My Thoughts: Blogging is not easy, writing an article even harder

Although easier to critique other people's works, writing even a poor article or blog is not easy (procedurally). And to follow my critiques, they are not easy to overcome in my own posts. The most pressing pressure is time. Although professional writers may be pressured by due dates, I am pressured by just spending personal time on the article. Many posts are not completely to my liking, then found that I do not publish much. Eventually, I feel that enough information is provided and the general thoughts and ideas were presented so I just publish it anyways.

Personally, I wish I had more time to research. I wish I had more time to put together the research to make a better analysis. I wish I had more energy to more things. I wish I could make my thoughts follow a more coherent process. I wish I could focus more on the topic.

Blogging is difficult for me to stay on topic. I segue way too much. I delete way more than I leave in. Sometimes, I go so off tangent that I even start another article mostly intending to drop a few notes so I can return later then go on another tangent then eventually forgetting my original post.

So, I still encourage anyone to blog, write, or simply a journal. No one needs to read it. I feel that I have learned a lot about myself from these posts.

Scammish Pseudo Professional Blog Posts

I am like many people who get suckered by click-bait articles. But unlike most, I like to do some due diligence when an occasional post strikes my fascination. Recently I have been doing some research for a project that I hope to work on, I have found that a lot of these articles have no references... not even the author.

I can understand a personal blog (like this) not following all the rules, but our default disclaimer is basically take our advice with a grain of salt because we have no credentials. I dislike these blogs that are in the name of a company especially a seemingly legit companly like glassdoor, monster, and indeed (yes, I have been researching online job hires).

My Hates

In general as far as I can remember, I absolutely hate articles with no dates! 

https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/big-lies-recruiters-tell

https://www.nbrii.com/employee-survey-white-papers/10-things-employees-dislike-most-about-their-employers/

How hard is it to post a date? Not hard at all! So something is suspicious. In the best case, the company is just not legit because they are not putting the reader's concern in mind. This should be the first "readers beware" especially if you want to source the material or use their services.

Next, I hate lists that have absolutely no sources or references. And if there are no sources or references, then there should be some description of the author.

https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/author/emilymoore/

Yes, her articles are interesting reads but there are no backings. Where is she getting the information from? If from her personal experience, what is her experience? This is also not hard at all. It is the internet. The author can just as easily just make up a description.

And the author's title (Monster Staff) in the article from monster? They seriously could not come up with a more useless title to add some sort of legitimacy to the post? Might as well just signed, "some bum from the street" or anonymous.

Here's an example that does a good job of the above items:

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/auditory-processing-disorder/

What irks me even more is that even reddit posts are more legit than the professional-looking blogs and articles. Even in reddit, at least some of the users will list their sources even to the point of admitting not only that it is from personal experience but that it is super biased.

So it just saddens me that many corporations are nothing like people. They put on a good face to make us forget that they will scam you if they can in as legal a method that they can.

On a Side Note

Would be nice if there was a way to rate blogs, articles, or whatever based purely on how they do certain things. I personally use the above method to rank how trust-worthy a company or site is.

See also

A good article with dates, references, and a good bio. Adds a lot of trust and believability to the article.

https://business.dailypay.com/blog/employee-turnover

My Thoughts: "...people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

I found it quite entertaining reading the comments to a blog by Jeff Atwood (https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-dont-use-software-that-costs-money-here/). A large amount of them were dedicated to a single paragraph: "It's tempting to ascribe this to the 'cult of no-pay', programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

Why I find this so fascinating was how at-arms people were defending themselves as if the paragraph was a personal attack on them as software users. At first, I just thought it was the one or two people who always make a big deal about a small thing (the paragraph was not even the point of the blog). But as I continued to read, you see comments (paraphrasing): "long time reading, but not anymore." All over few statements (did I mention that it was not even the point of the blog?).

Still and in a more serious tone, the commenters even appeared to have missed the whole point of the paragraph. First to address the logical problem that keeps irking me. A lot of commenters were basically saying "pirates != open source enthusiasts" but the paragraph reads more like "pirates then open source enthusiasts".

Besides the logical discrepancy, the definition of "pirate" isn't the typical use of the actual people who "steals" software. From the usage, I took the scope of the meaning of pirate to be the group of people who used paid-software for free by downloading hacked or opened software or obtaining keys illegally. Common things that I saw back in college: MS Windows, MS Office, Starcraft, etc.

