Free Blogging Advice – Harmonia Philosophica

Blogging after Death: A tutorial for post-mortem blogging

Overview

Writing your thoughts about a subject you like is in the core of blogging. From small blogs before some decades, blogging to-day stands strong and can be found everywhere, covering a multitude of topics from quantum physics and philosophy to fashion and cars.

But one day you will inevitably die.

Should that mean that you stop your favorite blogging?

Of course not! Blogging never stops!

There is a way to keep blogging from beyond death. And it is fairly simple: All you have to do is schedule future posts. However, some details should be kept under control if you wish this post-mortem blogging to happen successfully. This post aims at addressing those details to help you sustain your blog well after your life has ended.

Scheduling posts

First thing is first: The very first thing you should do is schedule future posts. In order to do that, all you have to do is create new posts and set the publishing date in the future. All major blogging platforms support scheduling posts in the future, however with some slight differences.

For example, WordPress allows future posts up until the year 9999.

You can see below some future posts for Harmonia Philosophica.

On the other hand, Blogger allows future posts without the 10,000 AD limit, as you can see below in a snapshot of future posts of the sister-site HarmoniaPhilosophica.eu.

Setting the date well into the future, will allow you to continue blogging even after your body has left this world. Yet, there are some things to keep in mind when doing so.

Scheduling interval

First, try to schedule your posts properly. One post every year is a logical thing to do, yet you will not reach too far into the future. If you schedule your posts les frequently, let’s say once every decade, you might reach further into the future yet you will lose the traction with your readers. There is also the possibility to just schedule posts at random intervals, only to have something to publish into the future without worrying too much about details like who will read you and when. And indeed, if you are dead, who cares?

I personally chose the latter method and I have posts spanning from some decades into the future to posts well beyond 3000 AD. (IF WordPress and Blogger will still exist up to then…)

Manage content

A second thing to take into account is the content of your posts. Be aware that posting for current news and affairs is not something you should be doing when posting post-mortem. Any post you schedule for the future should be as void as possible from content that is strongly related to the current era and the current state of affairs. Anyone reading your blog at 2500 AD will not care about the current political news or the current sports news. Try to posts about subjects that will be of interest regardless of when they are read.

For example, you can chose to make philosophical comments that can be of interest in any epoch they are read, or write humoristic posts that may make someone laugh even after 1,000 years.

Administrative Details…

Another important point is the following: Do not forget of any administrative details that could have a devastating effect on the ability of your blog to operate in the future without you being around here to cater for it. For example, any add-ins that you have installed and which need recurrent payments every year to stay active will not operate after you are gone.

I strongly suggest you uninstall anything that does not add much value to your blog anyway. Having a simple site without clutter is the basis for a modern blog. Even if you are not into post-mortem blogging, following this principle is still applicable to your blog. In any case, your readers read you because of your content, not because of any fancy buttons and tools they see in the sidebar of your site.

If you have been paying for a domain that your site uses, it is most probable that in the future this domain will not work since there will be no one paying for it. So try to adjust your internal links (links from posts to other posts or pages within the blog itself) so that they will still work after the domain you use if no longer available.

The end is not the end…

So there you are. You are ready to write posts beyond the grave. But remember: Writing after death does not make you a good writer. You still need to take care and write good posts. Put your soul into them, as you do now.

Do not ever forget that people read you only because you have something to say. Writing without truly loving what you write will only turn you dead, long before you actually die…

Free Blogging Advice (FBA) – Episode 5: Seek just one follower… Yourself!

Free Blogging Advice: Writing is hard. And easy. The goal of the Free Blogging Advice (FBA) series of short articles is to provide some free advice on… blogging! All you have to add is some time and effort. And love. Lots of love.

FBA Episodes

We all seek recognition. This is indeed one of our small human traits that it is difficult to get rid of. But we must get rid of it, if we are to grow as writers (and as humans).

The quest for recognition can lead the writer to end up writing for others, thus polluting his own original thoughts with the thoughts he/she believes others want to read. One never had followers, it is you that will be following your followers at the end…

One should focus on the only thing that is important for a writer/ blogger: To write original content.

One follower should suffice: You!

Write from your heart and just ask yourself: would you be following… You? If the answer is yes, then seek nothing more. You already have the best recognition you will ever need.

And sure, recognition by others may also come afterwards. But as a side effect and only because others will see and feel that you are not writing what they need to listen, but because they will read things only you could ever tell them.

Let the writer rise from within.

Ignore your readers.

Or else they will kill the writer you could be.

