Today, Carrie read one of the book reviews I’d linked up to 5 Minutes 4 Books’ “I read it” carnival and commented thus:
“So – do you have two blogs and am I horribly confused? I’m subscribed in Google Reader but I never see these book reviews pop up! What’s with that? Am I blind or something? I’m always surprised when you link up and then I scramble back through and catch up. Is it me?”
No, Carrie, it isn’t you.
It’s a rather nefarious plot of mine to completely befuddle my readers.
Okay. It’s not really that either.
[What follows is the long story–and the short. Feel free to skip ahead to the “short” if you’d rather not read my whole blogging history.]
Long Story
You see, before I switched to using the WordPress blogging platform almost a year ago, I did my entire website by hand. I started with a blank text document in Microsoft’s notepad and ended with a web page, coding the html, css, php, and whatever else I needed as I went.
This was fantastic for building and maintaining my web-authoring skill set, but not so nice for getting daily posts done in a timely manner. So after a year of regular blogging (I’ve had a website since 2001 but have only consistently blogged since April or May 2008), I decided to switch to using WordPress.
I didn’t want to let my skill set decline, though, so I continued building my “static pages” from scratch. I use the “old-fashioned” text-file edited html to create my Bible study, book review, and recipe pages (and use a completely different program to create my photo albums).
Unfortunately, these pages aren’t connected to WordPress’s auto-feeds. I realized this from the outset and tried to solve the problem by continuing my hand-coded RSS feed. The problem with that was that some people were only subscribed to my hand-coded feed–and therefore missed my regular blog posts. It was quite a conundrum. I deleted the hand-coded feed and directed those subscribers over to the blog feed.
But that left me without any way to let my readers know when I posted a new book review, recipe, Bible study, photo album, etc.
Short
In short, because I hand-code my book reviews, they don’t show up on my RSS feed. This is tragic for my readers (and potentially for my blog statistics), but I really want to maintain my html skills.
In order to help readers find the static content I’ve recently added to bekahcubed, I’ve started to post a weekly “Recap”. Recap posts follow a predetermined format, first showcasing any new pages that I’ve added to bekahcubed over the course of the week and then sharing any interesting links I’ve discovered on the web over the same week.
So if you’re looking for new book reviews or recipes (or if you want to see the photographical evidence that I really am real), take a quick scan of the “Recaps” that are posted every Saturday night at 11:59 pm Central time–and click the links to anything that looks interesting.
And there you have it: my nefarious plot to befuddle my readers (and my attempt at a workaround to still engage the most persistent of them all.)
Ah! =D Ok. See? Showed up in my Google Reader and now I know where to look! Ta da!
Thanks.
BTDubs, I joined the dark side. This loads so much better with firefox!
I, too, am glad you answered this question! I was wondering that myself. Kudos to you for your html skills. Html makes my head hurt. :)