the wake up call

Had an interesting exchange today of ideas with my friend Dave. Last nite, I had a barrage of visits showing up in my shortstats from Cameron Moll. Absolutely floored me, as the visits were coming approximately every 2-5 min over a 3 hour period, and thats until I went to bed at 3am. Up this morning and it has continued at a steady rate non-stop.

I showed Dave the stats and it sparked a convo about writers, readers and content.

“I’ve been feeling pressure to get more/better content, just ’cause of the google traffic I get. I get a lot of my traffic from google or other search engines, (people looking for things that they aren’t gonna find on my site), so I feel like I should have better content there. So at this stage, I can’t even imagine having the kind of traffic this guy, or people like Kottke have.”

reflection and the results

This caused me to reflect and examine my own site visiting habits and ponder the reasons I visit certain sites with frequent regularity. One of the things that I really dig, and I think people do in general, is getting things for free…being unashamedly honest here, there are a host of sites that I frequent that offer things that are quite useful. For example, I go to Wordpress developer sites all the time to read about new plugins, mods, add-ons, tips, and techniques. Some of these sites are portals and gateways to a wealth of resources like the Wordpress Plugins Database. Others are extremely valuable in terms of free information such as the newly revamped Wordpress Codex. The last and yet most frequent Wordpress related sites that I visit are the developers themselves. Greats such as Chris J Davis, Michael Heilemann, Ryan Boren, Nick Momrik, and Coldforged just to name a few.

I visit the Legends — Zeldman, Meyer , Cederholm, Bowman, and others to learn about how to perfect my code, impliment new techniques and get their opinions on things new and old. These people also (Zeldman the exception) allow comments and the people that comment offer alot to the experience, oft times solving questions the “big guys” have, this happens frequently.

Stylegala, CSS Beauty and the CSS Vault are everday visits as well to see whats being featured. One fantastic addition to this group that I visit regularly is the newly launched 9rules network which is a fantastic hub and network of great content featuring 9rules member sites.

Content With Style, and Mark Boulton are good examples of the hands on type of tutorials which one can benefit from greatly.

where the rubber meets the road

For me what this all really boils down to is my hunger to learn and to get fed, so I visit these places regularly. One of my goals now is to start bringing some of the things I’ve learned into practical examples on this site. It doesn’t necessarily matter if they have already been done before, once you post a tutorial or example, the comments start and can enrich the current article or turn into topics for future articles/tutorials and the learning cycle continues. Whats cool about this is that some of the people that visit our sites may be new to areas that we are writing on and in turn, learn new things.

I’ve been guilty of thinking that since I have come across a tutorial or lesson on something that everyone else has come across it as well. Often, someone may explain how to do something in a way or manner that makes much more sense to certain people, that may not relate to a tutorial on the same subject written by someone else.

The way I see it is you have to find what interests you, write about it, and get it to the target audience (nothing profound there). It can be specific like Meyer and CSS, or it can be virtually anything or everything like Kottke, I think Kottke’s strategy is much harder in a way because its so random. I keep him in my rss, but I don’t visit him in the same way I do the sites above as I’m primarily reading about specific areas and interests when I am online, sometimes however an article title of his may jump out at me and I will pay him a visit.

Zeldman could easily do a Kottke style as well, would he lose his standards-based readers, probably not, altho he would most likely still talk about it here and there, his apartness is a step in the more “general” direction. But he would be able to get a Kottke type reader base because he is “Zeldman” and people want to hear what kind of muffin he eats for breakfast and will go to that place to buy it if he blogs about it.

So the approach should be something that you are passionate about, something that interests you which in turn will be reflected in your writing and ignite inspiration in others.

and you?

Why do you go where you go? Who is on your daily regular list, and what makes them special?