Blogging Pains

Maintaining this Elder Guru site has been a bit grueling over the past several weeks. My few regular visitors to the site, a group I’m guessing consists largely of writers of other aging related sites and people in related lines of work, will notice that it’s been nearly a month since my last post. The first two weeks of that were spent deliberating over a new way to approach Elder Guru.

The problem, in the nearly one year the site has been up, is that this site’s following has repeatedly received increases in numbers only to have that soon followed by a decrease. My suspicion is that readers arrive at the site primarily via a search engine that leads to a post of interest to them, so they then subscribe, only to receive a post or two later that doesn’t interest them, so they stop following.

Another problem is that the content as I’ve been writing it has not been keeping my own interest. While writing about Medicare changes, as an example, specific to a small group of people in limited circumstances might be valuable information to those individuals, it does little to fill my need to write creatively and attract an audience.

To that end I decided to bring a new approach to Elder Guru, one that will provide both relevant information for elders and those who help them, but also deliver more insightful, philosophical, and just plain fun posts to read and write. It is my hope that this new approach will peak both my writing interests, but also reader interests, for my writing interests are not satisfied unless there’s an audience to speak to. For this reason I changed the tag line for the site from “Information on Aging” to “Informed, Insightful Aging” as a means of encompassing wider, more interesting content.

After designing and uploading a new header for the site to embody this change, my site crashed – and crashed again – and again – and again. Being a person more interested and skilled in the written word than I am at writing CSS and HTML to design websites, the process of getting my site fully functioning without errors was difficult and frustrating. With the exception one remaining, minor design difference that can be seen by people using Internet Explorer (it looks fine in Firefox), the site is back up and running with an updated version of WordPress and other updated files. As is the case with any difficulty we face in life, I learned from the experience. Perhaps next time, because these things always happen again, the process will go easier.

So to that end, for those reading, you can expect more varied and consistent writing at Elder Guru.