A reader writes:

I’m currently student teaching. I’m very passionate about music and music education. A couple of years ago I felt a sudden terror when I recognized I was nowhere close to ready to be a successful teacher, and I started delving into as much material as I could and doing whatever else I could (camps, etc) to get ready. Your blog was one of the first good, free resources I found, and I’ve been reading ever since. So first, thank you for your contributions.

This past summer I had a friend start a music blog, and I thought, “Wow, that’s a great idea.” I love to write, especially in reflection and with the goal of learning from my experiences. I also enjoy helping others, when possible. So I thought a blog sounded fantastic. I started one, and it actually developed a regular readership (small, but consistent when I was consistent). It was actually kind of scary in some ways, because I wasn’t even student teaching yet. Who would actually care what I had to say? Anyway, I ran into a snag when a friend, who let me clinic his band, was unhappy over how I described his band. In a case study like fashion, I described the size of the school and level of the band in very broad terms, but with the goal if putting the tactics used for improvement into some sort of context. In other words, while I didn’t name the school, director, or students, I did say it was a small school, and a weaker ensemble (that is, however, on its way up). That was a mistake. He explained that this upset him, and I immediately went back and edited the post to make it more broad, so their identity was even more protected, if that was possible. We’re still great friends, luckily.

But the experience made me afraid to continue that type of blog. In my student teaching I’ve been able to work with students daily, and sometimes experiment with instructional techniques that their teachers aren’t using (which they told me to do… whatever works for me, they said). I’d love to share these, but now it’s kind of scary. The way I promoted the blog was primarily through posting it on facebook. I like sharing my experiences. But even if I don’t name students, or the school, all of my friends know where I’m student teaching.

Which leads me to the next problem, that when I start teaching somewhere, if I write about my experiences, then anyone who reads it will know where I teach. Even if I no longer reveal my identity on the blog, (as I noticed you only post with your first name), if I post it on facebook to let my friends know it’s up, they’ll still know it’s me. Which leads to the potential of parents, co-workers, students, etc. knowing it’s me. It just seems risky. Even though I’ve technically been protecting the identities of the students the entire time, people might still figure it out. Who knows? And even if I say nothing negative about the students (which I never assigned blame to students for a lack of fundamentals, not in real life or in previous blogs), some might be uncomfortable with me doing that.

So all that is to say, do you have any recommendations? I’d like to be able to blog about my experiences and share anything I’ve learned, as it might help someone. At the same time, I want to be able to share the blog with my friends. And of course I want to ensure I’m doing this in accordance with the Code of Ethics in regards to student and parent rights, protecting their privacy and so on. I know you support other bloggers, so I thought I would ask you for advice. How can I operate or structure my music/music ed blog so as to accomplish these goals (self improvement through reflection/helping others to improve), while sharing it with my friends, but not violating anyone’s rights or the Code of Ethics?

My response
Thanks for writing. You may have noticed that I blog FAR less often than I used to. There are a few reasons for this, but you hit on one of them pretty well. I want to dig into this in much greater detail and I know other young teachers struggle with these things as well, so my response will also end up on the blog later this week. With that being said, you’re getting a pretty involved response to your email (and it also happens to be the fastest blog reader response I’ve done in more than a year simply because I happened to be checking emails today!).

The beginning
Once I struggled through a couple of years of poor teaching and then struggled through a couple more years of overbearing control-freak teaching, I finally started to hit a groove around my fifth year. So I started a blog that spring.

When I first started my blog out, I made the conscious decision to maintain as much anonymity as possible. I write almost nothing about individual people, and when I do write about individuals, it is in a positive light. This is by choice. I could complain and vent and whine and everything else, but I find that writing style tends to help determine the types of responses. Since I prefer to encourage my readers who might be struggling as I once did (or with some of the same issues with which I currently struggle), I avoid negativity on the blog as much as possible.

The conflict
I really liked some of what I was writing and wanted to share it with a few other people I knew, but I also wanted to maintain as much anonymity as I could. So I have shared over the years with a small handful of people I know personally. I have also passed along a few articles here and there to friends without telling them outright that I wrote them. But as a general rule, I don’t promote my blog on my personal Facebook account.

I haven’t found it to be too much of a problem so far and when I tell people that I have a website that gets over 1,000 pageviews a day and brings in an average of $1 a day in advertising revenue (wooo), they are mildly impressed.

Promotion of your blog while maintaining relative anonymity
I started my blog in February of 2007. To put that in Social Media perspective, Facebook surpassed MySpace in popularity in 2008 and Twitter had an average of 20,000 tweets per day as late as SXSW 2007. Currently, Twitter has over 65,000,000 tweets per day. So the way I spread the word of my blog was much different then than it would be now. That being said, here are a few things that worked well for me.

1. Comment
   Find and follow a few blogs that have similar audiences to yours (I sort of created my audience since there weren’t many people doing what I did at the time). Subscribe to them in Google Reader or some similar RSS reader, and add relevant comments that add value to the discussion. Include a link (usually associated with your name) and be consistent with the presentation of your persona.
2. Separate
   Create an email address for your blog. If you have a domain name, use that. If not, create a free one with Gmail or wherever. Every blog-related communication should come from that address. Every comment should be associated with that email address.
3. Be consistent
   Not too long after my blog was born, I realized that while So You Want To Teach? was easy to memorize, it was also rather cumbersome to type. So I began using SYWTT. I then decided to start setting up accounts with the SYWTT name to create some consistency. Find a name that works and run with it.
4. Post consistently
   Obviously I no longer heed this advice, which explains why my blog hasn’t grown much over the last year. But early on, I wrote some of the best material on the blog. Write a series about something and get a few great articles out there. Then promote one or two of the best articles. Before your blog begins to really flow, be sure to write a handful of Pillar Articles. If you don’t know what these are, Google (or Bing) the term and then get to writing. Mine are 9 Reasons To Quit Teaching (And 10 Reasons To Stick) and Questions That Will Save Your Career.
5. Social Media
   I used StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Delicious early on. Now I use Twitter and Facebook almost exclusively. I do still get occasional StumbleUpon traffic, so take advantage of that. I also signed up for some RSS directories and did as much as I could. When in doubt about the usefulness of a site, try it and see what happens.
6. Read blogs about blogging, marketing, and just great blogs
   Don’t keep your blog-reading only to education topics. Before I started blogging, I read The Simple Dollar, Zen Habits, Seth Godin, and ProBlogger. I continue to read those blogs and apply what I learn to my blogging, my teaching, and just generally any area I can.

One more thing
As one reader once advised me, once you go public, there’s no going back. I know some great bloggers who maintain anonymity and I also know some who are quite vocal in about where they teach and what they do. I don’t know that there’s necessarily a right or wrong way to go about it, just as some teachers add current and former ungraduated students as friends on Facebook, and others don’t. It’s a personal judgment call.

One piece of advice that should help you in most areas of life, especially in the high profile world of public music education: If you mess up, err on the side of caution. You’ll have years to make a name for yourself. Don’t mess it up before it get started!

Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, where recently she’s been researching different physical therapy assistant schools and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

If your school is like a lot of institutions these days, you have to share resources and probably don’t have much in the way of educational technology. So when you get to spend time in the computer lab or use the interactive whiteboard, it’s usually well-planned and eagerly anticipated. However, if you’ve been teaching long enough to lose greenhorn status, you know about the scourge of the lab – technological failure. Even with the best of lesson plans, you’ll be wracking your brain for something to do with a bunch of disappointed kids sitting in front of blank screens unless you have a pre-fabricated backup plan. While more seasoned teachers will be better able to think of something effective on the fly, it doesn’t hurt to know which options are open to you when the dreaded scourge of the lab attacks.

Partial Technological Failure
In some cases, you’re only halfway terrorized by technical difficulty misfortunes. If you happen to run into the problem of a few broken computers, for example, you can revise your lesson plan fairly easily. To make sure you’re ready for this one, turn your lesson into a group project that requires only one computer per group. This may sound simple – why should you plan ahead? – but there are often subtle snags when you translate an individual project to a group one. For example, unless you give detailed directions about splitting up tasks or collaborating, students are likely to waste time trying to make sure that they’re not doing too much work. To plan for this potential issue, you can start with a group project and not worry about changing it, or you can write up a modified lesson plan in case of emergency. Just be sure to watch out for differences in the amount of time needed to complete tasks, adding items to your lesson plan so you don’t get caught with down time.

Full Technological Failure
Again, group projects are a great way to conserve resources when technology fails you. Even with no computers, interactive whiteboards, or other technology that might be available at your school, you can save the day with a good backup plan. If your lesson plan involves specific Web content, print off a copy of the most important pages – you can send a student to make more copies if the need arises. If you divide your students into groups, they’ll only need one copy of each page per group, saving some time and some trees. Another way around this problem is to create overhead projector pages from the Web content, eliminating the need for copies. Your lesson plan shouldn’t need too much modification, but you might need to get creative to make your group projects interesting. Because your students won’t be able to find information online, part of the fun and the educational experience will be missing. You can replace it with something like developing skits that teach the information, writing literary journalism pieces, having students write tests about the information and take each other’s tests, etc.

The Secret Weapon
No matter what happens, you can turn to this writing prompt or any variation of it: How would life today be different without (failed technology here)? This will get students thinking about how important that piece of technology can be, how it’s used by a variety of people and social groups, and what kinds of effects it’s had on the educational experience. You can count this as a completion grade or assign a grade to each essay, and extra credit is always another option. As long as students understand that their work is being evaluated, they tend to make a good effort. If you prefer short answers to this question, you can add other activities to the lesson plan, such as writing press releases about technology that has gone missing. Fresh ideas are great and help keep students from getting restless and taking advantage of the situation, so don’t hesitate to encourage students’ creativity no matter how you write your backup plans.

Brian Jenkins is a member of the braintrack.com writing team. He contributes content on a wide variety of college and career-related subjects, including information about high school teaching education programs and careers.

In Demand Teaching Jobs and Degree Options
In some areas of the country it’s difficult to find a teaching position because of large scale layoffs, hiring freezes, and dwindling student enrollment. Some areas have a surplus of elementary school and social studies teachers. One way to increase the chances of obtaining a teaching position is by entering a high-demand teaching field. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has forecasted a 17 percent employment growth rate from 2008 to 2018 for special education teachers, a rate which is faster than the average for all occupations.

Hot Jobs in Education

• Bilingual teachers – Teachers are needed to teach English to students whose native language is not English. Teachers are also needed who can teach classes in two languages. Teachers with these qualifications are in high demand in many areas around the country.
• Special education teachers – Those with a degree in special education teach students who have perceptual, physical, emotional, or developmental problems. In some states, there is such a high demand for these teachers that school districts are hiring people who are not certified in special education but are pursuing a teaching degree.
• Math and science teachers – Many schools can’t find enough math and science teachers because few prospective teachers want to teach these subjects. Therefore, the demand for these teachers is very high. Some school districts are offering incentives to qualified science and math teachers, including tuition reimbursement and other financial incentives.

Online Teaching Degree Programs
Online degree programs in education are increasingly popular due to their flexibility and convenience. Students can learn at their own pace. Many online programs offer personalized attention and encourage the formation of online study groups. Many of the online programs also provide an experimental component.

Here’s a list of teaching degree programs available on-campus and online:

• Early Childhood Education
• Higher Education
• Education Technology
• K-12 Education
• Secondary Education
• Special Education
• Exceptional Student Education
• Elementary Education
• Teacher Licensure

Online Educational Technology Degree program
Online educational technology degree programs were created because of the increasing use of technology in today’s classrooms. The training provided may give graduates an edge on the competition for some teaching jobs. Most of these programs provide master’s degrees and cover topics such as multimedia tools, the Internet, computer technology, distance education, computer interface design, and integrating technology into the classroom.

Changing Careers
Some colleges and universities offer accelerated teaching programs to keep up with the demand for teachers in their states. These short-term programs are designed to prepare students who have a bachelor’s degree from another field to teach topics in high demand such as science and math. These programs can be completed in 9 to 18 months.

There are plenty of on-campus and online teaching programs to choose from. The demand for teachers varies throughout the nation. If you want to enter the teaching profession, identifying the high-demand teaching fields in your area would be a wise first step.

If you haven’t stopped by the actual website for So You Want To Teach? in a few months, er weeks, er days, er hours, you may not recognize it. I have used my summertime to really put in some solid effort into adjusting the layout of the blog. I haven’t done a full-on redesign since March of 2009. Since that time, I’ve added a few widgets here and something else over there, but never really spent a lot of concentrated time really thinking about the layout of the blog. Until recently.

How it all began
Quite frankly, I got bored of looking at the blog each day. I had some stuff there that just really didn’t make sense. It was more cluttered than I was comfortable. So I started looking at sites I like.

Zen Habits
Number one on the list is always Zen Habits. I am always impressed by how quickly his site loads. Why? Because it’s almost entirely text. I’ve been following this blog since the beginning of January, 2007. So almost from the beginning. Leo featured a sort of interview with me once about my perpetually clean desk, but that article has since been removed. Nevertheless, he did link to me in Ask the readers: Best tips for decluttering? and listed my post first among such sites as FlyLady, CNN, and Lifehacker. So I must give him props there.

Mashable
If you go online at all, you should be familiar with Mashable. If you’re not, you should get familiar with it. Mashable is hard to define, it’s a technology/social media/viral content/Google/YouTube/whatever new trend happens to be going on at the time site. It’s a blog. It’s a perpetual online magazine. It’s an information overload. But amidst the noise, Mashable does a fantastic job of throwing all of the information at you in an organized way.

I really used these two sites more than any others in deciding what I wanted to do. So here’s what I did:

1. Gave search more focus
   I moved the search box from the sidebar to the top of each page. Facebook does it. Mashable does it. Yahoo! does it. Gmail does it. There must be a reason it’s up there. As this blog continues to age, it becomes more and more difficult to find some of the excellent articles buried in the archives. Enter search…
2. Added more excerpts to main page
   I had 5 excerpts per page, which meant there were 100+ pages of archives. Now I’ve made it to where there are 10 per page.
3. Pictures, pictures, pictures
   Whereas the “Popular Posts” widget shows just the titles of the 10 most viewed posts over the last couple of days, I find they often get a little bit stale. I had the “Other Readers Liked” section at the bottom of each article, but decided to move it to the sidebar of every page to add a little bit of color and present some articles repeat visitors may not have seen before. Amazon uses a similar feature. I also expanded the “Related Articles” list at the bottom of each article.
4. More pictures – Avatars
   Since I have quite a few articles written by guest bloggers already on the site, and since more people continue to submit articles, I thought it would be useful to add an author avatar in the header of each article. By the way, if you’ve written something on this site (either an article or a comment), feel free to set up your Gravatar. I also cleaned up the comment section more.
5. Social
   Every article has a Facebook Like button in the header. Additionally, each article has its own Google Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook Share counters. It seems “sharing” and “liking” are two different things on Facebook. I also have found that the Topsy Retweet numbers are more reliable than TweetMeme. Plus the colors fit in a little better with my design, so that’s what I’ve gone with. On top of that, each article has a “Share the Knowledge” section at the bottom, encouraging sharing on Delicious, Diigo, StumbleUpon, Technoratri, Tumblr, and Digg.
6. Follow me
   Along the same lines,  I moved the Social Media icons. You know, the ones that tell you to subscribe or be a fan or follow me or whatever. Well, I took them out of the main sidebar and placed them at the bottom of each article. Conventional wisdom says to place an RSS icon “above the fold” on your blog. I have come to believe that blog readers are pretty smart and if they want to subscribe because of an article they read, they’ll see the big orange icon at the bottom of the article and subscribe if they want to. Speaking of smart readers…
7. Comments
   I have struggled at times with comments simply because moderation was such a chore. I turned them off this spring and had some of the most liberated time I’ve ever had when checking email. But I missed knowing that this blog is helping people. So I begrudgingly turned them back on this summer. Here are some of the things I’ve done to try to fight this:
   1. Removed the section of the comments that allowed a reader to include a URL – Most of my comment spam was coming because people wanted to get a link from this site to theirs.
   2. Removed any links in the displayed comments from previous readers – Before I removed the URL section, hundreds of spam comments made it through the filters. Instead of individually moderating these, I chose rather to simply remove the link back to any site. I hated doing this because so many of you out there do have sites that deserve the link, but my commenting headaches were not worth that. Sorry…
   3. Removed all trackbacks/pingback displays – Again, this was a spam prevention strategy. A bit extreme, but I felt it was necessary if I was going to be serious about turning comments back on.
   4. Reader moderation options – If you happen to be reading through a comment and come across something that doesn’t look right, simply click on the “Flag this comment as inappropriate” link inside the comment box. This “crowdsourcing” concept will help me utilize my reader base to help with the moderating of comments. It is one of the things that convinced me to open them back up, so I’m excited about it!
   5. Conditional comment display in the header – I love the idea of displaying a graphical notification with the comment count on an article, but I always hate seeing the number 0 there. It’s such a lonely number. So I played around with PHP If statements and got it working. If an article has a comment, a little comment count icon appears. If not, it’s not there.
   6. Cleaned up the Gravatar display for comments – I’ve never really been happy with the way that the comment avatars display. Until now. I finally got it to do what I wanted it to do! If you care, the primary thing that allowed me to do this was opening up beyond the sidebar and using the entire width of the blog for the comments.
   7. Integrated Twitter oAuth support – You can now use your Twitter account to login and post a comment, with the option of tweeting out that you posted a comment. I am working on Facebook integration, but it will take a good bit of more work so I can update my database to a more recent version of PHP.
   8. Cleaned up the Comment Submission form – I actually did this last night. Now once you enter an email address, your Gravatar displays in a preview box. If you want to change it, simply click on the link provided and set it up.
8. Digging through the archives
   I have been going through many of the old articles primarily looking to add images to them. I also am eventually going to work my way through and clean up the tags some, but that is a pretty huge undertaking that I just don’t see as a priority. Really, the search box is the best way to find stuff!
9. Tags
   It’s kind of frustrating to me that WordPress didn’t have tags at all back in February of 2007 when I first started my blog. They were a bit late to the game there, and when they implemented them, I basically just used them like categories. So as I said above, my tags are a royal mess on this site. I’ve just never really wanted to bother to go back and really fix them. I like categories and search. But I know a lot of people like them, so I’ve been trying to make them more useful. Toward that end, I put a little box at the end of each article reminding me basically that I have neglected them for too long. It also serves the reader by letting you click through to see other articles that are similarly tagged.
10. Footer: The final frontier
    The footer is the final section that I want to address from a design standpoint. I plan to eventually add some cool graphical navigation stuff but it’s not a hugely pressing issue either.

So there you have it. A quick and simple guide to navigating this site somewhat. Let me know what your thoughts are on the “new design”/modifications. Comments are open for business!

Also, if you have any questions how I did certain things, I would be more than happy to share with you the tricks. At least if you’re using WordPress…

You are currently reading the 501st article on this site
Over the past few years of my time in the blogosphere, I’ve seen some blogs come and go. I’ve seen some great ones start up and hopefully even been able to send out some positive blogging encouragement to some of these folks in the process, either via Twitter or by linking to their blogs. Whatever the case, it’s always encouraging to see new bloggers start into the effort.

With all things, there are numerous people who start out but simply fail to follow through. It’s just the human propensity we have for starting something new and moving on after it loses its newness. I’ve had times in my blogging where the thought crossed my mind and even camped out for a while.

Teachers quit teaching.
Twitter accounts remain untweeted.
Bloggers quit blogging.
MySpace (thankfully) shuts down.

What’s that? MySpace hasn’t shut down yet? Wow…I guess sometimes you just need to keep beating the dead horse even after it’s double-dead, and then some more…

Anyway, back on topic. I want to introduce you to a few EduBlogs that have recently started up in the last year or so that appear to show some promise. Hopefully these bloggers can continue their blogging journey!

Teacher Reboot Camp
Written by  Shelley Terrell, Teacher Reboot Camp‘s mission statement is:

To “collaborate on strategies for engaging all our students through effective instructional methods and technology.”

Fantastic stuff. She started her blog in May of 2009, but really has amped it up as we got into 2010. I have enjoyed a lot of the links that she shares on Twitter as well as reading her blog as I get opportunities to do so. The blog lists some of her favorite posts, some of my favorites are:

• Do We See the Beauty in Every Student?
• How Do We Nurture Passion?
• PRESTO: How to Build A PLN Using Twitter

MusicEdMajor.net
MusicEdMajor.net is, as its name implies, a blog geared toward college Music Education majors. It fills an incredible void for many music students where there are plenty of EduBlogs out there, as well as plenty of Music blogs. But many of them relate more toward the administrative side of things. College music students really don’t need to know much about Bad and good ways to defend social foundations and reform teacher education or Additional thoughts on the Wiimote Whiteboard when they are about go to observe a middle school band rehearsal. Both are fantastic in the right time and place, but having a list of 5 Low-Stress Ways to Stay Musically Active Over the Summer may end up more beneficial to the music student. Other favorites from the site include:

• Top Apps for Music Ed Majors
• How to Stay Productive: Part 2-Keep a Calendar
• Practicing 101 for Music Ed Majors

Classroom Book of the Week
While this won’t apply to teachers of many disciplines, Classroom Book of the Week looks like a resource that pretty much any general elementary teacher can find useful at least once in a while. Author Kate Narita describes the site:

I am an author, curriculum guide consultant, and a teacher. Each week this blog features a Multiple Intelligences unit for the primary or intermediate elementary classroom based on a recently published children’s book. Author interviews include information about the writing process and the Six Traits of Writing.

She also includes a shipping address for readers to submit books for review as well as email contact info to encourage follow-up questions and offer her services to help develop curricula.

Look at my happy rainbow!
Matthew Halpern lives the perfect bloggable life ever! Hence, Look at my happy rainbow exists.

I’m a man. I teach kindergarten. Doing the second makes me better at the first. I follow the Responsive Classroom philosophy. I try to find the joy in teaching and something to love about each sprout (not always easy, but that is my job). People say teaching is the hardest job you’ll ever love – it’s true for me. A friend of mine told me there is a special place for kindergarten teachers in heaven… I get to experience a little bit of that everyday I’m in the classroom already so I consider myself doubly lucky.

Though he doesn’t have any “Best of” type lists, I just ran through some of the interesting tags and selected a few posts that just SOUND cool!

• Pirates.
• Forever Young (or how teaching kindergarten is like an 80′s song).
• Sometimes you have to do the Happy Dance.

i want to teach in texas
i want to teach in texas is a brand new blog (started in March) written by April Michelle Floyd, who appears to be a college student. I just found this blog and I think I really like it (not only because she’s in Texas, but that definitely helps her cause)! It’s fun. I love this post entitled 3 Words That Describe Education:

As I look around the blog a little more, I realize that most of what she has posted are just reposts of other site’s stuff. Again, the blog is very young and she has some good ideas. Hopefully with time, April will refine her writing and focus more on quoting small segments of the articles and then adding her own thoughts rather than just cutting and pasting. I’m giving her the befit of the doubt though, since I really do like the direction she’s headed…

So what about you?
What’s your favorite fledgling blog out there? Share in the comments…

I am leaving tomorrow after school to go to the annual Texas Music Educators Association clinic/convention in San Antonio. I’m not taking my laptop with me and won’t be accessing a computer besides my iPhone, so I will be away from blogging for the rest of the week. I don’t want to spend a long time here, but I thought I would note that Thursday marks the third anniversary of So You Want To Teach?

This has been a fun project. I’ve learned a whole lot about web development, myself, teaching, and the art of blogging through the building and maintaining of this site. It has become more of a burden than I ever imagined, but I do enjoy the opportunity to share my thoughts with tens of thousands of visitors each month. I’ve learned a lot as a result of the blog and the comments that many of you have posted or emailed.

Whereas in months past I would have asked you to leave a comment, I recently realized that comments were beginning to overwhelm me and were draining my time, so I removed comments from my blog. Instead of asking you to leave comments, I’ll kindly ask you to blog, tweet, or Facebook about something that you’ve really enjoyed about SYWTT. Share a link to a particular article you appreciated or to the homepage. Heck, you can Google Buzz about it too if you want.

This evening, I decided to do something I’ve been toying around with since the summer. I finally deleted comments from my blog entirely.

Where it all began
I began this blog as a hobby back in the spring of 2007, shortly after I began to learn more about the potential that blogs held. Life was much simpler back then. For one thing, I taught 6th grade beginning band only. My obligations outside of school were minimal, and the amount of time I spent in front of the computer was similarly low. Life was much simpler back then.

I long for that again.

Where it has taken me
In the fall of 2007, I moved to the middle school where I became responsible for one of two performing bands. This shift meant that in addition to all of my previous responsibilities, I was now going to football games, pep rallies, and parades (in addition to the same high school football games, marching competitions, and other duties). In addition, I now have after school sectionals most days until 5 or later, as well as taking the band to the UIL Concert & Sight-Reading contest in the spring.

The winter of 2007-2008
The blog (and the interaction with readers) was something that really helped me when the other band director at my campus had a stroke in December 0f 2007. He was out for three months, and the encouraging comments I got from readers of SYWTT (in addition to church and frantic phone calls to my mother and friends) were immeasurably helpful in getting me through that experience.

Beginning in the spring of 2008, I noticed a sharp drop in the number of posts I was writing on the blog as well as a sharp increase in the number of comments. This came as a result of natural growth of the site, but I soon realized it was too much to keep up with.

During the summer and fall of 2008, untold hundreds of spammy comments were undoubtedly allowed to be posted on the blog simply because I fell down on the job of moderating them. There were a handful of great ones, and I enjoyed the insight I got from many, so I really didn’t think anything of it.

Google enters the fray
I noticed sometime in November that my Google PageRank had been up as high as 5, but it was now hovering somewhere in the 1-2 range. Traffic was still coming from Google, but not as much as I feared it could be. I worked to take care of that some, but really have been unable to bring it back up above 3 again. As a point of reference, my Twitter profile currently has a PageRank of 6.

Though my blog is not huge by any standards, my full-time job as a middle school band director takes up a lot of my focus, and the increased comment load as well as the increasing demand on my attention as far as moderation goes, began to be too much.

Problems compounded
This past fall, I got an email from my hosting company telling me that they were getting a bunch of spam emails being sent out through my blog’s comment functionality. After a few weeks working with them (including a complete shutdown of the site for a day or two), I finally made some changes, installed some plugins, and got them happy again. But comment spam continued flowing.

DISQUS
I installed the DISQUS comment system in October of last year, but soon began to notice an increased time spent loading the pages on the site. Last week, I posted about this, got a comment and subsequent email from some of the people over there, but really didn’t get much of a solution and the whole thing has been bothering me for a while.

The final straw
Yesterday, I bought the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook from ProBlogger. He had a special running that also included a few podcasts. I was listening to Leo Babauta talking about the reasons he removed comments from Zen Habits and it really struck a nerve with me. It’s been building for a while, but this was really why I decided to do it.

I also listened the Neil Patel talking about why he keeps comments on Quick Sprout. I would love to be able to do that and respond to every single comment that comes in, but I also remember that he is a full-time web worker. I’m not. I have other priorities and the blog is taking up too much of my time.

Plus I’m on a mission to run a 5K this spring. Oh yeah, and hopefully lose 50-100 extra pounds in the process. Can’t be sitting on my butt in front of the computer all day when I should be out training, now can I?

Taking up too much of your time? But you rarely post any more!
While it’s true that I rarely post, I am being forced to delete comment spam and really dig through a lot of other administrative tasks that I don’t want to do. I want to get back to that place where I’m really passionate about doing this stuff again.

That may involve some changes in the near future. That may involve me launching one or two new blogs soon. I will most definitely include me spending less time doing blog administration and more time blogging. I’m sure I have a bunch of unfinished blogging projects that I started out at one time or another and need to finish. 2010 is the year of completion and discipline for me.

