What My New Website Will Contain

Photo shot of me by Matt Litton at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles this past June.

The past 14 years of blogging have been a relationship to my readers I'm not giving up. I'm only asking you to follow my new site. I'll type the link to it into this post as soon as the site is live, which might be Monday, but things have been behind plans of recent. I know many of you by name. You who regularly read the blog. Many more of you remain unknown to me, except that we're all readers, most of us anglers, and likely the majority of us New Jersey residents, so you're not as unknown to me as someone from another planet! 

The blog on the new site is divided into three categories: Fishing, Literature and Philosophy, Photography. I encourage you to explore the whole site, though if you're only interested in the Fishing blog category, you know what to expect, though I'll get to a new feature in a moment. There's also a Home page (Bruce Edward Litton); an About page with a very long and difficult essay; a Books page with another long essay about my coming book The Microlight Quest about trout fishing, the value of recreation, and the life of the mind; a Gallery mostly of photos from Round Valley Reservoir when low water created landscape photo opportunities; a Contact page; and of course, the Blog dropdown, including, separately, all the blog posts and those three categories. 

In addition to the same blogging I do now, the Fishing category will include, every two or three weeks, maybe monthly, an article originally published in New Jersey Federated Sportsmen's News. 

When I sell an article, I'm really selling the rights for it's first publication and usually selling exclusivity for a six month period thereafter. After six months, I'm free to publish the article anywhere else, the copyright mine. In the case of The Fisherman magazine, since every article I get published there is published online as well as in the print and member's only issues, I not only don't want to make a mess of things by duplicating text to confuse the googlebot and getting penalized by turn; my genuine respect for the magazine's online coverage amounts to their efforts being more than enough. The Fed, as I affectionately call the News, does not publish articles online. Members get an electronic issue of the News in members-only PDF form. Naturally, many members know nothing about my blogging, as I don't advertise it, and besides, they're getting my articles freshly written. 

Although these articles are more and less evergreen, I believe a distinct value exists in getting word firsthand. As lasting as the value of an article may be, often the highlights involve local events that happened recently. For example, the first blog post of the new website's Fishing category is "Cold Snaps for Baiting Walleye." The original published in the Fed in 2019, a passage includes a quoted exclamation from one of the people at Dow's Boat Rentals about the overheated October weather. Spoken only a year prior, the words felt fresh in a way they don't now. That quote might also impart to you an epiphany of the life at Dow's, only now they're no longer renting boats to the general public. 

Besides being called the Fed, it's called the News for a reason.

Some of you who follow my blog probably don't visit twice a week or weekly. Regularity lapses and a month-and-a-half might have passed. Members of NJFSC get the News monthly. It's always there for them at about the same time each month, and my articles aren't the only ones. As much as I'd like to blog one of the articles every two weeks on the nose, I know my life isn't regular enough to do that. Another reason getting the Fed isn't a bad idea.

I don't mean to downplay the added value of feature articles I'll post every month or so. I do want to show, however, that I'm not cheating the Fed. First and foremost, the particular features of mine they publish characterize that publication, not my website. First and foremost, I'm writing them for the Fed. Though I'm altogether in my rights to publish the articles as I please after first use, they would be in theirs to refuse to publish me, if I were to keep publishing articles I do for them on my site. If they were to disapprove, though my argument isn't done yet. Nevertheless, it's not an easy decision. Of over 4000 readers of the Fed each month, however, regular readers of my blog among them are only a small fraction of that number. 

A relative few of the formerly Fed articles published on my new website will find a lot of readers that have done Google searches. Most of them, it's likely, readers hearing about NJFSC for the first time, and some of them will go on the NJFCS website and learn about the organization. A few may join. I'm certainly doing them no disservice in this respect. After all, there are good writers for the News you can't read anywhere else, and they have regular columns amounting to interest generated every month. Secondhand exposure of my articles to the internet is therefore a benefit to NJFSC, and I hope I've argued well that first use and regularity are values for NJFSC I can't replicate on my website.

About Litton's Fishing Lines, it will not only remain online; you can access any of the posts you want to visit. I will be going back to some of the older ones and updating them. My hope is that some of them no longer indexed by Google will be reindexed.

I certainly have enjoyed blogging on this platform. It's not only very easy to work with--easier than working on my new site--the Search Engine Optimization is fantastic. My posts rank well, and though most of my them are obscure by nature, dealing with important information that nevertheless doesn't make headlines, they get indexed and rank where at least some readers find them. 

How many readers would I have expected to click on the post entitled "Shipetuaken Creek"? It's been only a couple of years since I posted it, and I watched as Google searches mounted to a present total of 240, though 40 or 50 of those came from regular followers during the first couple of weeks of the post's existence. Shipetauken Creek is an obscure little waterway, and yet there are people out there interested in it.

 

The Book