Nothing Gold Can Stay

In life, it's best to go all in or not go at all.

With the summer coming to an end, and classes scarily approaching, I realize that this blog cannot go on. I don't have the time, energy, or motivation to keep serving the VD, and I doubt Miller does either.

It's been fun cooking up posts for you the last twelve-odd weeks. I recommend a blog to anyone with nothing to do.

With my last post, I want to go through some things I've learned this summer about the blogosphere. Think of it as my honors thesis. I've been doing research for the summer, and here are the results:

Keep it short: Long articles are for print. The Internet is all about speed, and blog posts should be simple and to the point. Ideally, a blog should have a continued button, so that you can have the first few paragraphs on the main page, and the remainder somewhere else. I couldn't ever figure out how to do this on blogger.

Break it Down: If you're post is going to be long, as I suspect this will be, break it down into short sections. That way, readers can easily pick and choose what they want to read.

Bored? Start a Blog:

Since I used a ton of excel this summer for my job, I decided to bust out some graphs. The graphs show that as my research got more interesting, the blog got appreciably worse. It was almost exactly inversely proportional. In the beginning of the summer, when I didn't have much to do at work, I would think about the blog all day. That way, when I got back to my dorm at night, I could storm through 2-3 posts a night. By the end of the summer though, my job got interesting, and the VD suffered. The big spike in the graph to the right is July 3-5, the greatest stretch this blog ever had.

Blogger--easy, but limiting: I don't know html, java, or any computer languages, but I was able to make a website for free. That's pretty cool, and it's thanks to sites like blogger. It was sometimes very difficult to format posts (like the graphs above), but for simple layout, blogger is surprisingly smooth.

Weekly Features are the way to go: Hopefully you didn't realize, but some weeks I'd have 2-3 "Vegan Dessert Questions of the Week" and some weeks I'd have none. Same is true with the "Random YouTube Video of the Day." By having this quasi regular features, it gives you a good cop-out when you can't find anything to write about.

Deadspin.com is Amazing: Many of my readers might not have heard of deadspin.com, but it is the premier sports blog on the Internet. Having had a blog for the summer, I can now fully appreciate the greatness of Will Leitch, the editor of the site. He is officially the king of sarcasm.

Don't get too Personal: My worst posts came when I was upset and felt like ranting. I had no one to complain to, so I complained to myself, via the Vegan Dessert. These posts should never have actually been published.

Think before you write: Because it's so simple to write a post, I'd often put something up that I didn't completely believe in. I'd try to get a post up too quickly, and realize hours after it was published that it didn't make sense or I didn't really believe what I had said. Unlike writers for print, bloggers don't unnecessarily have time to think about their posts between writing and publishing. The two can be simultaneous. This can lead to some poorly thought out posts.

Google Images is the Best, True That, Double True: By taking images from Google, our readership at least tripled. Not too many people search "Vegan Dessert" on search engines, but lots look for images of David Beckham, Kobayashi, or Jessica Biel. By having such photos on our site, we got a lot of inadvertent traffic. I like to believe that some of these accidental visitors actually stayed on the site and read some posts. The photo below got us the most traffic. There were a couple days when we got close to 1000 hits thanks to the David Beckham photo.

Wait a second. Never mind. I just went to look for the David Beckham photo on our site, and it's not even there any more. It looks like a lot of the photos that we borrowed are now no longer up. Maybe Google images isn't the way to go after all.

Vegan Dessert? You may have noticed that this blog has absolutely nothing to do with Vegan Dessert, and I just use it for metaphors every once in a while. The main flaw with this blog was that it had no focus. At times it focused on sports, other times politics, other times music. Because of this, there was no way we'd generate a large, loyal audience. No one knew what to expect when coming to the VD. This made it more fun to write, but made readers more skeptical to keep on visiting.

**There will be one more post in mid-September, when Kanye's new CD comes out.**

I hope you've enjoyed the VD. It's been fun.

I'll leave you with the official song/music video of the Vegan Dessert: