Region Blog Review

Buzzcut at Blue County in a Red State has in depth coverage of the Lake County income tax’s failure at last night’s Lake County Council meeting.  He spoke with Councilman Ted Bilski, heard news that Will Smith, Jr. was resigning, and was on hand for the “non-vote” on the proposal that killed the Lake County income tax for now.

People forget that elected officials are the taxpayers’ employees.

Professor Eisenstein reminds people to make their opinions heard at today’s Lake County Council meeting.

To keep elected officials under control, i.e. ensuring the people’s interests, especially when it came to taxes, the citizens would directly, i.e face-to-face, confront their neighbors, the elected officials.  It was not uncommon for American citizens to picket and harass the elected official at their homes to demand explanation or a retraction, especially when it came to taxes.  Remember the elected officials are the citizens’ neighbors and essentially their employees.

I’ve made a few minor — but which should end up being significant — changes to the way Indiana Top Sites calculates the rankings.  I’ve switched the ranking system from an average to a ranking based on actual page views during the week to help newer users move up in the rankings based on their weekly performance, instead of using the averaging method which favors longevity over current statistics.

Hope to see more Northwest Indiana blogs on the Indiana Top Sites listings!

Click here to join Indiana Top Sites.

With the 2008 presidential race heating up with the approach of a new year, Northwest Indiana bloggers are taking stands for their favorite candidates.

Hammond Ramblings goes for Mitt Romney, while Porter County Politics has taken a liking to John McCain.

If your Northwest Indiana blog leans a particular way — for Democrat, Republican, or a third party — leave a comment and let the world know who you support.

Steve Dalton warns of reveling in the misfortune of home builders.

Buzzcut at Blue County in a Red State writes about a state website that lets taxpayers know how school systems are paying to educate pupils.

A secret to growing a blog is to post daily.

Readers always love seeing new content and as a blogger, you always want to keep them coming back for more.

As with every rule, there are exceptions — some blogs do well in the search engines with “evergreen” posts — and during holidays, readership always drops off, so it isn’t critical to have a post come out on Christmas Day or New Years Day since there probably won’t be many people expecting content on those days.

Once nice feature of Word Press is the ability to edit the post time stamp.  WordPress’ edit post timestamp allows a blogger to write a post, then publish it at a later time.  While this might not be necessary for all posting, it is helpful when one will be away for vacation or unable to update their blog.

The edit time stamp feature comes in handy on those occasion when I’m inspired to write a lot of posts, but don’t necessarily want to have them come out all at once or when I know that I’m going to have a busy week and won’t have a lot of time to keep the blog updated.  In fact, I wrote this post on Christmas Day but delayed it so that I wouldn’t have to worry about writing a post later in the week.

On news oriented blogs, it is helpful to be able to write several posts at once, but have one come out in the morning and another in the afternoon.

For other blogs where the content isn’t time sensitive, the post timestamp feature is a blessing because it allows a blogger to write a week’s worth of posts, then have them come out once a day.

Leo Babauta of Zen Habits write about he has adopted this strategy as part of his minimalist blogging habit.

In recent months, I’ve reduced the time I spend writing posts for my blog to about half a day’s work, and I spend about an hour or so more every day of the week responding to comments and emails.

Here’s what Lorelle says about using the post timestamp feature:

When you’re blogging, you want to post as consistently as possible. If you’re on a three-days each week schedule, then you want to post on the same days each week. If you’re posting once-per-week, you really want to try to publish a post each day.

Notice I said ‘post each day’ not write each day. Of course you can write a post each day, if your life allows. But how do you take a weekend off? How do you go away for short spurts of vacation? What about getting bogged down with work and not having the time to blog?

Leave it to the developers of WordPress to have a solution for you: Post Timestamp.

It’s been a quiet December in Northwest Indiana’s blogosphere.  Many bloggers seem to have taken some time away for the keyboard to spend quality time with their family and friends.  Of course, there are some who are keeping their blogs current, so we are greatly appreciative of their efforts.

Here’s hoping that Northwest Indiana bloggers bring us some great posts for the little time remaining in the year and all throughout 2008.

A recent guest post by J.D. Roth at Problogger explains how one can take time off from blogging without losing traffic.

Merry Christmas from Region Blog Review!