Treat me as cow, I’ll treat you as bull(shit)

I used to be avid reader of Sramana’s blog but of late there seems to be an ostentatious drive to increase the hit count for the website. I feel being milked and exploited daily.

These days the blog primarily contains interviews of entrepreneurs/CEOs. Every interview is split in 6-10 parts and posted on daily basis for 6-10 days. Reader do like to read about experiences of entrepreneurs/CEOs and their stories but if I am interested in some interview I want to read it all today, in fact Now. If you are acting as a platform to give right diet to readers then give them the total diet when they want to gorge it and not just show the bait and lure her to increase your site count by coming everyday to you. This might work for soap operas but definitely not for blog. There are few good posts too on the blog but they seem to be drowned in flood of interview parts.

To make the things worse, there is glaring struggle to commoditize this blog. A couple of people have been recruited and been asked to do interviews. So multiple people posting multiple parts of multiple interviews on any given day. This seems like mess to me. There seem to be a race amongst the interns to churn out more content than others on daily basis so it’s quantity replacing quality (as applies to any commodity). Dear Sramana, A blog is one’s signature but you made it a rubber stamp and gave it to other people to use it and monetize for you.

No doubt that most of the articles doesn't have even a single comment. Don’t milk readers. You treat her as cow she’ll treat you as bull(shit).

Bye dear. You just lost me.

101 blog templates that are not for me

As soon as I started writing blog I realised that blog presentation must be reader friendly. No doubt, content of blog is the king but along with content if blog is presentable enough to read then it’s like you can have your cake and eat it too. By presentable blog I mean that blog should not be very flashy, must have good font and colour combination, and soothing background settings. (I am not writing about how to make blog presentable so I won’t delve further into it. Google already shows millions of site on this topic). So to make my blog presentable I started looking for a suitable template.

Google nearly have answer to all my queries (or at least direct me to the right answer). ‘Blog template’ search gave me millions of results back. I scanned through 8-10 websites to find the template I was looking for but all the templates that I saw were like commodity/goods and presented no customisation to me. The blog template that I want should be according to my needs and not according to anyone else’s whims and fancies. I feel blog template is highly subjective to individual’s needs and desires. You just can’t pick and use some flowery/sunset/green/historical/random-coloured template for your blog. If you are serious blogger then you blog is your signature and you can’t design your signature on someone else’s wish. So I discarded hundreds of templates as they didn't suit my style. So here comes this idea.

Why can’t we make a web based 'blog template creator' application. Any blog template basically is some flavour or permutation of font, colour, columns, boxes, background and image (please point out in case I missed something). Application will give people freedom to arrange these flavours according to their wish. Seems like a very simple thing but this can lead to customer delight and give people's blog a unique identity. Currently some people are charging 100s of dollars just to make a blog template that suits your persona. Once this 'blog template creator' application is launched people will throng to try it out. This application will be amongst the best example of tailor made service given to customer.

Image: wordle