Blogging in the bike lane

What makes a blog popular? Well first there's an interesting title, (a headline if you will) that grabs your attention. Giving a title to a topic can be as important as the topic itself. But what makes a good headline now a days? Is it something that grabs the attention of a real person or is it now formulated to be at the top of some search engine hash table? Hopefully it can be a little of both, especially if you want others to be able to find your content. Next comes good writing, because what good is a teaser, if the content doesn't deliver on the promise? Trust is also a key element, without it, you just don't get read, and of course the trust part takes time.

I tend to write about topics from daily life, although I'm a little limited in what I cover related to my work. I cover the topics that I feel close to, ones that are important or interesting to me, for instance bicycling, where I've written about the Ghostbike program and club rides, hobbies - such as the recent set of Picoo-Z postings and my Instructables projects. And since I brought up the topic of hobbies or interests I thought that I'd go into a short overview of a few that have occupied my time over the last 5 decades.

Geology - mainly through grade school science fair projects
Model rocketry - fireworks without the boom (unless you want it too)
Model building - plastic car kits and some scratch built, like a Star Trek TOS communicator
Electronics - various kits and gadgets, which later resulted in a career path in Electronics and then computers.
Model railroading - I have yet to complete the layout, but I keep getting a little closer each year, during the winter months. This one combines almost all the others
Computer programming - mainly on a C-64, with a few articles published in the old Compute!'s Gazette. Later, as a Sun UNIX System Admin. the programming was more in the form of sheel scripts.
Bicycling - most recently (in the last 6 years) I've gone from mountain bikes to road bikes
Blogging - this stuff at http://inthebikelane.blogspot.com