A revival of Photogabble... the post-mortem
planted on in: Blogging and PhotoGabble.
~474 words, about a 3 min read.
In December last year after a lengthy hiatus from blogging I wrote my first post titled Keep Blogging Fun!. In my mind at the time that blog post was the first of
many to come and marked the revival of this website, photogabble, a project that I have now stuck with for over a decade something which by any measurement is a long time; to put that into perspective it's one seventh of the
average worldwide life expectancy of a human at birth[1] or to phrase it in another way: I have been blogging for one seventh of my life!
On the surface that statistic sounds impressive and in reality I aught to have had an easy revival of photogabble given its age and my prior experience ā however I was (and still am) of the opinion that blogging should be more
about enjoying the writing and the subject you are writing about than chasing rainbows ā and so I wrote a handful of articles at my leisure restricted to the subject of programming. Unfortunately the restriction of scope to just
programming related posts hurt the revival because writing programming related articles requires a great deal of research, drafting and time to get to the point where I feel happy to hit publish.
Additionally programming related articles also have a much larger word count than the average blog and therefore the audience that they appeal to is limited due to the personal time investment required by each visitor to read and
process each post (if they read more than one in the first place). Photogabble was originally about photography and culture in general, two subjects that are both easy to write for and easy to consume, something that was
key to this websites early success.
As a post mortem of the past six months I would say that the recent revival of photogabble has not been a failure given that I have written and published fifteen articles, three of which are proving to be quite successful but
that it hasn't been an overall success because while I have seen traffic increasing and bounce rates falling, I have not written as much as I would have liked simply because the length of time it takes to write quality articles
within the programming genre.
Moving forward I am going to re-evaluate what goals I have for Photogabble over the next six months; I would like to see the growing trend of visitors continue of course, but I would also like to nail down what photogabble is
about and broaden its scope to make it a lot easier for me to have fun writing content for its platform.