To me it was felt so ironic that those defending to never have been a pirate probably has used pirated products (I am clumping in MP3 and movies here)... with or without their knowledge. At least back in the day, that was the sign of a good technical engineer... so it is very hard for me to imagine an IT/SW person to not have used pirated products.

Perhaps the confusion is due to the use of the term "open source" instead of "free" or "cost-free" software. Because some commenters were saying "free" being open-source instead of closed-source software. But the article is about costs, so I am not sure why the confusion exists.

Basically, I read the paragraph of people who were users of pirated software are now users of open source software. I have the same sentiments. With more readily available no-cost software, most people have steered more away from pirated software.

Disclaimer

I am pretty sure I've posted a blog about this (blame my fault memory). The periods outside of the quotes are intentional... it just bugs me to use periods within quotes when it is not related to the quote.

Also, I am not sure why I am easily amused by these things.

Reference

https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-dont-use-software-that-costs-money-here/
https://perlbuzz.com/2008/04/10/open_source_is_not_piracy/

Blogger December 2015 Stats

Google Analytics
Sessions = 905
Users = 817
PageViews = 1898

Google Webmasters
Impressions = 6392
Clicks = 710


Google AdSense
Page Views = 121
Clicks = 0

Blogger
Pageviews Last Month = 1960
All Time Posts = 374
All Time History Visits = 66818

Life: Blogger Dec 2014 Stats

Google Analytics

Sessions = 2280
Users = 2089
Pageviews = 4818

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 362
Impressions = 10,161
Clicks = 1621

Google AdSense

Page Views = 588
Clicks = 2

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 3254
All Time Posts = 327
All Time History Visits = 34069

30000+ All Time History Visitors

Thank you visitors, readers, web surfers, fact questioners, and everyone else that has contributed to my blog. My last milestone of 20,000 visitors was only a few months ago in May/June of this year, 2014. I started around 12,000 at the start of the year (when I essentially started tracking my blog metrics).

YTD, I have almost 7000 sessions from Google Analytics with 13000 pageviews. I did have some analytics issues when I tried to enable the demographics. I am not sure that would be a 5000 page view difference though.

Google AdSense shows that I have about 8500 page views. This is several thousands short from both analytics and blogspot. I wonder if this may possibly be due to ad blockers.

Life: Blogger September 2014 Stats

Google Analytics

Sessions = 1120
Users = 1031
Pageviews = 2444

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 327
Approximate Impressions = 8171
Approximate Clicks = 733

Google AdSense

Page Views = 953
Clicks = 1

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 2080
All Time Comments = **
All Time Posts = 287
All Time History Visits = 25195



* Approximations are rounded down
** Switching to Google+ comments removed the ability to count total comments

Blogger's Labels

Cons

I am not familiar how other blog sites handle labels, but I always find it difficult to keep my labels consistent. Occasionally, I find that I use two different spellings of the same label. Most of the time, one is the plural form and the other is singular. When I catch these, it is quite painful to go through each post to update the label. Another side affect is if I am not careful with the site tracking, I will at times artificially increase traffic on those posts.

Lessons on Label Usage

I have been trying to limit the number of labels used on each post. At first, I tried to include all topics. I have not quite figured if one way is better than the other. Having fewer labels is nice for separating the different posts that I have. With more labels, there can be more categories but lose the way I separate my posts.

The primary categories that I wanted to split were basically my point-of-view (POV) of the information. Review are my opinion on a product, process, service, place, etc. I will try to provide the information regarding a review. Life are my opinion on my personal life so there is some understanding needed about me which can be learned from other life posts. I would not provide all background information needed for the post. Work are my opinion on a more professional level. Similar to life, not all information will be provided but will usually have a little more weight since I typically work in that matter. Games and Bored are just posts that are not as important to me. Games are usually just informational about the game status. If the topic is more related to me, then will likely be in the Life topic. Bored just included things that I found interesting but having little information to add to it.

Life: Blogger July 2014 Stats

Missed July earlier in the month.

Google Analytics

Sessions = 605
Users = 524
Pageviews = 1383

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 285
Approximate Impressions = 6276
Approximate Clicks = 307

Google AdSense

Page Views = 506
Clicks = 2

Blogger

Does not allow for previous data.



