Hiatus Disease – Are You At Risk?
Posted by 0rion on November 18th, 2007 - 8:30 pm
Every year Hiatus Disease claims the lives of thousands of blogs. In fact, it is the leading cause of blog mortality worldwide.
It can quickly turn fatal if left untreated, and thus should be taken extremely seriously. If you or someone you know may be suffering from Hiatus Disease, don’t wait. Seek professional help immediately.
Fortunately, Hiatus Disease is almost always treatable if diagnosed in time, and the long term impairment effects are usually minimal. Even if you have not contracted Hiatus Disease, you may still be at risk. Learn about the symptoms and take the short quiz below to find out whether you should be concerned.
This young girl is currently battling against the ravages of Hiatus Disease. Don’t let yourself end up like this.
Symptoms
Known symptoms of Hiatus Disease include:
- Reduced frequency of updates
- Irregular or arrhythmic posting
- Lack of creativity
- Increasing reliance on over-the-counter gimmick posts
- Frequent excuses for the above
- Loss of enthusiasm and enjoyment in blogging
- A decrease in blogging stamina, and an inability to achieve and maintain solid reader interest
This is not an exhaustive list, as the symptoms of Hiatus Disease are varied and elusive, but these can serve as an early warning sign for the condition.
Known Causes
Waning interest in the blog’s subject matter of choice, frequently referred to in other medical texts as “moving on in life” or “burning out”, is the leading cause of Hiatus Disease among bloggers today. The acquisition of a boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse is also known to trigger the condition. This strain is particularly tenacious and left untreated can quickly become life-threatening.
Job pressures, IRL drama, and other family related issues are also known to contribute to development of HD. In addition, many younger bloggers are at risk, as school final exam periods are a frequent cause. Entering or leaving university, and the accompanying lifestyle changes, can also trigger the disease.
The presence of other medical conditions can dramatically increase the risk of contracting Hiatus Disease, as well as worsening the severity of an existing case.
Don’t let Hiatus Disease catch you unaware! Know your risk factor!
Are You At Risk of Contracting Hiatus Disease?
Take the following quiz to find out whether you should be concerned about Hiatus Disease:
For each question, simply choose the appropriate answer, and then add the corresponding number of points to your total.
#1. On average, how many times per week do you post?
A. Fewer than once per week – 5 points
B. Once or twice – 2 points
C. 3 to 10 times – 1 point
D. More than 10 times – 3 points
#2. How long is your average blog entry?
A. Fewer than 200 words – 5 points
B. 200 to 1000 words – 2 points
C. 1000 to 3000 words – 1 point
D. Over 9000 More than 3000 words (Holy cow!) – 3 points
#3. On average, how many comments do your entries receive?
A. 0 comments – 5 points :’(
B. 1 to 5 comments – 3 points
C. 5 to 25 comments – 2 points
D. Over 25 comments – 1 point
#4. How long have you been blogging?
A. Less than 3 months – 5 points
B. 3 months to 1 year – 2 points
C. 1 to 3 years – 3 points
D. More than 3 years – 1 point
#5. Have you or anyone in your immediate family previously contracted Hiatus Disease?
A. No – 1 point
B. Yes – 5 points
#6. How often do you feel stressed?
A. Never – 1 point
B. Occasionally – 2 points
C. Frequently – 3 points
D. OMG ALL THE TIME!! – 5 points
#7. Are you married? (closely related to the previous question)
A. No – 1 point
B. Yes – 5 points
#8. How old are you?
A. Under 18 – 5 points
B. 18 to 24 – 3 points
C. 25 to 35 – 2 points
D. 35+ – 1 point
#9. What is your name?
A. Cory Doctorow – minus 10 points
B. Anything else – 0 points
#10. What is your quest?
A. To have fun! – 0 points
B. To save the world! – 2 points
C. To become an internet supastar~! – 1 point
D. To make ridiculously large sums of cash money! – 5 points
8 – 14 points = Low risk. Your blog is extremely healthy. Keep on truckin’!
15 – 23 points = Normal risk. Continue to maintain a healthy blogging lifestyle and you should be fine.
24 – 32 points = Elevated risk. Consider implementing some of the suggestions from the “Prevention Steps” section below to improve your blog’s lifespan.
