Family Travel

Nobody said that the writer’s life is a secure one, but then neither is life in Corporate Land these days.

As of this month, my family travel blog Kid Trippin’ (for Disney’s Family.com Web site) is on indefinite hiatus.  I enjoyed working with my editors, who were professional enough to call me personally and explain that there was not a problem with me or my writing, just that the company is taking a pause to sort out where they want to take the site and the online presence that they want to build.

It’s frustrating to create a blog from the ground up and then have it shut down, and frankly it was the first really decent blogging money that I’ve made, but I’m OK with it as long as the issue is not my work.  Blogs and sites are not a “build it and they’ll come” proposition — you have to market and work RSS feeds and a host of other things in addition to the obvious requirement to write good content.  I took care of content and made suggestions in the other areas, but that’s the downside to corporate blogging; a lot of things are out of the writer’s control. 

By the way, interested in blog promotion?  Check out Successful Blog’s 20 Blog Promotion Guides to Inform Your Strategy.  Thanks for the helpful info, Liz Strauss!  Good online marketing ideas are also easy to find on Wendy Piersall’s Inspired Business Growth blog for Entrepreneur.com.

We’re at an interesting point in the business blogging continuum and the development and growth of online media.  Some things will work and some won’t.  I don’t like being associated roadkill but I certainly understand it.

R.I.P., Kid Trippin’ and all the other bloggers out there who are with me on the Web 2.0 wave, rough as it may be.

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, blogging, blogs 

There is a lively post over on ProBlogger right now, asking blog readers whether links should open in a new window.

The question is this:  if you click on a link here on Family Travel, would you prefer to have a new window pop up that takes you to the link’s URL, or would you prefer to stay in the same window and then back-click to return to the original Family Travel post with the link in it?  As an example, the ProBlogger link above opens in the same window, and the link to the “whether links should open….” permalink opens in a new window. 

Apparently a lot of people really, really HATE it when a new window opens, to the extent that they actually leave the offending site that doesn’t open windows the way that they prefer.

Here’s what I wrote in comment #63 to the ProBlogger post: 

“Wow, I’m with Barbara up in Comment 7, in that I get off on Internet exploration tangents and prefer to have a new window open and come back to the original site later, since otherwise I’d be “back-buttoning” for eternity. So, I open into a new window on my blog because I thought that was easiest for everyone. No nefarious intentions at all.

I had no idea that this annoys people so much, and am somewhat puzzled by what you accomplish when you get miffed about new windows and never return to that naughty site. Why not leave a comment for the blog author; maybe they’re like me and had no idea that it gets people in such a twist.

I know life’s short and we’re all busy, but don’t be passive-aggressive. Give straightforward feedback.

This has inspired me to ask my readers what they’d like — thanks so much for the food for thought, Darren.”

So here’s my question, faithful readers — which do you prefer, and why?

I can go either direction when I draft a post and put in a link – open in a new window or open in the same window – but I want to make this site user-friendly and welcoming to the readers, not write it only to satisfy my own preferences regarding the “right” way to set up a post.

Thanks very much for your feedback in the comments.

Technorati tags:  travel, family travel, blogging

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