A number of bloggers are taking breaks right now, including one of my favorite literary blogs, Beatrice. I plan to take a short year-end break from Wednesday to Sunday. Library bloggers, take note: it’s good practice to announce a break, so that new readers know you haven’t give up on the blog but are just restoking the engines. The last time I gave a talk about library blogs, I had to knock several from my list that hadn’t been updated in several weeks even though I was sure they were just taking a semester break.
In my case, except for the break, this is fertile blogging time: the semester won’t start for a month, I’m caught up at work, and the holiday mania has subsided. It’s fertile time for reading blogs, for that matter, and remembering how much I enjoy MetaGrrl, how interesting Crooked Timber is, and so forth.
I like to do end-of-year lists, so expect a few of them before the semester absorbs me in late January. That sense of summary and conclusion, the wrapping-it-all-up, the listiness of it all: it’s fun, it’s good intellectual exercise, and people love lists. I’ll be doing several “fave” lists in a few days, probably here but perhaps on ALA TechSource, depending on where they fit.
To get me started, here’s my top-ten list of top-ten things I’m doing during my semester break, not in any particular order:
1. Upgrading to Movable Type 2.0 (verrrrrrrry carefully) and then spiffing up the FRL theme (don’t forget the classic thread, am I a free-range chicken or a cow?)
2. Stocking the house with diet-friendly food. Oh… right… and cleansing the house of diet-unfriendly food. I always forget that part. The celery stick does not cancel out the cookie.
3. Wading into the overfull storage room and throwing out anything I haven’t used or looked at in the last two moves. I am tired of wiggling in there sideways. I’ll take pictures of some of my discoveries. (Anyone interested in seeing my Air Force mess dress blouse? So cute, with tiny buttons and ruffles…)
4. Purging my closet of those late-1990s power suits and dresses I’ll never wear again (I’d have to grease my hips with Vaseline to get into some of those tiny, narrow skirts–and then you’d have to use the Jaws of Life to get me out of the suits)
5. Getting my taxes together simply to hear the voice of praise and amazement from my accountant (and also because if I don’t do it now I’ll end up squeezing this into the worst possible time of my last full semester)
6. Installing 8,000 small programs on my new Dell Latitude D410 laptop and setting up its docking station with my monitor to experiment with the One Machine approach (with an old laptop as emergency backup)
7. Replacing my mouse, which is covered with a thin layer of grey grunge… I put my hand on that thing all day? Eeeeeew!
8. Mucking out the stable, that is, tidying up my tiny, adorable garden office that has been a mess for most of the year (I’ll provide pictures when it’s ready)
9. Reading everything for my lit class–a good list in itself
10. Blogging about all of this, even if it’s just a wee bit of my life, just for the sheer pleasure of sharing
Posted on this day, other years:
I don’t know. I don’t buy your reasoning about it being good practice to announce a break. First, I’m sure that you, at times, have taken a 5 day break from blogging, like your doing Wed – Sun, (I can’t prove this – no time to look through your entire archive) without informing your audience. So, should one do it only during holiday season, when readership in the blogging community is much lower than usual? If anything I would announce a break when most people readership would be high…during non-typical non-blogging times, say the beginning of the school year.
Second, this is exactly why aggregators are great. If someone doesn’t update their blog, I am assured that when they do, I’ll know about it. Sure, aggregators break sometimes., but most of the time, they don’t drop posts (especially desktop readers) and are the best indicators that someone has taken a break from blogging.
Many in the library blogging community don’t blog for weeks at a time. No need to bore readers with a step by step explanation as to when posts will be made and when posts won’t. Think of the opposite (not the best example, but I’m going with it): Today, I will post 4 entries; tomorrow, I’ll post 2, etc. Doesn’t make sense, right?
I used to tell readers when I was going on a long break (last weeks post notwithstanding, because I was blogging at my company corporate blog – that’s important, I think), but it seemed annoying after a while, both to me and my readers.
Aggregators are a great “Do Not Disturb” sign on the life of a blogger who wants to take a break. When I become available for blogging, I’ll post and the sign outside my door will be taken off. Seems reasonable enough.
(When I preview this comment, my paragraphs aren’t broken up, so it doesn’t look like I have any breaks in my thought processes – Not sure if this will come up in what gets posted on the blog)
My failure to announce prolonged pauses between posts does not equal an argument in its favor. I haven’t been doing very well on my blog this fall and I feel it, so I’m being more intentional. I like my blog and my readers, and I want to stay engaged with them even when the message is “I’m not around.”
You haven’t persuaded me that an aggregator stands in for expecting to read something that isn’t there. My aggregator doesn’t know the difference between a break, a broken blog, or a moved RSS feed, and in fact, I just did some Bloglines cleanup and found a few “hey, I’ve moved” messages. My aggregator also can’t plant the suggestion to visit the blog again in a week or two.
You also aren’t convincing me that your readers really were annoyed. The only person who seems to be bugged by these notices, aside from you, is Walt.
I feel that the more I acknowledge the reader on the other end, the better my blog is. That includes exception-handling, which is what a break announcement is all about. Grammar, punctuation, fact-checking, and not posting in haste and regretting in leisure: these too all play a role as well.
I’m a terrible blogger. Please accept my resignation.