* Approximations are rounded down
** Switching to Google+ comments removed the ability to count total comments

Life: Blogger August 2014 Stats

I seem to have missed metrics for July.

Google Analytics

Sessions = 594
Users = 511
Pageviews = 1362

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 292
Approximate Impressions = 6595
Approximate Clicks = 318

Google AdSense

Page Views = 588
Clicks = 2

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 1500
All Time Comments = **
All Time Posts = 261
All Time History Visits = 23142



* Approximations are rounded down
** Switching to Google+ comments removed the ability to count total comments

Life: Blogger June 2014 Stats and 20202+ Lifetime visitors

Odd that my analytics numbers is much lower than usual even compared to the other metrics. I wonder if something happened with the analytics scripts.

Google Analytics

Sessions = 76

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 223
Approximate Impressions = 5800
Approximate Clicks = 287

Google AdSense

Page Views = 448
Clicks = 3

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 973
All Time Comments = 39
All Time Posts = 222
All Time History Visits = 20202

* Approximations are rounded down

Life: Blogger May 2014 Stats

Google Analytics

Sessions = 267

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 232
Approximate Impressions = 5700
Approximate Clicks = 318

Google AdSense

Page Views = 638
Clicks = 1

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 960
All Time Comments = 38
All Time Posts = 210
All Time History Visits = 19267

* Approximations are rounded down

Life: Blogger April 2014 Stats

Google Analytics

Sessions = 321

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 259
Approximate Impressions = 12400
Approximate Clicks = 455

Google AdSense

Page Views = 748
Clicks = 3

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 1275
All Time Comments = 38
All Time Posts = 201
All Time History Visits = 18144

* Approximations are rounded down

Life: Blogger March 2014 Stats

Google Analytics

Visits = 361

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 299
Approximate Impressions = 7400
Approximate Clicks = 500

Google AdSense

Page Views = 792
Clicks = 1

Blogger

Pageviews Last Month = 1788
All Time Comments = 34
All Time Posts = 192
All Time History Visits = 16930

* Approximations are rounded down

Life: Blogger January/February 2014 Stats

Analysis

Seems that my traffic is decreasing a little bit. I think this is due to the decrease in a couple of my older posts that have been driving most of the traffic. My guess on that is due to the age of the posts as they over a year old. 

I still have not figured out what keeps causing the 1 or 2 visits on each of my pages. The first visit almost always occurs within a few minutes of posting, but sometimes could take up to a day or two. The second visit is more erratic in that it could be within a day to a few days (maybe a week).

I am glad to see that my traffic sources are now search engines. Last year there were a couple that would always sneak onto my list that were for other advertising. I do not think that I did anything to change that, so hopefully that is just blogger cleaning up the data or the ad sites disappeared or the ads do not think it is worth there time anymore.

I am trying to reuse my lables, so hopefully the number of single tags will decrease over time. Or perhaps, I will be trying to increase the higher count labels.

Google Analytics

Visits (January) = 450
Visits (February) = 371

Unique Visitors (January) = 403
Unique Visitors (February) = 330

Page Views (January) = 615
Page Views (February) = 436

Pages per Visit (January) = 1.37
Pages per Visit (February) = 1.18

Google Webmasters

Total Queries (January) = 275
Total Queries (February) = 266

Approximate Impressions (January) = 8,500
Approximate Impressions (February) = 6,960

Approximate Clicks (January) = 600
Approximate Clicks (February) = 437

Google AdSense

February = 794 Views
January = 951 Views
All = 2037 (since 12/19/2013)

Ad clicks = 0

Blogger

Comments (January) = 9
Comments (February) = 2

Posts (January) = 24
Posts (February) = 18

All Time History Visits = 14,967
Last Month History Visits = 1,285

Life: Practicing Basic Math while Reading Random Blogs

Sometimes I just enjoy reading random blogs to see what people write about. When I do so, I also track how long they keep their blogs going.

One of things I also look for is the number of posts they blogged. Of course, I only record the ones that have the list of blogs that are countable (typically blogs with list of years with the number of blogs in the year). I count these in my head for my table of data.

