First person to comment on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog post

Being the first one to comment on a blog and then feeling elated that you are the first one to comment is lame. Very lame indeed. I agree.

But what if it’s the blog of the CEO of a company that has annual revenues of $4 billion and that gave the world Java?

Yeah that’s right, I read a whole lot of blogs in the tech scene including that of the CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz.

And on the post about IBM partnering with Sun on OpenOffice.org, I happened to be the first one to comment.

Kind of reassures me that, yes, I do keep myself up-to-date on what’s happening where. Yay!

Don’t post onto your blog too fast to avoid losing traffic!

So I had this bunch of posts that I had written on Orkut about my training at TechM that I recently decided to post to this blog too. I broke up the entire content into several posts and made 14 posts in quick succession (in about an hour which involved formatting, tagging, posting). My advice, don’t do that!

I noticed that since the posts were made so quickly, RSS Feed readers like Google Reader, Technorati etc. seemed to have missed receiving several of the early posts I made in the bunch. From what I can tell, WordPress only seems to offer the last 10 posts to the Feed readers when their bot decides to drop by asking for new posts, if any.

Seems like Technorati didn’t even accept the last 10 posts! I see that they took in only the last 5 posts offered by the WordPress RSS news feed. So that’ll probably hurt me in terms of traffic sent to my blog (which isn’t much to speak of anyway…for now). This would be particularly bad for a blog which has a lot of people subscribing to its RSS feed to stay in the loop.

This could of course be an issue with A-list bloggers like Scoble who make many posts daily….but probably not as quickly as I did for that brief period. But then anyway, the feed readers configure themselves to visit popular blogs more often and, I guess, accept more of their new posts if offered by their RSS feed.

I suppose later someday in a week or two, Google will send its spider/bot to read all of the latest content and then, hopefully, discover the “missed” posts and maybe send some traffic my way. I’ll probably make a new post to index links to all the recent posts to help the spider do so.

I did think about deleting all the posts and then reposting them one by one in a less bursty fashion. But since some of the posts had already been received by feed readers, I decided to spare unsuspecting surfers the possibility of landing up at a page that is no longer around.

So if you ever need to make a bunch of posts to your blog, making 5 posts a day until you run out may be a better idea than making 25 posts in half an hour.