Direction and Directives

I said before that The Rundown took a pretty good lickin' when Google did the whole PR thing and we're just now starting to recover from that (hopefully it'll keep-up!), and I wanted to dote on it for a moment or two.

If you are a blogger or webmaster, you know what I mean when I talk about all the behind-the-scenes stuff we have to do on a regular basis. It's a real catch-22 because you can't work on new content, or improving the content already on the blog/site, while you're doing it, but if you don't tackle the technical stuff, no one can find you! The real kicker here is that the engines expect you to have indicators/pointers to content that you haven't had time to create or publish because you're so busy trying to tell them where to find it! Without them, the new content won't be indexed; if they point to nothing, you stand the chance of lowering your entire site's ranking because the engines see them as "dead" or "broken" links!

There are all sorts of workarounds for this and I prefer the "placeholder" method. If you were with us before the site went live, you may recall The Weirding just had the 404 page with the lounging babe there for three months. That was intentional; that way, the engines started picking us up before there was any content. When we went live, we were already in the engines and people could find us. (Of course, we had all sorts of hosting problems and setbacks along the way, which has stifled us to this day, but that's not the point of this post.) This is the same reason there are placeholder pages for so many of the RPGs right now.

I sincerely doubt any of you are familiar with the original Rundown - the one that was on the GeoCities site since 1998 - which is just as well. It's still there, though I doubt it's in any of the search engines or anything like that. But the original Rundown was far more a traditional blog than this version. While I don't really think of The Rundown as a "niche" blog, I have intentionally narrowed the focus largely to sequential art lately, and that's the direction in which it's going to continue for the immediate future. I am still going to bore you to tears with personal details from time to time, I am still going to run-off at the mouth about politics and news and so forth when the mood strikes, and there will always be a bit of celebrity gossip and general entertainment news along the way, but The Rundown was always primarily about sequential art and comic books, in particular, so I have just decided to make sure it reflects that.

Well, the point to all of this is that the technical aspects to which I have been more attentive as of late seem to be paying-off to some degree and so long as I can keep my health up and there are no more earthquakes, there will be a lot of new content on the site shortly. But this means that the slower pace we've become accustomed to these last few weeks is going to have to continue for a little while longer.

Still, I think 5-6 posts or so a day is pretty good. I figure most people are only interested in two or three of those, anyway, so much more seems like overkill. Of course, when there's a lot of news to cover or something big going on, there will be more, and when there's nothing to report, there will be fewer, but in general, we've hit a comfortable zone that's going to be extended for a while longer - at least until the major site redesign is complete.

I have so much stuff I am champing at the bit to get published, but everyday life, my health, and everything else makes it hard to finish it all as quickly (and well) as I'd like to. But I wanted to fill you in on what I'm up to here because I know things have been kinda schizophrenic lately, with almost nothing one day, then a slew of posts the next, and so on.

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© C Harris Lynn, 2008