fosstodon.org is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Fosstodon is an invite only Mastodon instance that is open to those who are interested in technology; particularly free & open source software. If you wish to join, contact us for an invite.

Administered by:

Server stats:

11K
active users

Kev Quirk

A few people I follow have multiple blogs that they use for various topics, but I don't really understand why.
kevquirk.com/blog/why-have-mul

Why Have Multiple Blogs?Why Have Multiple Blogs? | Kev Quirk
More from Kev Quirk

@kev I don't get it either, I much prefer keeping everything in one place.

@kev It does sound exhausting.

Back in my very active blogging days, I had one in English and one in Norwegian, which was more than enough.

@kev If I had a blog per topic I randomly want to talk about, my entire income would go out to domains 😂
Anyway, one site can have multiple topics and I still use wordpress, because I am to lazy to switch ;-)

@kev a few minutes ago, I've had a similar thought for different fediverse accounts for different topics (same person)

@st3fan I actually have 2 fedi accounts, but somehow that feels different to me. I don’t know why.

Clearly I’m a hypocrite 😂

@kev i had two blogs in the past, but one for Portuguese and another for English. I am now wondering if just a language switch wouldn't be better!

@ronoaldo @kev Personally, I'd only do a "language switch" if the content is the same in both languages. If you write some articles in Portuguese and others in English, it doesn't make sense. Otherwise, a simple link somewhere to the other version would be preferable.

@kev I think some people do it because they want to use different services. They want both a blog on Bear and on Pika so they split up their blogs by category to accomplish this. Outside of that I don’t know why one would go through the hassle.

@kev

> If you're posting about something I'm not interested in, I'll just skip over it in my RSS feed. I don't have to read everything in my feed reader.

Exactly this. Dunno why people think their subscribers (even to their newsletters) read everything they post.

@pratik Exactly this. I'd considered making 2 blogs, but decided I didn't want to deal with that. Like you, I am quite sure people will skip over the things that don't interest them.

This is why categories + good titles / headlines are important! Tell me what it's about and why I should care in less than 12 words, please.

@kev

@kev I wonder if it matters when "not interesting" crosses over into "potentially controversial" ?

Currently I only really write religious stuff. If I did add a second topic, it would probably be something techy. I can see some people being interested in tech and very much against the religious stuff, and I'm not sure I'd want to deal with the resulting comments... but mixing non controversial topics would be fine. Or perhaps I just need to find my religious-tech-people niche :)

@RadtkeJCJ yeah, maybe that would be a good case for a second blog actually. Great point.

@kev I have only one blog because I can't spread myself too thin. If I had more I'd end up focusing on one blog and the rest would starve.

My only blog revolves around myself without focusing on a single or a few topics. This accounts for new or shifting interests and projects.

By the way, WordPress is not the only blogging platform that supports RSS feeds for arbitrary tags. Write.as does too, for example.

@kev maintaining a single blog is already a chore. Running more than one is a big no for me. I can imagine people making money on blogging running more than one, but that's a different story.

@kev I do it differently. I put the same types of content on each of the different blogs, seemingly at random 😆

@kev But I've whittled it down to just two, and I am teetering on having only one. Wish me luck! :)

@jbaty 😂😂 good luck! You do it different though, as you have that rss feed that slurps up everything, so there’s still a single place for ALL THE JACK! 😊

@kev m'dude - Is this a tongue-in-cheek post? I've followed at least three of yours at various times.

@david my blog has had multiple iterations, I don’t think I’ve had multiple blogs though?

@kev There was the OCD blog, and I'm, like, 60% sure there was something else. I've recently nuked my FreshRSS instance, so I can't check.

@david OCD blog? As in obsessive compulsive disorder?

@kev - Hmmm. I could have the first letter wrong. It was about your family life, and I *think* it was before you moved to Wales.

@david ohhhhh yeah One Crap Dad! Completely forgot about that. I only had that a couple months as I realised it was too painful to run multiple blogs. 😂

@kev it's usually an SEO thing.

If you post about a range of topics in one place, each topic is effectively drowning in a sea of all the others. Search engines can't determine what the prominant, overall keywords are, so can't rank the site for searches relating to those terms as well as it can for a website that doesn't talk about anything else.

Basically, if you're looking for info about CPUs, Google is going to send you to a CPU site, not a blog that just has one old post about a cool CPU.

@dev_ric and that’s why search is broken. I’d much rather read a post from a personal blog, from a reader who has genuine use experience of that CPU, than a “CPU blog” that simply quotes a load of stats.

@kev oh for sure. Search becoming a whole business in itself, the whole fact that SEO is even a concept, is seriously messed up and has broken all sorts of things. SEO and LLMs have effectively ruined the Internet.

But still, that's why people have per-topic blogs 😞

@kev I tend to agree with it wholeheartedly when it's about subjects, but what about *languages*?

I blog both in Dutch and English. Sometimes it covers the same topic, but sometimes it's only the one language. Either because I'm lazy or because it's not relevant for the other group.

(I've solved this via a language plug-in and maintains two language sections in one blog that you can switch back and forth between - but by default keeps you in one language, such as when you search or go by tag).

@Roelant someone emailed me about this, actually. And I still think it's the same. I follow a number of multi-lingual blogs and they either have a per language RSS feed (and related page on their site) or they just dump it all together and allow the reader to skip over.

Why doesn't it need to be separate? People can just skip over the stuff they don't want to/can't read.

@kev says the man with multiple mastodon servers 😜

@basil hahaha yeah but they're not blogs. :)

@kev Oh well, I made a lot of blogs in the past. And I tried many times to have "one blog to rule them all" ;)

However, I learned most people don't like mixed topics. It seem to work for a micro blogging feed, but not so much for a blog.
People even get upset if they want to read about a topic and in between they find totally unrelated stuff.
Seems like you can't write about a serious topic and posting your fav anime pics and foodie hums in between.

The most famous sites are strictly curated.

@ryo Are they? Look at Jason Kottke, his is arguably me of the biggest blogs out there and he posts about all kinds of things.

I think that’s true for a commercial blog, but not for a personal one.

@kev I don't know. I don't even know him :)
But I know a lot of people that started with a blog and now are of course commercial because of the huge success.

But I got a lot of responses from people that complained that said it's too random.
I often find myself very disturbed if I await a tech blog and then finding post about a totally different topic. Worse are political topics and personal tragedies (when not expected to read).
I'm really not wanting to read about certain things.

@ryo I think that's where descriptive titles come in. You can then skip over the stuff you don't want to read.

@kev yeah I tried hard. And a lot of people do. But you see that stuff and that headline. That's enough for ordinary people.

If you grab a book about python e.g. and there are a few chapters that show half naked anime chars or the last road trip they made in the mountains with drinking the crap out of them, I don't just skip the chapters and say, well it's a good python book.

I was not looking for it. Many get easily offended by certain topics. A headline like "I endorse XYZ" can't be unseen