Tuesday 19 August 2014

A Very Dull Announcement About The Blog


Warning: This post is not about music and is very very dull unless you care for the detail of writing a blog and how we do it.

To a certain extent, reading (and writing) Breaking More Waves is the blog equivalent of a bowl of Bran Flakes every morning – we keep things regular. You can pretty much guarantee (95% at least) that when we post something it will go up like clockwork at 8.30am GMT. A few years back we posted everything at midnight, but then we changed to 8.30 with sometimes (time and good music permitting) a second or third post coming at lunchtime or in the evening.

Now, please don’t think that each day we’re sitting at our laptop waiting till exactly 8.30 before pressing post – far from it. At the time the blogs are posted we’re normally either busy doing the day job / travelling / sleeping / eating / having sex in fact doing anything but looking at the internet or anything blog related. 

So why 8.30am?

1. Because an 8.30am post enabled us to have a target to aim for. Without that target it would be easy to put things off for a day or two and before you know it (especially when things in our life outside of new music blogging are busy) a day or two becomes four or five, four or five becomes a week, a week becomes a month and then suddenly the blog becomes inactive / dead.

2. Because we liked the idea of people in our own country travelling to work / college and seeing our daily post go up (maybe via our twitter autofeed) and being able to read / listen to it on the train or bus (if they’re driving a car then hopefully they wouldn’t be reading as they drove) on their commute.

3. Once we had decided on it we just stuck to it, even when it made no sense. For example we often pre-write posts several days in advance and then schedule them for 8.30am – enabling us to look regular even when in reality we’re not. The trouble with this is that because of the speed of the internet, a new music post we’ve written three days before isn’t that new by the time we post and people who are interested have probably already read as much as they need to about that particular song / artist elsewhere, so irrespective of how brilliant / original / thought provoking / different our blog post is from the usual ‘here’s a song, it’s brilliant’ type post that most blogs do, it doesn’t get read quite as much as it could have if we’d posted when we wrote it - and if we're going to write then it's nice to have people read it.

So because of 3 above and also because of the fact that sometimes the 8.30 deadline becomes hard work when we don’t sit down to the laptop till 2am in the morning to try and writing something half coherent after we’ve been up since 6am the morning before and have to be up in another 4 hours, we’ve finally decided to ditch the self-imposed 8.30am rule. We’re changing from Bran Flakes to Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, but sometimes might even have Sugar Puffs. Sometimes the obsessive regularity makes blogging hard work and this shouldn’t be work (or hard), it should be fun (although admittedly we get a weird kick out of achieving our self-imposed deadline through lack of sleep sometimes). Hell we even blogged for 24 hours non-stop earlier this year, although that was for charity.

So this post goes up dead at 8.30am.

We still might post at this time in the future.

But mainly we’ll be posting as and when we’ve written the post, or at a time that suits us. 

Thanks for reading, whatever time of day it is where you are.

OK, back to the music…..

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