I’m back from the ASI 2017 conference–as usual filled with inspiration. I’ve had my duvet day for recuperation from the horrendously early flight that I took from Portland ME to RDU. It was a good conference, I learned a lot, and I had a chance to visit with indexers face-to-face over breakfast, dinner, or just coffee.

One of the particular benefits of this conference for me was discussion of having an online presence. Gwen Henson did a great presentation on “Developing Your Online Presence” that provided insight of how to do that, and tools that help. The presentation “Successful Blogging and Content Creation” by Meghan Brawley sent me home with so many ideas of what and how to improve my blog.

As I start thinking about all those things, it really brought home all the things that you have to do when you’re blogging–things that aren’t immediately obvious–kind of behind the scenes, but very necessary–in addition to creating content for the blog–there’s maintenance to be done. Here are two that came to mind as I was reviewing my blog this morning.

• Are your links functional? It’s easy to neglect is checking to be sure the links in your previous posts are still functional. If not you should try to re-establish them, find a replacement, or at least acknowledge that the link is not still functional so that you don’t have a frustrated reader trying to use that link.
• Is the information you presented still appropriate? It’s possible that information presented in that post from three (or more) years ago has changed–new discoveries, new procedures, or changes in best practices. If your professional organization has changed or modified its name, make sure you are up to date in your use. (Perhaps another post on why that change was made?) If that is the case, you need to consider a solution: delete, revise, or at least add a note indicating you are aware of the changes–that might even make a new post (always looking for content).

I’m sure more maintenance tasks will occur to me as I try to be more conscientious in maintaining online presence!