Search blogs

I just read one of those year-end wrapup posts in this case focused on blogging trends in 2018. If you are interested, I provide the link. It was my impression that this survey focused on mostly paid bloggers and the “trends” and data were not broken down by the likely audience. I would guess this makes a big difference.

I did learn a couple of things. Bloggers who are still active seem to be moving to longer posts and they assume that readers want long form content. I guess services such as Twitter and Facebook take care of the need for comments.

One of questions included in the survey was whether or not a blogger updated and reposted posts. Many did and the survey seemed to indicate that these bloggers associated this practice with higher readership. I must admit I had not every considered doing this. I probably should.

Between my two blogs, Learning Aloud and Blurts, I have generated 3370 posts since 2002. That is a great deal of content and I assume some posts offer useful information over time. Since blogs quickly push posts off the front page, causal visitors and probably most visitors have no idea that relevant information may be available. Maybe I should offer a repost of the week or something similar.

One technique for finding old content of interest makes use of tags. I suppose I should use more tags, but I do use some. When a post contains a tag at the bottom of a post, selecting that tag will bring up older posts that have the same tag. Follow up with tags if a topic interests you.

Traditional search within a browser is not particularly useful because it searches only the content that appears on the active page. My blogs reveal 5 posts per page.

You can use Google custom search to make all of your content available to readers. If you look in the margins of my blogs, you will see a box for custom search. If you think I might have offered a comment on a specific educational topic, give custom search a try.