Chris Blackwell’s Domain

I’m finally back from vacation today. Well actually I got back yesterday but I needed a day just to unwind. I also needed a day to read over all the news and articles that got built up in my Google Reader over the week, or so I thought. I had flagged over 30 articles to read later during the week. When Sunday came, I deleted all but a few of them, and you know what, I didn’t miss a thing. Sure, I may not have read the latest technique to market your blog and focus on your niche more, but how many different ways do I need to read about that?

I thought that every day I had to read every article posted on Problogger, Zen Habbits, Daily Blog Tips, or Dosh Dosh. I ended up deleting all of the articles from them that had built-up over my week away. By seeing how many articles I normally read in a week, I got a pretty good idea of how many I read in a day. I must read about 10 - 15 articles a day during the weekdays. How much productivity is lost in reading all those articles? Sure, they all might have a great tip here, or an idea there, but taking away all that extra time will cost me money in the end. Where was that tip?

While I do think it can be good to read other blogs, and learn about new marketing techniques or strategies, I also think that you should keep in perspective how much time you are spending and how many articles of the same content rewritten in a different way. My week off was just that, a week off. No Twitter, no Blog Catalog, no email, no instant messaging, and a significant reduction in the amount I read via RSS. Give yourself a break and try it out. You’ll be surprised at what your NOT missing.

Over the weekend I changed the main domain for my blog from thechrisblackwell.com to chrisblackwell.org, and I have given everyone a perfect case study of what NOT to do. I originally registered thechrisblackwell.com because chrisblackwell.com was already taken along with a few other variations. However, I was starting to get too many questions on why I had “the” so I decided to go with a .org domain and simply have my name. The problem is the domain change, and how I went about switching them, was an absolute disaster!

I lost all my subscribers and comments!

When I made the domain change I immediately went to FeedBurner to update the domain and feed details. The next morning when I checked by feed subscription numbers, I got a big surprise when I saw a 0 staring back at me. I posted a small test post, waited an hour, then checked my Google Reader to see if the feed was still being updated. Nope! My Google Reader didn’t see the new post and was still linking to the old domain.

So I’ve lost all my subscribers to my blog that I’ve spent months building up. Well, at least it can’t get any worse, right? Wrong! As I started looking around my blog I started to notice something very quickly. No Comments! I still don’t know what happened to all my comments, but they got all deleted in the move somehow. I am very upset by this as I cherish all my comments and some readers had some very informative information and links.

Hopefully these are all the problems and nothing else will or can go wrong. If you have posted a comment on my blog before, you have my sincerest apologies. Please subscribe again to my blog and help me recover some of what I have lost. Thank you everyone for your kind patience and understanding.

Every morning I roll out of bed, make my way to the coffee machine and then head to my computer with one thing in mind: check my RSS Reader! This has been my morning routine for over two years now and it works for me with one little exception now. The amount of unread posts that are absolute junk! When I wake up in the morning and see I have 130 unread items and I end up only reading about 5, that is not acceptable by any means. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, so where has the real simple part gone?

I can’t read the news on the net anymore

I had to completely unsubscribe from all news company’s RSS feeds because they really don’t get it, and, are by far the worst at posting junk. When a news company reports on an issue they create a post about it and then my RSS feeder is updated with that post. But then they post another article about the same topic, and another, and another. Before too long I have 5 unread messages in my RSS reader about the same topic. Come on guys, consolidate this into either one post or one RSS message. Every time I try to subscribe to a newspaper’s “general news feed”, it has over 200 unread messages by the end of the day. How am to keep up with that?

All in a race to make Google happy

A lot of these sites are posting very frequently so that Google indexes them faster and faster, and the more their competitors post, the more they feel like they have to retaliate. Even some of my favorite sites like Lifehacker and Engadget have slipped a little and are now submitting dozens of posts a day. Engadget by my count is up to about 50 postings a day! Are there really 50 new tech stories to talk about each day?

What’s this whole quality thing about?

You’ve probably noticed a trend or lack thereof on my blog. I don’t post anything unless I have something meaningful to say. You don’t need to read yet again about the new MacBooks that Apple released, or another post on how badly Windows VISTA is doing, because you’ve already read it. It’s been covered! So I don’t waste my time and I don’t waste yours rehashing the obvious. Make sure your posts are original, note worthy, and to the point.

It has been two days since I learn’t about the retirement of Brett Favre. I knew when I heard the news that I would have to step away from my regular technology topics, to pay my respects to my hero Brett Favre. So for the past two days I have been collecting myself and trying to figure out what I wanted to say about him, without resorting to writing an entire book. I grew up watching Brett Favre and the Packers play. Nothing I loved more was a Sunday night game watching Favre being Favre in a snow covered Green Bay. Favre was is a true competitor on and off the field.

Favre leaves the NFL with more then a handful of records. Some of his amazing records include;

• Most Career Passing Yards
• Most Career Completions
• Most Career Touchdown Passes
• Most Career Wins as Starting Quarterback

Favre also holds the record for Most Career Interceptions too, but that is the magic of Brett Favre. Nobody will ever remember the bad timing interceptions, or the time he couldn’t avoid the sack. They will remember the 80-yard TD passes to win the game and the amazing shuffles passes to avoid the sack.

My largest regret by far when I heard the news was that I never got to see him play in person. I always seemed to think that there would be more time and that the retirement talk was nothing really more then sports reporters looking for an angle. Now that he has retired I feel this very large sense of loss opportunity. John Madden himself has said many times that you have to come see Brett Favre play in person and in Lambeau Field to truly believe the magic.

What do you think of Brett Favre and his career? Do you think he will go down in history as the best ever? What Favre moment do you remember the most?

I don’t really know why I’m blogging again. Actually I’m busier now then ever. So why would I choose now of all the times to pick it back up again? Well, the reason is if I didn’t start soon I would have probably never picked it up again (that would have been perfectly fine for some people out there). However, blogging really does help you with your writing skills and having the discipline to have to post something at least once a day week can keep you quite grounded. My writing skills (much like my math skills) are not exactly up to par, and I can really murder the English language at times, but I feel this is something I need to do and I hope some of you will even enjoy reading my rants from time to time.

I will try my best to keep this site as interesting as possible and to keep everyone updated on all the new projects I am bound to get myself into. Please feel free to participate in this site as much as possible and leave comments whenever you can. It is your comments that really keep this site interesting and alive.