Tweaks and Changes
Every now and then, I like to make changes to Contains Moderate Peril. Occasionally these will be cosmetic but most of the time they’re functional. For example, I recently stopped subscribing to Soundcloud and moved to a free account. This meant that most of the back catalogue of podcasts in the RSS feed were no longer available to play. I therefore removed the respective links from the podcast page as it’s not very professional to present readers with material that is inaccessible. As this had a knock-on effect on several posts I had written about specific podcasts, such as Brian’s Mordor or Bust Retrospective, I uploaded a few of the shows locally and embedded a suitable player.
While I’m on the subject of podcasting, I wrote recently about how I was sunsetting the Burton & Scrooge show and reinstating the Contains Moderate Peril podcast. Sadly, real life has conspired against me and I’ve had to put this project on the back burner for a while. It’s a shame as I still have ninety minutes of material recorded from 28th March but due to technical problems with Zencastr, the recordings are out of sync. My recent foray on Fiverr to have new logos designed for the show also ended badly. The graphic designer gave me his initial ideas then went walkabout and refused to answer my messages. I got my money back but the work remains incomplete and the project still outstanding.
Despite being a Squarespace customer since August 2015, I’ve only really scratched the surface of the functionality that is on offer. Although I like the template I use for the site, it doesn’t easily allow readers to search and access older material. Hence a few months back I added the related posts footer to each post with four thumbnails of similar content. Unfortunately, there is no global way to do this so I have to manually trawl through the blog and amend every post individually. However, adding this functionality has had a serious impact upon traffic and stats. It would appear that readers will look at related material and find value in it. Therefore, as of today I’ve added a link to a blog archive page at the top of the site. This page features a monthly calendar to check back through all previously published posts.
Finally, May has come round once again but sadly no one has decided to take onboard the Newbie Blogger Initiative, so it would appear that this event has come to an end. I guess there’s no point crying over spilt milk, so it’s time to move on. I still intend to write every day this year and take a great deal of pleasure from doing so. My ambitions to increase the audience for Contains Moderate Peril appear to be working. Monthly viewing stats are up and the readership is growing. Apart from the tweaks and changes discussed, the overall strategy is to keep publishing posts and letting the existing body of work do the rest of the work. Over half the site’s traffic comes from Google searches that find older articles. If that isn’t sufficient motivation to keep writing, then I don’t know what is.