And within the millions of followers you will never listen to the desperate agony of your dying self…

Free Blogging Advice (FBA) – Episode 4: From whom are you writing?

FBA Episodes

There comes a time where any blogger wonders…

“Why am I doing this?”

This question can arise more than once in the beginning of your blogging endeavor and it will also come up later in time after you have established yourself as a known blogger. (or I would better say it SHOULD come up again after you have succeeded as a blogger – more on that later on)

Not being able to answer that simple question usually ends up in full demotivation and eventually to the end of your dream to become a blogger and share your ideas with the world.

But is there a right answer for that question?

Truth be told, there is not.

But there are many wrong ones.

Aristotle once very intuitively said that “the question contains the answer”…

This couldn’t be more applicable here.

Some say they are blogging for their followers…

That is so nice. Except that if you are writing for the ones who read you, then you will inevitably become just a puppet belonging fully to them. A writer does not care about who reads him. He (or she) simply writes whatever is in his head just… because! Creativity is a deeply irrational urge, not a calculative urge to gain more followers or retain the ones you have. Van Gogh only sold one painting while he was alive.

Some say that they are blogging to share knowledge…

Some say they are blogging because of other reasons…

That is the great trap though. That you need a reason to blog.

If blogging does not come from deep inside you, there is no reason you should be doing it in the first place. If you need a reason to blog, then you should stop right now. Because the moment that reason seizes to exist, that will be the moment when everything will look useless and futile. And a true writer never sees his (or her) work as futile or useless! Pure creation is never done under special conditions or within specific context. It just flows out from you.

Search within you.

Imagine yourself after many years blogging.

Having written thousands of posts.

With zero followers.

Zero page views.

Will you be happy?

Will you feel full?

Only you can answer that.

And when you answer this question you will understand.

Why everyone asking “Whom am I writing for?” is simply trying to find a reason not to…

Free Blogging Advice: Embrace imperfection!

FBA Episodes

One of the things bloggers find difficult to cope with, is the fact that their site is not perfect.

Most of us are perfectionists, especially when it comes to the child of our creativity. Our site should be flawless, full of perfect articles, with embedded perfect pictures, saying perfect things.

The truth is much more different than that though.

Every human is imperfect. We constantly change and grow, we learn and forget, we are literally a new person every passing second as Harmonia Philosophica has explained more than once in various philosophical contexts.

How do you expect your blog to be perfect?

Being perfect was never the goal in the first place.

The goal is to expose your thoughts to the cosmos. To let out your thoughts and give others the opportunity to get to know them. Perhaps even reply back and establish a community wandering about the same things.

A blog is a window that exposes your soul to the world.

Trying to believe that what others see through that window needs to be perfect is simply a denial of your very nature. No matter how much you try to make things perfect, there will always be things that could be done better, small spelling mistakes, broken links or missing images.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that you must not do your best to have a perfect site. I am just emphasizing the fact that if this is the first and only thing you care about you will indeed have a perfect unpublished site…

Blogging is about letting go.

Blogging is about having fun.

And who can have fun while trying to play everything to perfection?

Experiment!

Write!

Love what you do!

Your blog will ALWAYS be imperfect!

That is what makes is so perfect…

Free Blogging Advice (FBA) – Episode 3: Develop your story.

FBA Episodes

Now that we have decided to start writing (see previous episodes), we need to develop the story of our site.

Story: The narrative that describes the intent of your blog. The story will explain to the visitor why he or she is here, what they should expect to read and what the blog will offer them.

You need to publish the story in your About page. In that way you will establish the identity of your site for anyone to see.

But what should a story look like? First of all it needs to be simple. If you do not have it clear in your head then your readers will be confused as well (and most probably will not come back to you site).

Secondly, it needs to be emotional. Emotions is what drive the world around and you need to invest in the emotions of your readers to capture their interest.

Last but not least, your story needs to be a… story! What I mean by this is that you need to convey your message to your readers through an actual story, i.e. an anecdote, a tale that will have a hero, a problem that her or she needs to overcome, a climax and a resolution. This is easier said than done. But you need the story element in order to reach to your readers with a compelling and attractive way. Just stating what your site is about is not enough. If you just just wrote down the goal of your site like a corporate statement then it would look like a… corporate statement. You need more than that to engage with the visitor of your blog.

Stories captivated us when we were children. And still do. Everyone likes a good story. It is more probable to remember something that you heard in a story than something you just read.

As an example you can read the story of Harmonia Philosophica here. It is a short one, as a story for a site must be. And it tries to convey the message of this site, i.e. that being irrational and non-thinking is the best way to think.

Whether you like it or not is another story…

To be continued…