When we started our web
site, it was as much a hobby as anything else,
but over the past year it has grown up quite a bit.
We have been looking at more mature web applications
to add content to our web site. The latest in our
series of web site upgrades is the addition of the
blog.
If you are new to the term, blog
is short for web log. A web log is the internet version
of the daily journal, but since it is online, it is
available for all eyes to see. There are thousands
of blogs online, from the mundane to the newsworthy.
If you want to see more examples of blogs, go to any
search engine and type in blog or blogging and you
can see them.
When we first investigated blogging
(the present participle for the verb form of posting
in a blog), it seemed interesting enough. But can
it work for a Tennessee boer goat farmer?
What can you blog about if you raise
and sell boer goats and livestock guardian dogs, like
our great pyrenees and border collie dogs?
At first, the idea seemed hopeless.
I could picture the entries:
“Today I went to the Co-op
today and picked up two fifty pound bags of goat chow,
and on the way there, I dropped off the trash at the
dump.”
Intriguing? Not really -- although
you would be surprised at what you see in some blogs.
Okay, so it needs some focus. To
get started, I just looked at my inbox. As a subscriber
of multiple goat mailing lists, and the author of
the articles on this web site, I realized that people
have a bunch of questions. I received a bunch of e-mails
every week asking how I raise my goats. Many of the
e-mails are similar to the ones I sent more experienced
breeders when I just got started. Coincidently, in
that statement is the same motivation for the articles
that we add to our web site. People have a need to
know and want to find out how to solve the basic situations
that arise in running a small goat farm. As we have
said, we are not experts, but …. Well, we’ve
been through the same thing.
So maybe a blog entry reads,
That seems like one of the common
questions we get. We could put the question in with
our answer. Ultimately, it could lead to a discussion
on the blog about fencing (we are not quite there,
yet, but it sounds promising).
Another idea was to use the blog
as a medium to display testimonials from our customers.
We have had a number of satisfied customers purchase
great pyrenees and border collie livestock guardian
dogs from us. So, an entry could look like this:
That was an actual reply from a customer
last October.
Or, this from a customer whose web
site we designed:
Additionally, our web site administration
can benefit from the blog. Just detailing plans for
the future and telling which files you have updated
recently can mean a lot when you have several people
updating the site from several different locations.
While it may seem mundane to the public, an entry
that says this:
So the blog is valuable for a number
of reasons. First, it is a way to document everything.
We use movabletype
as our blogging software. I also tried greymatter
and a few others, but I liked movabletype the best.
It may not be the easiest to set up, but it has a
very good user interface and has searchable archives.
There is a big value to searchable archives. First
of all, for our own benefit, now we have a resource
which we can search months from now to find out information
about our own farm. For the visitors to our web site,
they can use the search function, looking for key
words which answer their questions. If the information
we provide is useful, then the blog has done its job.
Some of our concerns were about how
much information to put in. Well, we started this
a few months ago and we are going to try varying degrees
of information, from the commonplace to the interesting.
Sure, most of the information is going to seem routine,
and maybe even dull. But we are going to get our feet
fully entrenched in the blog and see how it sorts
out.
Like I said in the beginning, we
do get a lot of requests for our opinion on farming
matters, and we were concerned that someone may find
the information they were looking for on the blog
and, instead of contacting us directly about a question,
we would lose the interaction with our guests. Well,
it is a chance we are willing to take. We hope people
will find what they need, and will still sign our
guestbook, or
attempt to contact us either through the comments
on the blog, or through our contact
form or just a regular e-mail.
If you get a chance, peruse our blog
(click here)
and let us know what you think. Go ahead and bookmark
it and come back at another time to see what we have
added, or just come back to our site and click on
the blog link on the left side of the page. Since
we have jumped into this feet first, I know we will
continue to upgrade the page and the comments fairly
regularly.
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