While trying to do the math in my head, I have found that I can "see" the numbers quickly in my head... but it takes a while for me to recognize the number. What I mean by that is that it takes me a while to "say" the number especially if I had to carry a number. For example, 88 + 33 = 121. For some reason, I doubt myself even though I see "121" in my head so I double check that 80 + 30 = 110 then add 8 + 3 = 11, thus carry the 1 for the tens, thus 110 + 11 = 121. After warming up, I am able to just ignore the step where I have to read out the number and just type what I see.

I have also noticed that teens really mess how quickly I can calculate because see 14 and saying fourteen really throws my mind for a loop. I think I already have some problems with dyslexia-like memory. So seeing 1 while saying 4 then see 4 when saying teen, triggers my mind to triple check that I have the correct numbers in the correct places. But like above, I go much faster once I ignore the urge to say the numbers.

For some reason, my recall is in reverse order and I cannot really tell. The most common example is when someone gives me there phone numbers. First, I rarely can repeat 7 to 10 digit numbers. And in the rare cases that I can, I almost always repeat the last 4 digits backwards but not the first 3 to 6. Even when copying numbers from one spreadsheet to another. I have just gotten in the habit of double-checking which I notice that I do this quite often.


Reference
https://sites.google.com/site/douglastclee/sociology/numbers

Life: Blogger 2013

Google Analytics

Average Visits = 38

2 full months, started in October.

Google Webmasters

Total Queries = 183
Approximate Impressions = 2000
Approximate Clicks = 1000

Started in October.

Google AdSense

Page Views = 286
Clicks = 1

Started 12/19/2013

Blogger

Comments = 12
Posts = 129
All Time History Visits = 11948
Max Month Visits = September 2248

Life: Professional Blogs or Online Articles' Basic Information

1. I would like to see some sort of biography to the author to understand what kind of experience or background that the author. Personally, I have actually worked with one of their branches so I know there is some legitimacy to the company.

2. The date that the article was posted. I want to know how old the information is. How else should I know which information is newer when they conflict? These sites lose a lot of credibility in my views just for this little information. I am surprised how many articles are still missing the date.

3. And the last thing I'd like to see is references especially when they talk about other sources. If the source is theirs and independent, then it should be stated that way. Otherwise, information without references just makes the article seem like it has other purposes besides the primary message.

I can understand the lack of these in personal blogs or hobbyists, but professional and corporate blogs should have these at the minimum for me to believe such information. I am not saying that I do not trust it, but I am forced to find other similar information elsewhere thus some credibility is lost.

Review: Blogging on Blogger/Blogspot

It has a bit past half a year since I've seriously started blogging. During that time, I have almost 50 posts. I have gone through quite a few writing styles and still figuring out this blog's identity is.

Per the tracker, there seems to be more interest in the interview questions so I had tried to focus a bit more there. I started off wanting to answer the question as I would in a real interview. Quickly, I learned that I could not do this for all questions. This last month, I tried just blogging whatever I felt that day.

I have been blogging about more topics. I found it easier to write about something that I just happened to be inspired to write about rather than trying to mold a real audience. So, I return back to writing more towards my future self, although I will be probably slip up again. Remember to stay focused, future self!

I do reread a lot of my previous posts. I found a lot of grammatical and spelling errors. I tried to correct some of them but I have been doing less now because the general idea is there. I do correct some lines where it just does not make sense at all. I know some is because I am trying to type as quickly as I think of the ideas and sometimes the idea just go way faster, then you'll notice some thought gaps.

I get a lot of sources from very odd sites. I'm sure you'll see them when you blog. I do not want to publish them because it will just generate them more traffic which I am pretty positive that is the reason they do that. There is probably no way around them, but at least it makes me happy to see the visitor count go up. And at the same time, makes me feel kind of sad that I am somewhat superficial and do enjoy at least some level of attention.

There were a one thing that I would like improved in blogger (and it is totally possible that blogger can already do it and I just have not figured it out). I'd like to be able to create a page with links to blogs by certain labels, like interview (label:interview) or work-related (label:interview or label:work life).

So far, I enjoy this new part of my life. It does help me focus on certain topics and reflect on other topics. I've been thinking of writing some alternative answers to interview questions and counter points to other posts... but we'll see how things go.

Reference:
First Relevant Post (12/26/2012)