metablogging

It’s T minus 1,049 days, and you’re overdue for a trial run. Here’s your plan:

- Fly to Minneapolis to see your dear friends Erik and Ann get married.

- Sleep for a few nights in Erik’s dad’s sailboat. Don’t worry, you shouldn’t need a bag. How cold can it be during mid-May in southeast Minnesota?

- Take a three-day kayak trip down the Mississippi. Camp wherever you can find a spot.

- Take a few days off while staying with your friend Andy in Red Wing. Andy’s the one who sometimes calls you to announce that he’s just purchased a ten-pound cube of dangerously potent cheese. You’ll enjoy hanging out with Andy.

- Get Andy to drive you to Waterloo, Iowa, then walk from there to Grinnell, Iowa, where you went to college. That’s 68 miles — five days, at a nice, easy 14 miles a day. After all, Iowa’s flat as a pancake, right? Hey, you lived there for five years. Of course it is. Shouldn’t be a problem. So don’t bother swinging by the REI or anything. You won’t need expensive socks for this light jaunt.

- Keep a journal. When you get back, use the notes to keep a running set of blog posts in more-or-less real-time, three weeks after the actual events.

• what people say about your plan
• your estimates of travel speed
• your budget methods
• your early research on equipment
• seasonal weather along your route and others’
• your interviews with other walkers, past and present
• your observations about backpacking culture
• your first warm-up walk, in Iowa next month
• how similar trips (see the left-hand links) are going right and wrong

Stay loose, though. You’re sure other things will come up.

Hey, you’ve been around the block. You’ve launched a blog or two. But you haven’t yet decided what sort of update schedule to use for the blog you’re writing about your trip. In the past, you’ve found two ways to fight blogger’s block:

1. post in accordance with harshly self-enforced deadlines (i.e. Tuesday and Thursday)
2. post with no standards at all (i.e. in clumps, in droughts, whenever you please)

Option 1 is obviously more reader-friendly. But your goal at this point is more to collect content than to collect readers. For now, go with option 2.

So: for the moment, you’ll be posting sporadically, as you think of things to say. In general, though, if people want to visit your site once a week, that’ll probably keep them from missing much.

If your readers are determined to keep up with every post despite this irregular schedule, suggest that they subscribe to your blog’s feed using Google Reader or Bloglines. Or add have them add you to their Google homepages. These free programs don’t need to be downloaded, because they’re actually just pages on the Web itself. Using one of them to subscribe to a feed is like signing up for TiVo — they’ll grab your posts as they shoot past, keep them for your readers and keep track of which ones they’ve read.

If any of your readers are interested in figuring this out (they should! once they do, they can use the same programs to keep track of all sorts of blogs, news sites and other things) and need any help, suggest that they leave a comment below saying “help!” You’ll be happy to walk them through the process. It’s the least you can do.