Managing Multiple Blogs

Flutterby asked how I managed multiple blogs and a number of other folks have commented about me having such a network of places. And these are not sites that simply mirror each other. Yes, sometimes they do but often you’ll find unique content on each one.

Having multiple blogs is not something I’d suggest to most people. It can often be confusing and bothersome as a body tries to juggle multiple audiences, logins, names, storylines and spaces.

The how and why I do it is mostly because my mind is very much compartmentalized. My relationship with my wife intersects with my spirituality but not necessarily in discussing how mine differs from yours. I often get ideas from reading you all, but sometimes those ideas are not germane to what I have going on in my own life story. Plus I occasionally get diarrhea of the keyboard and have several things to say at once. Despite the chaos that is my life, I do try to keep the assorted themes and storylines straight and organized.

I’m not sitting in front of a computer most of the day. In fact I’m all over the place. And a lot of that time is spent waiting. With my PDA, I can conveniently blog whenever I want with a minimum of disruption to my private/professional life. It’s more portable that a notebook, lighter and less disruptive. Once I got the hang of the thumb pad, I was off and running.

Mentally, I do have a map of what goes where as far as content. The R&R Blogger site is the darling of the biggest share of my readers because it has been around the longest and has the complete archives and it’s where everyone links to. So this is the “mainstream” blog where popular content goes to keep readers generally informed of my storylines. R&R WordPress actually gets more content and I’m trying to steer more people in that direction. I’m not forcing anyone to change their links if they don’t want, and you can still keep up for the time being. I get that it is more convenient for you Blogger bloggers to comment in a like-minded site. Having a blogger account enables me to comment to most of you!

But R&R WordPress is where the edgiest stuff is going. It gets updated sooner, more often and with more gritty content. Notice how much longer that blogroll is in WordPress? It’s just oodles easier to manage. And if I wanted, I could categorize the blogroll same as my posts.

Unsolicited Advice was always intended to support R&R through expanding the general knowledge base. Whether from academia, literature, periodicals, other blogs and websites, this was supposed to be more cerebral content. It was also intended to be very generic and not tied very closely to me or my story. At various times, I’ve used R&R and UA in tandem to explore and extend various topics. R&R would be where I would talk about whatever issue I might be facing personally while UA would be a much more detached treatment of the same subject. I suppose one could say R&R was my heart and UA was my head.

UA WordPress was a marked departure. I originally started it out of frustration with Blogger, which continues to be a bothersome mess. However, it has been a place where I could give extended treatment to various subjects. Running a series takes energy and space, and it’s nice not having to clutter up a space with stuff that may not be related. So having multiple blogs has enabled me to be slightly kinder to my readers.

If you’re trying to run multiple blogs, I think it’s important to have a clear vision for each one. If you’re running two blogs together off the same profile, it’s okay if they overlap and support each other. Go ahead and swap links back and forth. I do that all the time. That would be a tandem model of multiple blogging. Your stuff is in the same closet but is on different shelves. You could use these blogs to support one another by supporting 2 or more related discussions at the same time. Again, this is a bit of a juggling act.

If you want totally separate blogs and keep entirely separate content (and audiences) I recommend having them each parked in different places. WordPress makes this pretty easy, but having another one in Typepad or some other hosting place will help keep things tidy. For instance if you have a family blog read by your parents and another blog devoted to raunchy sex kinks, you might want to keep them separate. Having them hosted by different services will lessen the dangers of one audience stumbling into the wrong blog because you stupidly left a comment under the wrong blog with the wrong identity. With blogger, this is as easy to do as gravity unless you pay close attention and even in WordPress two worlds can collide with frightening ease. You want each universe to be separate and uncontaminated by the other which means different names, different locations, and different identities.

Keeping only one blog can be fraught with its own pitfalls when a less public but more devilish persona intersects with the puritanical one we’d like to present. For instance I’m not a big reader of Mommy Blogs, but when I do get a hankering for a hot momma, I go visit Katie Fleck. Very much the über mom with bunches of kids, projects and activities all the time. Very prim, very proper, intelligent and very irresistibly cute (her sister’s not bad either). When she said something about being an expert shoe polisher, I suggested she might keep various leather items polished as found on bootedup.com. I posted the comment and then saw the one right above mine…

HI KATIE’S DAD!

Your daughter is blogrolled somewhere between “A Kinky Woman’s Guide to the Universe” and “The Search for the Perfect Ass” on the WordPress blog. Just so you know.

D.