Do handwritten blogs work?

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  rangachar · Member · Oct 23, 2007 at 10:57 am

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  Hi everyone, I recently started a handwritten blog. I would like to receive your opinion. Please check it out at http://rangachar.wordpress.com . Look forward to hearing from you all! Please let me know if this is a good way to post blogs.

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  cornell · Member · Oct 23, 2007 at 12:23 pm

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  Ok, a couple of things –

  1. This should really be in off-topic as it’s not a support request. Hopefully someone (Trent?) will move it. Ideally in should be in the Plugging thread here:

  https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=7101&page&replies=239

  2. As to the question, I have only seen this done a couple of times. One was about a guy who wrote on till receipts about what he bought and then scanned them. I yawned. The other (I think) was someone with incredible hand-writing skills and it was superb.

  What you should really do, if you want to go down this route is make sure that the text is easily readable. I had a quick look at your blog and quite honestly, I didn’t stick around. It looks like you’re writing either with the mouse or on a graphics pad which is making it a little difficult to read. I also think that the choice of theme could be better. I would go for something with a white background that will not clash with the white in the images.

  You’re going to hit another problem. As every post is in effect an image you are going to have to be very careful about image size and quality. we only get 50mb free storage here at wp.com and that will fill up very quickly with a daily post. Of course, the more images on the page as it loads will also slow down the loading speed of the page which will put off some readers.

  I hope this helps.

  Collin

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  timethief · Member · Oct 25, 2007 at 9:22 pm

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  Unless the handwriting is very clear, even calligraphic, I would not read such a blog. This is not to say that others wouldn’t read it though.

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  markljackson · Member · Oct 25, 2007 at 10:01 pm

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  Interesting blog. It will have very limited appeal. Having said that, if you could get significant numbers you could make it work. The art crowd would go for something like this. You could also do a blog posting for every handwritten note you find, or someone gives you to post.

  Not sure I would rely on handwritten notes for the actual post, other than punctuating a point about a post.

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  thesacredpath · Member · Oct 25, 2007 at 10:10 pm

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  Even with highly optimized images, the 50mb upload limit would go pretty quickly.

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  raincoaster · Member · Oct 25, 2007 at 10:43 pm

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  Agreed.

  Creatively, I like handwriting as an idea for a blog, but it must be CRYSTAL clear, and you do actually have to keep up the standard of content; ie you have to keep writing stuff as interesting as it would be if it weren’t handwritten. Handwriting is a branding thing, really, not a reason in and of itself to visit a blog.

  You could get a Photobucket or Imageshack or Flickr account and host your photos there, though, sparing your bandwidth.

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  authorsanjida · Member · Oct 26, 2007 at 2:11 am

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  @rangachar,
  nice to meet you! :D

  have you heard of the blog “passive aggressive notes”? it’s not entirely a hand-written blog.
  http://passiveaggressivenotes.wordpress.com/
  but it is safe to say that hand-written notes collected from allover is a major part of that blog – without which that blog simply wouldn’t be THAT blog! and does this blog do well? well, yes, it’s one THE blogs at wordpress. :D

  about bandwidth, getting an image hosting site for the job is good. but choose wisely. as they can be slow or even delete your pics. photobucket is good, as long as you don’t post anything that they think is offensive, in which case they delete your images.

  as for wordpress, well, two problems. one can be overcome, one not.
  bandwidth – overcomeable. nobody said you can’t have more than one blog at wordpress. so you could do what i do sometimes. create another blog. upload your images there. save every post as draft.
  so when you need images, the images for your actual blog will be served from the other blog.

  now let’s come to efficiency. wordpress isn’t always great with speedy delivery of images.
  i have seen it that sites that have images hosted at photobucket have faster image appearance. and those who have them at wordpress have to wait a bit for the images.

  if wp could handle image loading quickly, i’d host my images here in different draft-posts-only kind of blogs rather than third-party image hosting services – no matter how good they are.

  as for the concept itself, hand-written blogs could be cool. if you have content that is interesting, i will visit it for sure. i am thinking of doing something similar myself. :D
  you might as well read that post and share your thoughts!

  there will be problems always whatever you do – in one form or another. don’t lose hope.
  all the best!