33 – 45 points = Extreme risk. Seek medical attention immediately! If your blog hasn’t already dropped dead, it’s likely on life support. At this point, you should be open to the possibility of euthanasia as the most humane option for your suffering companion, since what you wrote was probably extremely boring and emo to begin with.
Want to learn more about what behaviors may be putting you at risk? The following is a brief explanation of each question in the quiz:
#1. Maintaining a regular posting schedule is critical for every blog. More posts = more readers. Don’t get carried away, however. Some hardened bloggers are able to manage consistently posting more than once every day, but these individuals are few and far between. Many an over-exuberant blogger has burned out by posting too much, too fast.
#2. Short gimmicky posts or excuses won’t sustain a blog for long when faced with a content drought. For the same reason as #1, however, don’t get carried away writing too much all at once. This is also known to lead to the development of a highly contagious reader condition known as TL;DR Disorder.
#3. Comments have often been described as the lifeblood of a blog. Bloggers who never get any are at highly increased risk of HD.
#4. New blogs are as short-lived as mayflies, but if they make it more than 3 to 6 months, there’s a decent chance they’re here to stay. Interestingly, according to some statistics, blogs in the 1 to 3 year age range are more likely to contract HD, as life changes and other hobbies crowd out blogging. Once a blog has survived past the 3 or 4 year mark, however, it’s likely to still be around for a long, long time.
#5. Even if a blogger comes back from hiatus, the site may have lost a significant portion of its traffic in the interim. This can lead to a vicious cycle of HD, eventually leading to the death of the blog.
#6. Regardless of what your goal is, blogging should be fun. Bloggers who have a lot of stress in their lives are among the first to fall to Hiatus Disease.
#7. Blogging is a fairly high maintenance hobby, and people with spouses and children generally have a very hard time prioritizing blog over family.
#8. The younger you are, the more likely you are to go through significant changes in lifestyle, hobbies, and preferences. Older bloggers have generally figured out what the heck they’re doing in life and settled into a routine, ironically making them less likely to succumb to the disease than their junior counterparts.
#10. Self explanatory, I hope. If you get the reference you can probably take off another point for the nerd factor, as well.
If left unchecked, HD can snowball into a vicious cycle of hiatus after hiatus.
Prevention Steps
If you have Hiatus Disease, or are at risk of contracting Hiatus Disease, don’t worry! There are still plenty of ways to combat it.
The easiest prevention method is to branch out and cover other topics that you don’t normally blog about. Establishing a good niche is important for every blog, but getting out of it from time to time is equally important. Mix it up and write about something different from time to time to help keep things fresh for both you and your audience.
Another closely related method is to get out of your own blog more frequently. Check out other sites and see what’s going on. They don’t even have to be in the same genre as your blog. The internet is a big place; there’s lots out there to see.
Not only will visiting and commenting on other sites help raise the visibility of your own blog, it will also aid you in finding interesting things to write about. In fact, interaction with the online community is one of the best known methods of preventing Hiatus Disease.
Finally, when in doubt, get yourself a co-blogger or two to help pick up the slack. Or, if you aren’t able to con recruit dedicated bloggers of your own, try collaborating with another existing blogger on a joint topic. Bouncing ideas off another writer and having different perspectives not only makes it more fun when writing, it’s also more enjoyable for readers, and can result in lots of beneficial cross-pollination traffic.
Remember, don’t be afraid of Hiatus Disease! It’s at least as scared of you as you are of it. Or wait…maybe that’s for bears. Well anyway, now you know the HD warning signs, and what to look out for.
Forewarned is forearmed, and that’s half an octopus!
Apparently I fall under “normal risk.”
You should probably get bonus points (well, subtracted points, I guess) for generating or contributing to controversy ^_^
This needs to have one of those commercials with sad emo anime characters, as a narrator informs the viewer that “Hiatus Disease hurts… it hurts you and those around you.” and sad music plays =D. Don’t forget to mention possible side effects of implementing your methods to combat HD.
Also, octopi don’t have arms, they have tentacles.
15
Love your style. Funny and informative at the same time as well as a great comparison.
