Hey, everyone. This is going to be a short entry, but it’s one that I felt the need to write to set expectations of what I’m willing to do in my responses to readers.
A couple of days ago, I started an exchange with a reader who had left a comment about my April 29th post. His question was about why I don’t make links to my past posts in my responses to readers. I’ve copied the comment-exchange below:
——
knight17 wrote:
“Marquis, Why are you not linking your posts.. Man, that’s why the web is for.”
Marquis wrote:
“Knight17, I’m not sure if I’m understanding your question correctly. Are you saying that I should provide links to my own posts in my responses to people?”
knight17 wrote:
“You have said in the above post, in the Extracurricular session :
“I wrote a pretty detailed entry about choosing extracurriculars a few months ago, so, instead of writing a lot about it here, I’ll leave it to you to look through my archives for that entry. “
Instead of guiding people to search the archives, you can mark it with a link to that post.
Don’t you think it is convenient? It will also improves the no of hits to your pages.
Another thing I like very much is writings where links to outside sites are present. By that, I get to read informative articles related to the topic I am reading also.
- SJA/knight17″
——
OK, so I’m guessing that some of you are thinking “That isn’t an unreasonable request for Marquis to provide links to his old posts”…But, when I saw knight17′s last comment in the exchange, I literally laughed out loud. Perhaps, that was an odd reaction, but I just couldn’t help it because the request seemed so strange to me. I mean, I write all of these entries and post them out into cyberspace and now it seems that that isn’t “convenient” enough…kinda funny when you look at it like that, right?
As I’ve mentioned on here before, I don’t maintain this blog to receive any sort of acclaim or financial gain as a result. Rather, I do it just to help people because I’ve found that people who’ve reached a certain point in life/career seldom take the time to reach back and help others to make similar moves in their lives. Every minute that I devote to this blog is a donation of my time that I could be spending doing any number of other activities on my end (i.e. living life, doing “real life” things, taking a nap, getting my drink on, etc.). So, whenever someone comes at me saying that I’m not doing enough to make things easy enough for y’all, I get bothered…naw, lemme change that to “shocked” or “taken aback”. Here’s why…It takes me AT LEAST 1-2 hours to write every response to a reader email because I take the time to think through the questions and provide the best advice possible. If I’m willing to GIVE that sort of gift of my personal time, I wouldn’t say that it unreasonable for me to expect the people that I’m helping to use THEIR time to read through entries that I’ve written in the past. Y’all would be surprised at the number of emails I receive asking questions that I’ve answered MANY times over on this blog. Whenever one comes in, I direct the person to my archives for those past entries instead of getting upset that the person wasn’t willing to take the time to see if their question has already been answered. But, unless I’m feeling even more generous than usual and come across a bunch of free time, your boy won’t be searching through 400+ past entries to find specific entries to link to in my responses.
So, back to “knight17″, thanks for your comment and suggestion about linking to my old blog entries. In theory, it’s a great idea and it certainly would be very convenient to the readers that email me. But, in reality, it just isn’t feasible for me to search through everything I’ve written over the past 5.5 years in addition to actually writing my responses. I took a step in that direction when I started tagging my blog entries and, eventually, I’ll complete that for all of my archived entries, but, until then, interested parties will just have to keep on reading through them to find what they need.
A couple of days ago, I started an exchange with a reader who had left a comment about my April 29th post. His question was about why I don’t make links to my past posts in my responses to readers. I’ve copied the comment-exchange below:
——
knight17 wrote:
“Marquis, Why are you not linking your posts.. Man, that’s why the web is for.”
Marquis wrote:
“Knight17, I’m not sure if I’m understanding your question correctly. Are you saying that I should provide links to my own posts in my responses to people?”
knight17 wrote:
“You have said in the above post, in the Extracurricular session :
“I wrote a pretty detailed entry about choosing extracurriculars a few months ago, so, instead of writing a lot about it here, I’ll leave it to you to look through my archives for that entry. “
Instead of guiding people to search the archives, you can mark it with a link to that post.
