Hey Everyone,

So here it is - my first HUNT!

All week I’ll be looking for the best advice on this topic and I’ll update this post as I get new information. You are also invited to post your thoughts in the comments.

The Problem
Many bloggers have faced this issue. You start a blog to focus on a few topics in a general field or industry, but sometimes you feel the urge / need / responsibility to write something out of the ordinary. It might be due to a necessity, or just for fun. You might need to vent, or you might be excited about some personal accomplishment. In any case, you don’t want to annoy your readers who regularly visit for the specific topics you introduced at the start. In fact, let’s say you don’t only want to write these topics once in a while, but you always want to write on different issues. So is it more advantageous to have more blogs to cover the different areas, or should you keep it all on one blog? If so, how?

Update:

Funny…

Source: Speed Bump by David Coverly

Update:

Some good advice from my thread at Cre8asiteForums about this question:

EGOL:

“I think that a person might gauge their ability to depart from their theme by the types of comments that people post on those departing posts. If you get no comments then those posts are stinking up your blog. If you get lots of nice comments and questions then you can get away with it… To be safe you should always allow just a few lines of these posts to display on the front page of your blog…. I don’t want to scroll and scroll and scroll to get past the pictures of a bloggers pets.”

Respree:

“I tend to gravitate toward insightful, thought-provoking styles of writing that I can relate to… Many times, an interesting personal story about a certain situation hits home for me and makes me connect with the author in ways a very clinical, impersonal style cannot… I see nothing wrong with the ocassional vent, but if the blog or site is riddled with them, I find I’m not attracted to negativity.”

Ron Carnell:

“[Do] you want to think of your blog as a series of short stories, related perhaps but otherwise distinct, or whether your blog is going to be a novel? A novel … has to offer a balance of sorts because action gets pretty boring unless carefully woven with less exciting fare… It’s called pacing and it’s often one of the hardest things for a writer to master. In my opinion, yes, a blogger should definitely mix it up a bit. It shouldn’t be haphazard or spontaneous, though. It should be very carefully planned.”

Miriam (SEOIgloo):

“If the blog is a business blog (for example, dealing mainly with SEO, or design) why not have a personal/creative category in addition to your technical categories? If you keep the category name broad enough, you could put pretty much anything in it that didn’t fit in your tech categories. We did this on our blog. We have a section called Inside the Igloo where I’ve posted stuff like news about us, awards, etc. “

Kim Krause Berg (cre8pc):

“I go off topic too. I have a category called “When I Have the Talking Stick”, which is a Native American custom of whoever has the “talking stick”, is allowed to speak about anything they wish to. I didn’t start this until I had developed a following however and established a rapport with my readers. They wanted to hear more from me and my life and responded with positive feedback to my off topic posts.

Update:

And more good advice from my thread at Tazzu:

Ed C.:

“I would leave it all on one blog, as we do here on Tazzu. That way, it’s all in one area, from a Rant, Rave, Promotion of a site, or new business idea - it’s all in one place.”

Jer (Infiniti):

“Think of the bifurcation similarly to how we contrast LinkedIn and Facebook (or MySpace is probably more accurate). Not in terms of functionality but in terms of market and presentation… To split beyond that would be to over-categorize, to divide-and-fail, and to ask the impossible really. Think about how hard it is just to categorize posts. At least they can be cross-categorized.”

Robert Ballantyne:

“It is part of the strength of a blog that all material is presented chronologically. It is also a weakness because parallel streams of topics — like other columns in a newspaper — are not really possible. In that case, I’d recommend running parallel blogs. They could even be at the same web site and have cross links. Another advantage of running separate blogs is you may find that one really finds a niche and becomes hugely popular. It could catch fire without overwhelming its more thoughtful and quiet sibling. “

Also check the comments for great advice from Vivien, Jeanette, and Raul.

Hi Everyone,

The Tazzu Wordpress Camp on Wednesday was a great event, and I’ll be discussing it in detail in a day or two. However I just wanted to post a few thoughts that I had during and after the event.

I thought it was kind of ironic that originally WordPress had been built as a blogging platform, and the majority of WP users only know it from that angle. However, I have been using WP for the last two or more years for everything but blogging. I’ve been using it to design websites, make catalogues, create mashups, and I’m currently planning a WPMu Social Network (God help me if BuddyPress doesn’t come out soon!).

I think WP is supreme for blogging, but my experience highlights the uniqueness of WP as a CMS application. There are many content management systems out there. I’ve used Microsoft CMS, Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress. I found WP to be quick to set up, easy to manipulate, and very flexible depending upon the developer’s goals. Some of the larger applications have more powerful engines that can do great things out of the box. However I think WP is so flexible and light-weight that using it has been irresistable for me.

The point of this post is to hint at the future. Over the next two years, I know WP and WPMu will start competing more head-on with the mainstream solutions out there. However, I wonder, will the concerns of the blogging community outweight the concerns of CMS developers who use WP? To whom will Automattic and the WP community give preference? At some point, for the community and for the application core, there is a fork in the road. Both paths leading out from there are great and worthy, but they are different and will be interesting to different types of audiences.

What I’d like to see is the WordPress core product splitting into two editions: WP for Blogs, and WP CMS. This way, we could grow out of the “posts” and “blogroll” terminology, and start using more website/content specific terminology. We could allow developers to not only custom sites for clients, but also custom dashboards and admin panels.  I know Matt Mullenweg hinted at his interest in the growing use of WP as a CMS during the recent WordCamp in Dallas (video), but how serious are they about it? I would love to see “WordPress Suite 2009″ of unique products, some of which are already available, each with its own focus: BBPress (forum), BuddyPress (social network), WordPress Mu (multiple blog hosting), WP CMS (websites & mashups), and the original WP Basic (blogs). I think it would help expand the WordPress brand, and provide unique solutions for all types of content developers and managers.

stay in high spirits

-k.s.