So. Once upon a time, I used to have a routine. I used to do things in some kind of order. I used to daily read over 170 blogs, plus comment on 20-50, write one major post on my blog per day plus the thought/song of the day plus respond to emails plus get loads of stuff done around the house.
Then, I had the crazy idea of hosting blogs for people. On average since the start of this year, I have created 6-7 blogs every week. There is a huge amount of work involved in the process of doing that. It isn’t just set it up, activate the plugins and away we go.
People tell me which blog template they want to use, and then I customise it for them. I create them a blog header. I answer all their questions – and they are not one or two questions, sometimes it can be up to 50-100 emails back and forth. And even though I have cut and paste answers to a lot of the stuff people ask me now, I haven’t had a chance to organise them in a way I can access them easily to paste to the next question asker.
Life has become a game of catch up – I can rarely plan things because I don’t know what is going to come to me as a surprise in my email. Or I might have a plan – like tomorrow, I would like to write all my thought of the days for March. But then I’ll wake up in the morning, turn on the computer, and someone will be having a crisis or a blog meltdown, and I have to figure it out for them.
Most of the time I love doing it, don’t get me wrong. But there are days when it gets old fast, when I want to politely suggest that people learn to search the net first and then ask me if they can’t find an answer – because that’s what I do. That’s mostly how I solve their problems – I’m not any kind of genius, I just type their problem into Google and see what comes to me as a surprise.
Don’t be offended by that, people that I host blogs for. Like I say most of the time I love helping you out, but you can imagine that if you solved one problem and were handed another by someone else, and that went on all morning when you had planned to write a month’s worth of blog posts and get shiznit done fast, you’d get frustrated too.
The service I offer is somewhat unique. You don’t get that from most other blog hosts. They install WordPress for you, and then you’re on your own – people have to sink or swim on their own. I get people swimming pretty quickly, and then they can always ask me if they have issues.
And let me not get into updating all these blogs. The recent upgrade that happened – 2.3.3 – the other half handles the upgrades and he did one file across all the blogs as soon as it was released, because that was security related. That took an hour.
When he went to do the other four files it took the other half five hours. This is because people had been installing plugins other than what was in the package, and some of them did not react well to 2.3.3, and we had to work out why and then solve that. That’s his spare time – he works full time. So the more blogs I take on, the more time it takes him to upgrade them.
Recently I’ve been given some important volunteer roles in the local community here which will require more of my time and effort. And I need to do housework. And it might be nice to occasionally get some time to write blog posts like I used to.
I feel the need to slow things down.. if we keep going at this rate, we’ll have double the amount of blogs in 2 months.
So I’ve made a difficult decision – I am limiting myself to one blog a week from now on. If you want me to host a blog for you at some time in the future, you’d better pop over to the blog and put in a contact form, so I can give you the dates when I can do it. If you can’t wait till I can do it, I won’t be able to help you. I’m sorry. :(
Apologies for any inconvenience, but I’d like to try and get some routine back. ;) And I’d like to put some posts here more often.
Completely valid and understandable Snos. I am really enjoying the Aussie Forum, lots of great people in general conversation, but also very knowledgeable about WordPress and “how to’s”. I can’t say enough good things about the Forum, and really need to do a post about it, (I often get criticized for writing posts about “blogging” rather than staying in my “niche” and focusing on those posts).
You do great work Snosred, here on your blog as well as creating amazing blogs for others.
Well, that certainly explains a lot. I have been missing your posts. The Thoughts of the day are nice but they are kind of canned and don’t show your personality like your normal posts do. I have to admit I’ve been missing that.
Good for you. Saying enough can be really hard (I know LOL).
Just personally, I think you’re doing an amazing job ;)
I want to thank you again for all you do – you are awesome! And good for you for taking your life back.
Thank you for everything that you have done for me.
And its important that you take control of your time otherwise you will have nothing left for you, and no time with the Other Half either. Great that you realised now and made a plan.
I echo Teeni. The (what I assume are) autoposts are nice when interspersed with “real” posts, but I had noticed there had been quite a lot recently. It’s good to know that you’re going to take a step back and reassess the amount of work you’ve been taking on. You’ve gotta take care of yourself, we’d hate to see you run into the ground!
I was wondering how you find the time to do it. It sounds like you go above and beyond the call of duty and good on you. Good on you for slowing down where necessary too.
(God, I hope mine wasn’t one that pushed you over the edge!)
Actually I. like other people,also wondered how you found the time to do all that you do, because as you said, the service you offer is incredibly personalised and fantastic. I so appreciate it, because otherwise I don’t think I’d ever have moved from blogger because the whole thing would have seemed too daunting. I wondered if maybe you were a geek who just lived for what was on the screen and had no life whatsoever beyond the confines of the internet. Or maybe you were Superwoman.
I’m glad that you’re looking after yourself. I’m thinking about similar time issues in my life at the moment and feeling tired of always feeling tired. I should take a leaf from your book.
I am more than happy with your blog service. I realised that I may have installed a few plugins that I didn’t ask to do but this was out of not thinking so sorry if I caused a problem with my upgrade. I will ask before installing anything else.
As far as us hosted go if we can sort our own issues then we should. I could have done my own WP upgrade and did not realise that it was hard for you to find the time so next time I will do it.
I love reading your blog as much as you hosting my blog so anything I can do to help keep that going is great for me :)
Good luck in getting back to normality.
It was only a matter of time. Great service at a fantastic price, I am so glad I got in early.
So what about 2nd blogs for those that you are already hosting…..
*ducks and runs and hides*
Bwaaaa haaaaaa haaaaaaaa
lol – having not read your blogs before the forum, I now understand why you have thoughts of the day from Walt rather than from Snosred!
As I am a ditherer, I should have my thoughts on moving into a better blog format sometime later in the year, so that should work well, hey?
To qyote a famous line-“just say no”
I did not realize you had gone so far off the deep end! Errr, I mean that you had gotten so busy! Hosting blogs (other than maybe one or two for friends over time) has got to be a tremendous amount of work!
I hope you’re having some fun.