Don’t you think it is convenient? It will also improves the no of hits to your pages.
Another thing I like very much is writings where links to outside sites are present. By that, I get to read informative articles related to the topic I am reading also.
- SJA/knight17″
——
OK, so I’m guessing that some of you are thinking “That isn’t an unreasonable request for Marquis to provide links to his old posts”…But, when I saw knight17′s last comment in the exchange, I literally laughed out loud. Perhaps, that was an odd reaction, but I just couldn’t help it because the request seemed so strange to me. I mean, I write all of these entries and post them out into cyberspace and now it seems that that isn’t “convenient” enough…kinda funny when you look at it like that, right?
As I’ve mentioned on here before, I don’t maintain this blog to receive any sort of acclaim or financial gain as a result. Rather, I do it just to help people because I’ve found that people who’ve reached a certain point in life/career seldom take the time to reach back and help others to make similar moves in their lives. Every minute that I devote to this blog is a donation of my time that I could be spending doing any number of other activities on my end (i.e. living life, doing “real life” things, taking a nap, getting my drink on, etc.). So, whenever someone comes at me saying that I’m not doing enough to make things easy enough for y’all, I get bothered…naw, lemme change that to “shocked” or “taken aback”. Here’s why…It takes me AT LEAST 1-2 hours to write every response to a reader email because I take the time to think through the questions and provide the best advice possible. If I’m willing to GIVE that sort of gift of my personal time, I wouldn’t say that it unreasonable for me to expect the people that I’m helping to use THEIR time to read through entries that I’ve written in the past. Y’all would be surprised at the number of emails I receive asking questions that I’ve answered MANY times over on this blog. Whenever one comes in, I direct the person to my archives for those past entries instead of getting upset that the person wasn’t willing to take the time to see if their question has already been answered. But, unless I’m feeling even more generous than usual and come across a bunch of free time, your boy won’t be searching through 400+ past entries to find specific entries to link to in my responses.
So, back to “knight17″, thanks for your comment and suggestion about linking to my old blog entries. In theory, it’s a great idea and it certainly would be very convenient to the readers that email me. But, in reality, it just isn’t feasible for me to search through everything I’ve written over the past 5.5 years in addition to actually writing my responses. I took a step in that direction when I started tagging my blog entries and, eventually, I’ll complete that for all of my archived entries, but, until then, interested parties will just have to keep on reading through them to find what they need.
Didn’t knew you will take it that way. I was a new reader of your blog. I just directly subscribed to your RSS feed in my RSS reader. For readers who employ similar methods, linking is always good.
The link we discusses was about the extracuricullar activities, I just searched with the site operator and got it : http://marquisweblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/question-from-undergrad-about-choosing.html
I know you are working hard, but adding a bit of finish to everything is always nice. Don’t mistake me, I am not saying you are not doing enough.
hey Marquis,
Great response. You make sense 110%. I’ve been reading your blog for over a year now and had my own blog for a few years. I know the time it takes to maintain something like this. Major kudos to you! In light of your comment about people not giving back after being “successful” I will transition my blog to a b-school help blog like yours. (Headed to Chicago Booth this fall) Thanks for all you’ve done for so long that has helped so many like myself. You rock!
Hi Marquis, thanks for maintaining such a great blog! I totally understand your situation. You do enough just by providing your valuable insight.
I was thinking I might be able to help. I get bored sometimes and think I could fill that time up by looking up those entries for you to link to. Just an idea, let me know you think. If you think it’s a good idea, we can work out the details.
Maybe you could recruit a team of people to search those links. I’m sure there are lots of grateful readers who would like to pay you back by assisting with your blog.
VS
Marquis — you may want to check out Zemanta. It is a great browser plugin that will let you easily link to old posts, etc with little/no effort. I swear I don’t work for the company but give it a whirl, it is pretty slick and may give you a way to easily refer to previous posts with just a click or two.
-John