At the end of last week Tristan Watson (@tristanWatson) and Alex Horré (@alexHorre) found an old blog post I wrote on this site about my time at Techstars.
Visiting the blog and seeing that it mainly consisted of last.fm top 5 artist of the week post made me think of the picture of a church in Detroit.
It was so sad looking at a site left in ruins, especially the day after listening to Emma Clarke’s (@contentComes1st) Girl Geeks event talk, in which she mentioned the impact of content and the message it sends.
At Audacious (@audaciousHq) the last 11 months or so have been exciting, challenging, scary and thrilling. At times we have been rushed off our feet, other times, to use my co-founder Rachel’s (@audaciousBurns) description, we have felt stuck in “The Waiting Place”. All of which combined have made a great start to our journey. Rachel and I have experienced so much and massively grown as people and as a company, and we have completed masses of research too. In short we had lots to share, and revisiting this blog hit home the fact that I have missed a real opportunity. The best thing about mistakes however is learning from them.
Auto Posting is worse than no update
When I came back to this blog I was horrified that it was just pages and pages of my weekly top 5 music artist on last.fm - Any arguably interesting content was lost, hidden under a mass of “dust”.
That auto posted content wasn’t interesting, it was just filler. Who really cares about the top 5 artists, beyond me. No one that stumbles across this blog via linkedIn, twitter or my dribble profile cares, and those are the three biggest referrers to this site. And so, one by one, I deleted every single post.
I truly believe that nothing good can come from auto posting anything to your blog. The reason is simply that manual posting is a chore, what takes micro-seconds for an app or api to do, would take 10 minutes and that is a good thing. It will make sure that anything I share on this blog is worth the effort (at least in my eyes).
In summary Auto-Posting Sucks:
1. If your blog is abandoned, any previously written posts that had value are buried.
2. Nine times out of ten the auto-posted content has no value to the potential visitors.
3. The lack of effort required removes the “is it worth it?” barrier.
