Community Blogger

[goldfinch]

Nice! I enjoyed the columns.

[Melalvai]

Thanks! I'm having a lot of fun with it already.

[bluejellybean]

Awesome! I'm both a writer and cyclist too...bookmarked it! Looking forward to following the blog

[Melalvai]

I've been doing this for a year now and it's been a ton of fun. The newspaper changed websites this summer and that was a pain. We were supposed to get all the old blogs transferred over to the new site but it didn't work--only a few made it and then only the titles. So I lost all the old posts. I mean, I have them saved myself, but they aren't online so I can't link to them. On the bright side, I get to re-use the old posts, which makes it easier to hit my 3 posts/week goal.

The new site is here.

When the new site went live, my coverage expanded from the Kirksville Daily Express to all the company's papers in Northeast Missouri.
Today I got a message that 5 other towns--all over Missouri-- have picked up my blog.

That doesn't mean my readership is very large. They are all rural communities about the size of Kirksville (pop 17,000). I actually have no idea what my readership is. The Daily Express prints my articles frequently. I thought they only did that once in a while but recently I met someone who told me they print my article "2 or 3 times a week" -- but that's as often as I post! So I guess they've stepped up how often they print me. All the time in town I meet people who say "Oh yeah, I know your name, I read your article regularly". But I'm sure my readership is higher here because my blog has been running longer here and because it appears in print here.

I'm on facebook with my favorite author, the Metal Cowboy aka Joe Kurmaskie. Last week I was excited because he shared my article about bicycling & taxes. So my favorite author not only read something I wrote, but liked it!

I'm excited to have a wider audience. It definitely motivates me to be more consistent about posting. Last weekend and already this weekend I got 3 posts ready to go so that Monday, Wed, and Fri I just upload them and hit "publish". (Even better would be if I could upload them ahead of time, but the new website blogging software is almost as clumsy as the old one, and that is not a feature.)

[shootingstar]

Congratulations, Melavi. Great to spread cycling love. Does this give you even more different ideas to write now that you know it's a bigger audience?

[Melalvai]

Not yet. I did make a point of being less Kirksville-centric. Instead of just saying "Baltimore St" and assuming everyone knows what that means, I say "Baltimore/ US 63 Bus Loop" and I try to slip in something descriptive like "busy traffic".