OK, so all my hard work of the last 20 months (OK, goofing off, but still…) has earned me an audience of about 200 people a day who actually visit my site and wonder when I’m going to get to the point.
OK, I’m getting there.
A useful Web site about hiking should answer a few basic questions: where should I go, what should I take, and what’ll I see when I get there? An occasionally diverting blog about hiking would link to cool stuff when one gets the urge, link to other people’s blogs to get them interested in one’s own, and talk about gear when there’s nothing better to talk about. Mostly, this site has been the latter. But really, it needs to be the former.
When I started Two-Heel Drive, I had tons of experience blogging, but not very much experience actually hiking. Now I feel like I’ve got enough experience to write with a smidgen of authority on one subject: where to hike in Northern California, specifically in the Bay Area. Actually, I’ve only hiked a small fraction of the trails around here, so I’ve got lots to work with.
So from here on in I’m going to focus on places to go in the Bay Area and stuff I think might interest folks who hike around here. People around here seem to have lots of money and love to go on expensive hiking vacations, so perhaps I’ll take a look at some of those.
I probably won’t have as many daily updates, but the weekly hike write-ups will continue.
This is gonna be great fun, I promise!
Hi Tom,
While I will be sad to see the “digest” format go, it sounds like this will be a great project. And I can say, your previous hike write-ups definitely helped when we visited the Bay area recently.
May I suggest (and I don’t know if this is a feasible idea but…) since you’re focusing on local hiking, maybe do a semi-regular feature of a dayhike accessible by public transportation? Speaking as a newbie hiker in another big city, I love finding peoples’ personal accounts of car-less hiking. Just a thought.
Good luck, and can’t wait to read the new adventures.
Thanks for the moral support, and the idea about public transportation is an excellent one.
I’m working up a post on where I think this will go.
Tom’s original focus, which seemed to be along the lines of “all things hiking” seemed a pretty ambitious beat for a guy with a demanding day job.
My writing instructors always told me to “write about what you know”. I think, by moving Two heel Drive a little more in that direction, Tom has more than a little chance of advancing from great to excellent.
Tom’s skill of documenting his own experiences in a light but thoughtful writing style is wasted on endless lists of links to other sites. As audience, we don’t need any more of the 3- and 4-times removed reporting done by many blogs.
I look forward to more first-hand reporting in Two heel Drive. Good luck, Tom!
From a blogging standpoint, the idea of linking to other sites is to build an audience and motivate them to continue posting to their blog, with them, hopefully, sending their readers my way.
Also, cut-and-paste linking to other sites is less work than constructing insightful commentary. The day I linked to the astounding number of UK backpacking blogs, it started to become apparent that the model of monitoring and highlighting hiking blog content wasn’t sustainable for somebody with a day job.
Inevitably, people come to your blog to find out what you have to say, and inevitably, you write better stuff on topics where you have first-hand knowledge.