Look for the silver lining under every dark cloud. Well, that’s what I did with the recent downtime I experienced with the is-there blogs. With quite a number of my blogs down, I took the time to launch a new blog on another one of my domains.

We now have Cats Eyes - Dzi Beads - Crystals, a blog that reports news and provides serious (and not-so-serious) info on these archaic and modern stones and gems.

Aggregation of the feeds from this blog has already begun, and you can check it out at the bottom of the feed list on the right most sidebar.

All the is-there blogs recently experienced severe downtime (more than 24 hours) due to hardware problems on the host’s side. However, I hope I can say that the problem has been resolved and that this should not reoccur anytime soon.

Hopefully, the downtime did not inconvenience regular readers of each and every one of the blogs (too much). I would like to say sorry for the downtime and thank you for your continued support!

P.S. I’m still not sure exactly what caused this downtime yet, given that the host’s support side has yet to reply.

Nothing particularly useful will come from this post. So, if you’re looking for some hard facts or the latest news, this post is not for you. If not, read on.

I just have to ask: Do you ever get bored of blogging on the same blog software? Well, I do, and I’ve barely been blogging for months (and not many months I might add). Whether it is the all-powerful (and dominant) WordPress to the slightly out-of-favour Movable Type to the oft-praised community CMS, Drupal, I’ve found boringness seeping in.

So, my next blog will use Blog:CMS - a comprehensive blogging platform with certain CMS implementations, such as forums and wikis. Yeah, I’m not being very detailed here. Visit Blog:CMS to find out more.

Now, one reason why I find it so easy to switch blogging platforms is probably because there are quite a large number of blog software with all the essential features (or plugins) I require. The few include: categorisation, clean urls (primarily mod_rewrite support), feeds, trackbacking, anti-comment spam implementations, flexible templating through template tags, link lists, recent post and similar post listing. Of course, Adsense and Chitika modules - to make displaying in-post adverts almost work-free - and push-button plugin installations would help. Oh yeah, a strong user forum base would be nice…

I understand there are many who love the stability and familiarity that comes from using a single blog software - especially if the dream software has been found (for many, WordPress, I think). After all, why switch if you can do everything you want with the software you have? Moreover, plugin developers might very well want to stick with the software they are good at.

But, I’m sure there must be those like me, right? I can even think of one benefit of multi-software blogging: After the endless forays into the various software, open source or otherwise, you’ll probably appreciate your dream software even more.

It is scary to see comments like this from top class bloggers out there. Well, in case you didn’t want to hop over to Performancing, let me read the quintissence of Nick Wilson’s comment to you: “This isn’t a game anymore. The big boys are a comin’”. I won’t even have to explain that because Patrick Gavin does that a few comments down the road (in the same post). But again, I’ll do it anyway. From what I understand, they’re trying to tell us bloggers to make sure you’re in shape - your blogs well-toned and geared to handle the challenges from even more intense competition in the various niches you are in. With existing blog networks growing and new networks popping out on an average bi-monthly basis (just an raw estimate), small-time bloggers like me (and most likely, you) potentially face permanent mediocrity in the blogosphere if networks decide to come in with a blog in your niche.

All this also makes it pretty disheartening to young upstarts (again, like me) who began taking blogging seriously after seeing the huge successes quite a few bloggers have achieved. Imagine if everything you’re working for right now ends up useless two or three years down the road, just because some more experienced and better armed (Read: Better Funded™) blogger comes knocking on your door. Unless you have hit bullsye and are producing top class content and have large and relevant archives and backlinks, you are going to be doomed to mediocrity (and pennilessness as well).

But is it all doom and gloom? Probably not. Being trim and fit, blog-wise, has always been a prerequisite for success in the blogosphere - with hypercompetition from the big boys or not. It’s going to be a tougher game, yes. But not an impossible one. Predictions of failing blog networks will probably brighten the lives of upcoming bloggers for some time to come as well. But don’t forget the scrapers and stealers, they are likely to pose even more trouble as the blogosphere grows and content-theft becomes less likely to be noticed (or maybe the other way round as blog-readers become more savvy to duplicated content).

So, if you’re an upstart like me, keep persevering on, and make sure you keep learning and adapting to keep up with this everchanging monster that is the blogosphere.

Just yesterday, I wrote on the difficulties I faced blogging on multiple blogs and advised newbies like me to stick to a primary blog, at least until you get your blogging skills up a few notches.

Well, luck is on our side as today, Chris Garett writes on maximising your income with common sense. And guess what are the three common sense points he talks about. Point 1: The more you post, the better at posting you become. Point 2 excerpt:

Common sense point two: You need four things

1. A converting, usable design
2. Lots of great, focussed content
3. Lots of targeted, motivated traffic
4. A pool of high-paying advertising or other top revenue source

And most importantly, Point 3: The more blogs the better. Well, I agree wholeheartedly with this point, but he is speaking on the side of more experienced bloggers. With practice, indeed it is possible to generate good posts on a frequent and regular basis.

Now, as I said in my previous post, I’m not there yet. Not there as in not at the necessary skill and experience level to handle multiple blogs gracefully, so to speak. So, I suggested some other common sense: Keep with what you do best; stick with your main blog until you’re ready. Of course, I understand practice with multi-blogging makes perfect. I know that if I keep up with this, I’ll possibly be able to handle multi-blogging easily in the future.

But how happy will I be and will my main blog deteriorate in the process? These are important considerations as well. Therefore, I stick with my point that it might be a better idea to keep with your primary blog until you feel ready to take the next step into multi-blogging. So, how do you determine the right time to take that step? I say it is the time when you start writing multiple posts in your main blog, but still feel that you can write more. It is the time when you start feeling unsatisfied with your the quantity of your output. It is the time when you just can express what you want within the scope of your main blog.

Another related piece of common sense is to make sure you don’t delay or procrastinate too much. That way, the progression is natural and steady. We all know this, but tend to still ignore it (and we know this too).

So, great post by Garett. It indeed explains the necessary common sense that successful bloggers will have to have. But I think more attention must be placed on the progression from a single blog to multiple blogs. Therefore, for now, I think I’ll be happy with my common sense: Stick with your one blog till you’re ready; many successful bloggers started this way and it feels better. Just make sure you don’t “forget” (You won’t forget. I’d say it’s more likely you’d be lazy and procrastinate, eh.) to use Garett’s common sense when the time comes.

Blogging on five topically different blogs is more difficult than I expected. Initially, there was the thought that a wider variety of blogs would allow the expression of a wider variety of opinion, commentary and knowledge. Well, that’s what I thought…

It seems that common wisdom holds: Keep with what you do best. Indeed, focusing on a single blog and developing that blog the furthest in can go (if there’s any limit in the first place) is a good path to follow. Of course, I’m not trying to say that multi-blogging is bad, wrong, or worse than single-blogging. In fact, multi-blogging is one of the key means to blogging success (just look at the succesful bloggers we know: Darren Rowse at Problogger.net, for example).

It is just that, in many cases, the drive that brought you into blogging itself tends to be focused on the very first topic that you came in with. Yes, I’m referring to newbies like myself, not probloggers who make a living (a nice one for some, in fact) blogging. Probloggers, after all, have to ensure diversification in their sources of income, and a key means of doing so is to have blogs in many different niches.

In any case, do what works best for you. You just might be the type that can handle tons of blogs at once. Well, I know I’m not really the type, yet. Anyway, time to get back to blogging some real stuff.