Hi everyone, Just a quick informal survey. When you read a blog, do you enjoy it covering two unrelated topics or would you rather see the author publish two blogs, one for each topic?
Specifically, what I’m thinking of is that my blog is pretty evenly divided right now between posts about web development and personal posts, and that will only get more noticeable once I’m posting baby photos all the time. Do you think I should spin it off into a work blog and a personal blog, or leave them rolled into one?
Everyone who is reading this, please take a quick second to comment with your preference.
I'm a 30-year-old 
I don’t read your blog when it is about web stuff - or when it had all of those stupid links. Which meant I only read you blog maybe once a week at most when you made some sort of interesting personal post.
December 15th, 2006 at 10:28 am
I have to agree with KT, I don’t like the links, either. I’m glad they’re in a second sidebar now.
I would vote for a separation between themes. Add another link at the top, next to “blog” that says “web tech” or “web production” or something. Keep them on the same site, run them through the same engine, but split them apart.
December 15th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
I like having one blog for both. Maybe you can do different feeds for web or personal or both together?
December 15th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
I check your blog to get tidbits of what is happening with you and Annie. So, I vote on a personal blog b/c that is what I want. However, we shouldn’t forget that it is YOUR blog. Write what YOU want. F everyone else! :-)
December 16th, 2006 at 3:56 am
Why not keep it all in one blog, but keep separate RSS feeds for each category? It does mean that your readers would need to use the feeds to just get the information they want, but it would sure make everybody happy. Like petting a puppy.
December 16th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
My vote is for a single blog, regardless of topic. That’s because A) I’ve never had luck maintaining multiple blogs with any level of consistency and B) I read your blog to read about what’s interesting you lately. Some weeks that’s a bunch of personal posts. Some weeks that’s a bunch of links to John Hodgman interviews. Whatever. If it’s you’re what you’re writing about, it’s what I’m reading. I like it all together.
However … maybe you could come up with some wacky css hack wherein personal posts have one background color, links have another, and web monkeying displays in a third? I have no idea how hard that would be. Probably pretty damn hard. But it would accomplish the content/topic separation nicely.
December 17th, 2006 at 2:18 am
Actually, that’s pretty easy, and it’s not a bad idea. I’ll look into it.
December 17th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Yeah … I actually realized after I posted that comment that you’re already doing the same thing to separate comments. So probably not too tricky.
December 17th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Well, I think 1 blog works well. When we had KM.org, whenever I posted to some of the forums the posts were not read, but when I posted the same post to my blog, I got the opposite.
December 18th, 2006 at 2:33 am
I read your site to read what you are writing, not what you are writing about. I don’t delude myself that everything I write about is entertaining, but my family puts up with the Army stuff to hear the funny or stupid stuff, I presume.
Drupal makes it pretty easy to set up seperate feeds or pages with categories, though the way mine is set up is largely legacy from v4.5, two upgrades ago. I wish it allowed me to disable some; if someone subscribes to the RSS feed for my blog, they will miss out on my image entries, which are not part of the blog as far as Drupal is concerned…
I’m not sure what the point of that was.
Sig
December 30th, 2006 at 12:25 am
a single blog would be simplest, but realize that when you post 20 links with only a sentence of description each, once a week, your blog starts to feel overwhelming. keep that in the linkroll on the sidebar, but make it longer, the length of the blog, or 15-20 links.
as for the division, if you do go for seperate blogs, my suggestion would be to keep them both on the same page, with your sidebar in the middle.
simply put, take your current design and slide the sidebar over into the middle, giving you two columns that are each about 2/3 the size of your current main blog column. left blog is baby/personal posts, right blog is web design/linkroll.
this would probably be as simple as making all your current categories sub-categories of, say, ‘good scott’ and ‘evil scott’, and displaying those two main categories, with appropriate headers, on either side of the mid-bar.
January 3rd, 2007 at 10:24 pm
good/evil headers with appropriate descriptions and commentary…
good scott — i’m scott vandehey, a geeky but largely non-threatening family man from portland oregon. i’ve been married for x years, am a father of one, with two horrible cats and a lovely wife, and this is mostly pictures of same, as well as commentary on life in general as well as my own, and a few links to friends and related blogs which you may enjoy.
evil scott — nay, i’m scott vandehey, a heroic web designer with a college degree and x years of experience! i have created powerful websites like killingmachines and spaceninja and hatelife! kneel before me! view as well links to youtube videos, flickr photos, superior web design, and other things as well! cannot you it resist!!!
January 3rd, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Just thought I’d post that *I* like the links with the one-sentence each. I’d probably still find them in the sidebar, but I’d be sad if they went away. Where else would I find videos of highschoolers playing the Halo theme?
January 9th, 2007 at 1:20 am