Potemayo also reminds me what kind of pain is brought when the flu comes… but that’s slightly off-topic.
Other rules of thumb: Remain positive, transmit cheerfulness and passion to the readers and don’t panic when you don’t receive many comments for one precise article.
Also never systematically blame co-bloggers because of lower visitor frequenting.
That’s all I can think about.
*Random note* Thanks for converting me to Moyashimon-ism!
I fall under normal risk, but I guess thats a good thing
Normal risk here, although I feel I’ve been skirting close to HD for the last couple of months and am only now on the slow road to recovery.
Stangely enough, I got his HD stuff myself. I consider my self recuperating…I think ^^.
That was spot-on satire, although I wonder if anyone at high risk would be reading this to begin with, since you said this and all:
Oh, and I scored a 13.
Great post. Hilarious and in some sad sense, accurate. I’m at normal risk, oddly enough, being a new blog and receiving few comments. But coming off a website where there were no comments, the latter doesn’t concern me much.
Low risk!!!
Write episodic summaries to prevent hiatus lolo..jk, that would probably make things worse for most people.
Hahaha, great post. Haven’t seen something that’s entertaining and vaguely educational in weeks. No miracle drug though, eh? And you could’ve made millions too.
Surprised that having more / longer posts would decrease the risk, as sometimes I find it tough to keep up an every-other-day schedule, but I suppose it heightens your attachment to the blog or something (i.e. it becomes something you can’t just blow off).
And then I realized that you said most of that.
If there’s one thing I’d like to add that’d been thrown around a few times for at-risk bloggers, it’d be not to get too dependent on the readers. I mean, it’s good for a blog to have a wide fanbase and all, but it’s better to write what you want to write, y’know? Kind of goes along with your ‘just have fun’ deal. I like to write about the unpopular things / shows to get the word out there, and just pretend that people are reading. XD
Normal risk, but if I exercise and diet right, it should go down in a flash.
Normal risk, but I’m always at risk at ending my blog. It’s not that I don’t like doing it. I love it, but the whole real life thing really really just gets annoying. Sometimes I feel like writing about something else, but I don’t have time for a second blog let alone the one I already have, so every now and then I think about ending what I have and starting a new one.
Hilarious! Kudos to you sir. There’s a lot of truth in there though – I’ve seen a number of good blogs fall to this plague (YSP Duh and Hopeless Sensei spring immediately to mind) and had a couple of nasty bouts in the past due to house moves and the lack of ‘net connection that went with it.
Now is a good time to shamelessly plug the ABC, a great source of healthy and nutritious editorial content that’s perfect in times of word drought. ^_^
@ Kabitzin
Uh oh, there are side effects?? Why wasn’t I informed of this?!
@ D_Blade
Poor Pote-chan! Being sick is definitely no fun!
@ Owen S
Glad you appreciated the satire.
It’s true that the people most in need of help aren’t as likely to see this article. That’s why you can help today by linking to this post! The power is yours!
@ CCY
I wish I did have a miracle drug to make money off of!
“BULK UP YOUR BLOG TODAY! NOW IN ONLY 74 EASY PAYMENTS OF $29.99!”
@ super rats
Well, don’t forget the number one rule of blogging:
You do not talk about bloggingBlogging should always be fun. Unless, of course, your site is just making you absolutely embarrassing amounts of dosh, in which case it’s probably still fun.So if you’re just not getting into it, maybe it is time to close up shop and start thinking about something different.
@ Martin
Ahh yes, I forgot! I do have a miracle drug!
Suffering from Hiatus Disease? Fear not! There’s help! There’s hope! Join the Anime Blogging Collective today!!!
I’m at normal risk at 15 lol. So you’re telling me if I get a girlfriend that I will contract this disease ^^, how horrible. It is hard to keep coming up with original and read worthy posts, this is one of them. I wonder how long it took you to come up with this post, which seems very detailed and well thought out.
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Pfft. I’ll revive them with CPR.
OMG K-k-k-kissu!
CPR would work fine… Or electricity.
Though, I’m waiting for the day this blog gets active again.
Lol, Operation bring Epic Win back to life? Maybe we’ll need Dr. Black Jack… Or House, whicever works best
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