for a few days. No one I talked to really seemed to know what happened to her. Everyone was content just to know that she was gone. My guess is that she's somewhere in a room being studied.

I know, I know, you don't believe me, and that's fine. Before you dismiss my fantastical story, just think of this. Do you really think someone could actually make this up?

Promoting your Blog Fiction: Get a "Feed"

Let me make myself clear. Setup and turn on a feed for your blog and promote the heck out of it. I know that many people reading this post will file this advice under "d" for "duh". However, I can't help but notice that not every blog fiction site does a very good job of promoting their feed. Or worse, they don't even have one.

If you know what a feed is, you can skip the rest of this post. For those who don't know, a feed is just a way for people to get the latest sampling of your blog. It's uses are nearly limitless. For instance I use the feeds to create my left sidebar. BlogRush uses it to promote feeds. People use it to be notified when their favorite blogs have a new post. I put some of them on my yahoo homepage. Others put them on their google homepage.

There are 2 types of "feeds". An RSS feed, and an ATOM feed. Blogger does ATOM feeds. Others default to using an RSS feed. In the end, which type your blog supports is not an issue. Any program that reads feeds can read both types. Any program that's worth using, that is.

If you're a blogger, fictional or otherwise, you want to make "subscribing" to your feed as easy and quickly as possible. It should always be a click away. Most bloggers will also use something like feedburner so that readers can sign up to be notified via email when there's a new post. Look at my sidebar to the right. Towards the top is the international gigantic orange symbol for a feed. Under it is a link to subscribe via email. Some people will put the email signup form into their webpage so that people can sign up with the click of a button(example here).

Does promoting a feed help? Let me answer with an emphatic YES!!! Everytime I have a new post on this blog, I can't help but notice that the number of unique visitors for the day spikes. I can only conclude that those are my loyal subscribers checking out my latest post. I know it's my feed that prompts their visit. If they were manually checking, my traffic wouldn't spike.

I won't make this another tutorial on setting up a feed. There are plenty that do a better job than I ever could. I just want to make sure that you get one and promote the heck out of it. With the exception of creating an engrossing and entertaining story, it's the most important thing you can do to increase readership. This reminds me, subscribe to this blog's feed!!!

Subscribe to my feed



Subscribe to Blog Fiction by Email

Internet Bottom Feeders

I rarely hold back when talking about the scum of the internet. Spammers and scum sucking domain squatters are all at the top of my list of people who deserve a scarlet letter. Well, add to the list useless bloggers.

What do I mean by a useless blogger? Like a domain squatter, it is someone that adds nothing good, fun, or useful to the internet and yet takes up an inordinate amount of space. For instance, a blog that is optimized for adsense, but has no content that is human readable. The purpose is to get a good pagerank which drives traffic to their site, and hope that some poor sot clicks an ad. The whole purpose is to make money without offering a service. Just do a search for Viagra if you want to see many many examples.

So why do I bring this up? Well, it seems some guy, Michael Wong, visited me asking to exchange links with his useless blog. I checked out his site, and it was empty. EMPTY! Why the hell would I blogroll an empty site that has a single post that said

Even though there's no content now, there will be-once I build up enough incoming links.

Hello! I think you've got that backwards! I visited it again today and people are actually exchanging links. I'm not sure why. He also did add some content that had a lot of words, but didn't say anything. Oh, he also has some ad links, the most important part of a useless blog.

Having said all of that. You might think that I'm not going to link to his site. Well, you would be wrong. In the end, I did decide to give him his precious link:
Asshole

Blog Fiction Forums

I have two problems. First of all, I'm sure that everyone has seen the Grand List of Blog Fiction. For those who have seen it, the first thing you'll notice is that I reused the forum from my, now defunct, own Blog Fiction. I originally did this because I didn't really expect to find that much. Today, however, I'm at 38 and counting.

There is another problem. There is no active forum for blog fiction writers. In fact, with the exception of Novelr's very recent forum addition, there aren't even any forums for online writers. Sure, there's plenty of writer's forums, but they all concentrate on dead tree publishing. Or they are dedicated to some type of fan fiction.

As I'm sure you've guessed by now. I am now introducing the Blog Fiction forum(http://forum.blogfiction.org). If you signed up for my Terran Resistance forum, you'll find that your old username and password have already been transferred. I've also transferred over all of the old posts that are relevant.

