Giving Birth to a Blog: a Herculean Labour

I feel like I've given birth to a 14-pound infant. The experience of launching this blog into the world rivals childbirth, in exhaustion if not in actual pain. In the two weeks since this blog went live, I have worked like a demon. I have had to surmount a huge learning curve, and it has been humbling to discover just how much I didn't know. It isn't about the writing. That's the easy part.

I thought I knew a fair bit about web design, but I quickly discovered that blogging opens up a whole new world, introducing a new language and turning established Web convention on its head. In the last two weeks, I have had to master a blog editor; figure out how to tweak Blogger's template styles for the effects I want; and find ways to overcome its limitations. I have created 80x15 web badges (which I'd never even noticed pre-blogging); explored the differences between Atom and RSS; set up a feed and various subscription links; registered the blog with all kinds of lists, search engines, and aggregators; and learned about everything from permalinks and pinging to trackbacks and tag clouds.

I have done everything I can to create a quality blog that offers information of value to readers. Now, to take a bad cliché even further, it's time for the newborn to take flight. I have enrolled in several traffic exchange sites, some of which are starting to produce results, but this blog needs real traffic. Not just one-time visitors swinging by to pick up some credits to be applied to their own blog traffic, but people interested enough to post comments, link to interesting posts, or sign up for a feed to get new posts automatically.

So, over to you. Let's get some dialogue going.