Will you ever turn comments back on?
I reserve the right to turn the comments back on any time, and who knows, maybe I will again. If I do, I still have all 2,500+ comments saved in the WordPress database, so if I ever decide to flip the switch, they will all be restored. But I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you…

I tried the alternative comment system DISQUS for a few months here and have just grown tired of it. Since installing it in October, I have noticed:

1. A decrease in the number of relevant comments on my blog
2. An increase in the number of spammy comments that get approved
3. An increase in the number of complaints about the difficulty of commenting on my blog
4. A substantial increase in the the time it takes for pages on my site to load

I turned off DISQUS commenting this morning and while I lost a number of comments that have been posted to my site, I also notice that some of the comments posted on DISQUS actually were preserved. I also did some speed testing of my site and was blown away by the results. In fact, I turned DISQUS on again to confirm. All stats are provided by WebSiteOptimization.com.

Site stats with DISQUS installed
Global Statistics

Object Size Totals

External Objects

Download Times*

Site stats without DISQUS installed
Global Statistics

Object Size Totals

External Objects

Download Times*

Clearly a great improvement. The home page loads 11 seconds faster for a 56K reader than it did with DISQUS comments installed. There are only 37 HTTP requests rather than 64. This may not make much sense to most of my regular readers, but it’s dramatic improvement for such a simple change. Even at a super fast T1 connection, 5 seconds may not seem too impressive but when you consider that the site loads in 60% of the time it previously took, it’s a pretty solid improvement.

If anyone from DISQUS is listening, I love the comment system, but don’t like sacrificing user experience for convenience. I’m hoping one day to find the same cool comment functionality that the service provides without the crazy slow load times.

Over 10,000 of the visits to SYWTT this year came from nine sources. The top three alone actually sent me over 6,200 visitors. This is incredible, and I need to thank all of you for the help you’ve provided me.

Top referring blogs
These are the blogs that have sent the most visitors my way in 2009. I cannot thank these people enough for taking the time out of their schedule in one way or another and finding something on my site that resonated enough with them to send their readers my way. You people rock!

1. It’s Not All Flowers And Sausages
2. TutorFi.com with the post 50 Reasons Why I Enjoy Being A Teacher
3. Guy Kawasaki with the post 20 free tech tools for teachers and students
4. Learn-gasm with the post 100 Incredible Inspiring Blog Posts for Educators
5. Shmoo2 with the post The Quit Teaching Diet
6. Campus Grotto with the post 10 Ways to Stay Busy over Break
7. Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day with the post 5 great resources to find out about Google Wave
8. I Want To Teach Forever
9. The Cornerstone
10. Learn Me Good
11. Social Media Explorer with the post Determining The Top Education Blogs
12. Zen Habits with the post Ask the readers: Best tips for decluttering?
13. Successful Teaching
14. The ASCD Community Blog with the post “So You Want To Teach?” Prevents Listlessness
15. Joanne Jacobs
16. ProBlogger with the post Write A List Post [Day 2 - 31DBBB]

Other referrers
What is amazing is that these blog posts alone sent over 7,000 visitors my way. There were other referrers besides blogs that sent plenty of readers over here as well. The top 5 are:

1. Google Reader - by far, this is the top. Most of SYWTT’s visitors come from reading a blog article, and most of those come directly from Google Reader. At least that was the case in 2009. Times are changing…
2. Twitter – While Google Reader and other RSS readers and email sites are among the top now, I am all but certain this will change drastically in the coming year. Twitter will absolutely crush all other (current) means of information sharing. Facebook will be number 2.
3. Delicious – Far and away my favorite of the old school social bookmarking tools, Delicious still remains among the top of referrers to the blog. I’ve been trying for months to find a way to add a badge and a simple way to bookmark articles like I have for Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t blog and you don’t Twitter, any time you can bookmark one of my articles in Delicious, it will help out tremendously.
4. TeacherLingo – Though it doesn’t send stuff my way much any more, this site was greatly beneficial in the early days of building my blog. If you are a new edublogger, sign up over there and get to work!
5. Alltop.com – Guy Kawasaki’s brainchild, Alltop is a sort of hub for blogs and news items of a related topic. More info can be found here.

All in all, 2009 was a great year for the growth of my blog, and I owe a ton of that to these (and other) referrers. Thanks again for helping get the word out there and sharing with your friends.