Something that you'll notice right away is that I still have the Blog Fiction "link forum". That will be my new grand list of Blog Fiction. I also have a separate "link forum" for general online fiction. A lot people have put links to their online writing in my forum that wasn't really a Blog Fiction. I don't like to leave any one out. Especially when there are so few places for online writers to gather. Therefore, I've put in the "link forum" and a general online fiction discussion. Blog Fiction being a subset of online fiction it really does make sense to allow those discussions as well. While this blog will remain focused on Blog Fiction, I will also participate in the forum at least as much as I do this blog

To promote the forums I'll be adding a feed of the latest topics to the right. If you subscribe to my blog feed, I would also encourage you to subscribe to the forum feed(http://forum.blogfiction.org/rss.php). Since things will probably be slow going at first, you can be notified when there are new topics started. Once a topic is started, if you're interested in it, the forum software will let you "subscribe" to that topic and send you an email when a reply is posted.

I hope the forums will be useful and fun for readers and authors alike. If you have any ideas on how to improve the forums let me know by leaving me a comment posting it in the forums :)

Critiqing Lethe Bashar

Lethe Bashar recently asked me to review his sites. (Well... using a loose definition of "recently" that is). For now, I'll be critiquing layout and readability and not the actual writing.

Lethe,
Here are the notes I made when looking at and reading your sites. First, I'll start with the spain blog fiction, Lethe Bashar in Spain.

Looking at the sidebar, the "Share!" and "Subscribe!" bars include all of the social network options. Why specifically add Digg, Technorati, and Del.icio.us? Use the bars or don't use them and you can clean up some more clutter. Also, I think the StumbleUpon picture is plenty, I don't think you need the text link right after it.

No reason for the "site meter" to be in the sidebar is there? I would put it on the bottom. Speaking of the bottom, your blogrush box looks kind of funny down there. You may want to get the "skinny" version and put it in your sidebar.

I like the novel link at the top. I also like the "about me" introducing yourself and your project. Why did you get rid of it?

It of course makes sense to have a list of links to your other sites, but you may want to really differentiate the one to the Vegas, and "History of Lethe" sites since it's part of the same story\universe. Speaking of the Vegas site, I don't think there is a reason to have a feed from your Vegas site. I can't think of a "use case" for it. If someone is savvy enough to check one site for updates, they'll probably check the other one. Or, better yet, will probably have subscribed to both of them already. "The Philosopher's Tidbit" feed makes sense since an article title might grab some reader's attention.

Actually, speaking of links, all of that text seems really tiny to me. Are you creating this on a 800x600 res monitor? Maybe my eyes are getting old. I'll have to ask someone else to chime in with their opinion. In the same manner, what font are you using? Either the font seems hard to read or the background makes it harder to read. I'll also ask if anyone else is having that problem.

I like the navigational layout of this specific blog. Easy access to archives, next\previous post on individual posts. All of that deserves mass kudos.

Next is the Vegas part of your blog fiction.
I don't really have any new criticisms for this one. I like the layout a lot more. I'll just repeat some of the points from the Spain blog.

• Probably don't need the Spain blog feed
• Again, I think the link text is hard to read, but the content text is easier to read - so maybe it is the background color that makes the Spain blog hard to read
• Differentiate the Story blogs from your "other" sites.
• This one is also easy to navigate.

For both of them, I would make this link a lot more pronounced. http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Lethe-Bashars-Novel-of-Life/91955. Especially, if you aren't going to include a brief explanation\intro in each of your sidebars. I read about 6 or 7 posts in both of the spain and vegas blogs and still wasn't sure which one, chronologically, came first. It wasn't until I found that page that I figured it out and found on that there was another prequel to the stories. Making clear which comes first can matter to readers, especially new ones.

So those are my critiques for Lethe's sites. I hope they were all constructive. Does anyone have any other constructive critique's for Lethe?

Wilf is back

I'm still catching up on last months news. Wilf's world is back from it's hiatus. He was back right on May 1st just as he promised. I'm glad to see he's back. I'd rather he would've came back as a published author, but he doesn't appear to be looking back, so we shouldn't either.

Here's to you Wilf, and the book deal you'll eventually get. I've added Wilf's world back to the sidebar.