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Summer Lull, summer reading

Summer has sailed past us. Perhaps for some, Summer was loud, proud, and full of crowd, chock-full of happenings and adventures, crammed with incidence and accomplishments as it splashed and danced across the calendar. Perhaps for others, Summer was more discrete and subdued, with the same-ol’ stuff day in and day out, silently slipping from day to week to month, each looking suspiciously like the last, blending together into a tranquil surface of sameness. Or maybe it wasn’t so simple, and for most of us Summer wore multiple hats as it engaged us, fully filling some aspects of our lives while at the same time letting languish others, as it kept its sails unfurled and filled by the inexorable winds of time.

Yes, I think my Summer had schizophrenic traits, as I was exhaustively busy on several fronts, while others, such as this web site, were left to cool their heels. Days and weeks went by all full of activity, yet no progress was made on AustinMash! It’s not what was planned, it is what happened. And in case it matters, said activity was not of the leisure kind. No, this Summer did not find me out for day-long rides in the hill country, nor lounging on a boat, nor skipping town for exotic locales. Not a single group ride since ROT Rally in early June, not one day at the lake, not one sleepless night banging on the keyboard in all of Summer – how did that happen?

Probably the biggest time-sucking activity was moving to a new house. Wait - the moving part certainly took much longer than I would have thought - but there is an implied mountain of time in that statement, which was spent on a few related activities such as actually finding the house to move into. We were already living in a house we liked, which had a number of appealing features (think 3 car garage and super large yard adjacent to a greenbelt) which was purchased at a very reasonable price. This made our house hunt more difficult, as anything we found had to be measured against our current situation, and our features-for-the-price benchmark was pretty tough to beat. When we did find something that moved us to present an offer, we were typically late by a day or two – already gone! The best houses go on and off the market at lightning speed. Very frustrating. This is how several months of weekends were taken up by nothing but house hunting, followed by weeks of moving, fixing up the old house to sell, and settling into our new place. Yep, between the move and other stuff going on, it was once again proven that today’s most precious commodity is time – demand for it grows unimpeded, and new supply is sharply constrained :)

Normally my life outside AustinMash! is not a subject for this blog, but I include a portion of it here as an illustration of how personal life can interfere with business life, despite your best intentions. As it happens, AustinMash! is not my primary means of financial support. If it was, I would naturally not have the luxury of leaving it alone while other concerns capture my attention.

It has been interesting to see, however, that even with no active promotion on my part, AustinMash! continues to enjoy a steady flow of traffic. This is no doubt due to my previous efforts at SEO and some promotional initiatives with lasting effect, such as participating in forums and other blogs. The bulk of my visitors arrive from a search engine – mostly Google and Yahoo, in that order, and the top search terms used to find my site relate to the ROT Rally and Biker Babes – go figure. After that, the posts related to my experiences with flash-based video and WordPress issues seem to get attention. Oh, I even get visitors from people looking for Gary Hoover info.

Speaking of finding stuff, I’ve discovered a couple of very interesting marketing and promotion related blogs. The first is written by Guy Kawasaki, the original evangelist for Apple. He writes about what he knows, and he seems to know quite a bit about in-the-trenches marketing, software companies in general, and startups in particular. He is also relatively new to blogging, and is not shy about sharing his discoveries with the rest of us. Plus, his writing is just cool. Check out, just for starters, The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog and The Art of Distribution .

Another blog I just discovered (through Guy’s RSS feed, actually) is Pronet Advertising which also has a wealth of practical advice. For example, in the How to get on the digg homepage post, I learned there is a new way to code the digg button on my blog, that allows readers to digg an already submitted story directly from the post, and which I will be implementing shortly.

Hmm, there are enhancements to the digg process that I was unaware of. Boy, you take your eye off the game for a moment, and all of a sudden the rules are changed (what - no celebrating with props anymore?) and it’s a whole new thing out there. Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but the point remains valid - the blogoshere is still young and evolving, and it pays to keep up.