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Once upon a time, sometime in the heady 'Web 2.0' heyday of mid-2006, I was struck with a flash of inspiration, and decided to start my very own blog - such was the popular thing to do back then. For reasons that escape me I had the domain 'modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk', and such was the venue for my writing.

I was coming to the end of one permanent web design position, and was faced with a bout of freelancing - I think it was the end of full-time employment that inspired me to make an effort more than anything else. Getting popular wasn't my main concern - it was more portfolio-building than anything else, but I was soon to be thrust onto the limelight courtesy of sites such as Digg and Reddit.

And so it was, that Modern Life was to be an unintentional success - 3.6 million page views since its inception, several thousand RSS subscribers, and a healthy four-figure sum in advertising revenue.

Despite all that, the site was not to last: my last post was in December 2007, and Modern Life remains frozen as it was on that date. So why did I stop posting?

The last post coincides with the end of my freelancing sojourn, as I restarted full-time employment in January 2008 - conveniently coinciding with the end of a major freelance job. Starting a new job was a major drain on my time and energy, and it was a blow from which my blogging was to never really recover.

It's only now, some three years later, that I'm finally back in the saddle - so to speak - and writing again. So, the question is, what did I learn from Modern Life - and how do I plan to use my experience to better develop User Interfaced?

The Good

Simplicity is Golden

The one thing I always liked about Modern Life was its simplicity; I tried to be quite restrained in design, streamlining where possible. UI's design is a culmination of that 'bare-bones' ethic, perhaps taken to its extreme. Modern Life was never cluttered, its design intended to be clean, readable, and usable.

At the time of writing, UI is in its infancy and will no doubt see the introduction of more amenities - but I'm approaching the addition of any new features with caution. Simple sites are beautiful.

AdSense Pays, Long-term

Money was never a key concern for my site - I've had a healthy enough income from working as a web designer/developer - but hosting isn't free, so any chance to offset that was definitely a bonus.

It wasn't the most immediate income, but AdSense has been by far the most consistent source of revenue for Modern Life over these last four years. If you're looking for a long-term, slow-burn earnings, AdSense is your best bet.

As UI grows I'll definitely consider AdSense my prime intended source of revenue for the site. As I did with Modern Life, the best way to leverage ad space is to only publish on older articles, meaning that readers who follow the site might never see an advertisement, but those coming from external sources for the first time will. It's a good balance between revenue and intrusion.

Attention Is Easy If You Have The Right Content

In Modern Life's history, I managed to break the front page of Digg some ten or eleven times, yielding the bulk of my peak traffic and laying the foundation for thousands of backlinks.

My commitment to producing good, interesting content where possible was the main factor in this - if you can present a well-structured, strongly visual article on a subject that is both interesting and relevant to your target audience, success will naturally find you.

With UI, I hope to carry on my commitment to producing useful, interesting posts - and if my luck continues, success should find me once more.

It wasn't all good times with Modern Life, though - and some of the more valuable lessons I learned were from the negative experiences I had.

The Bad

Unexpected Popularity is Constricting

I never was a fan of the domain or site name I had chosen for Modern Life - it was too long, and irrelevant to the subject matter. Originally the full title was as per the original URL, 'Modern Life is Rubbish', but I elected to shorten this to 'Modern Life' and redirect the URL to modernl.com.

Getting a decent domain these days is tricky, particularly if you want a short .com address, but I'm reasonably happy with userinterfaced.com, and it has at least some relevance to the topic at hand.

Selling Text Links

I have mixed feelings about text links. On the one hand, they were by far the most lucrative way of making money - but on the other they were borderline-spam, and somewhat restrictive.

The majority of the Text Links I sold were through TextLinkAds, providing a hassle-free interface for selling plain text links to advertisers. Rate of return was good, paying in the region of $80 per month, per slot. I was earning $300-400 per month at my peak via TLA.

I also indulged in some direct selling of links, where I was offered healthy sums of cash for placed links. The majority of these links were on archived articles, but were amongst the most spam-like of links seen on my site.

Although they were well-hidden and none-intrusive, in retrospect I was never too happy with this. I was never dishonest regarding my advertising policy, but I feel you lose some integrity when you sell out portions of your site via text links. They're something that, while lucrative in the short-term, I won't be considering for UI.

Audience Interaction can be Distracting

As much as I appreciated my readership, and loved reading comments and other feedback from them, I found that at times it could have a negative effect on my ability to write. My initial lack of direction and subsequent confusion as to audience expectation made it harder and harder to sate my perfectionism in my work.

I added blog comments at the request of some of my readers, but I found them to be a distraction - they're not only another vector for spam (Akismet was a godsend but they were a drain on time), but added somewhat to the clutter on-site.

With UI, I think it's unlikely I'll ever implement any form of commenting or feedback system - it goes against my bare-bone simplicity philosophy, and is a distraction from writing. Sites such as Digg and Reddit provide a platform for content discussion, with a community already built in, and there's no need to duplicate that functionality with UI.

That's not to say I don't want any feedback whatsoever, of course - but in the case of UI I'm going to favour the more personal, and more easily managed, form of feedback - email. All personal messages are appreciated and gratefully received, but if you want public discussion, take it to your local forum or other community site.

On Perfectionism

For Modern Life, my desire to continually better the previous posts I had made ultimately became crippling, and was ultimately the site's demise.

With UI, I plan to do a lot more writing and a lot less proof-reading and discarding of ideas. Regular posts with a few spelling mistakes and of variable-but-usually-high quality are better than no posts at all.

I expect if User Interfaced ever becomes popular this post will be buried somewhere deep in the archives, but writing is quite a personal thing at heart - and ultimately this post is for my own benefit. I learned a lot from Modern Life, and I plan on taking on board those lessons with User Interfaced, a hopefully more mature - and improved - iteration.

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