Photography by Zesmerelda

Maya Norton, who maintains a blog about Jewish philanthropy, asked for my suggestions on a situation every blogger and webmaster has struggled with at some point.

Have you ever been approached by someone who has, to borrow Maya’s words, “a little too much chutzpah or asks things of you which do not honor the integrity of your blog content?”

In a series of four posts, with a staggered release over the next few weeks, I’ll be providing suggestions for dealing with a number of sticky situations:

• You’re asked to link to content you don’t want to link to.
• You’re asked to add a site to your blogroll/links you don’t want to.
• You need to refuse a request for advice, or a favor, or a review.
• You receive a guest-post submission that doesn’t fit with your blog.

In this post, I want to deal with the first scenario: how to refuse an unsolicited link or a reciprocal link offer without putting a reader offside.

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If there’s a post you’ve been waiting for me to write, or a question you’ve been dying for me to answer on the blog, now’s the time to be audacious and ask for it!

The comments section of this post will be a forum for you to tell me what you’d like to see here and the problems you want some help with.

If I feel I have something to contribute, and that the suggestion bears relevance to a broad selection of readers, the idea will be turned into a post.

You’ll be quoted in that post, and if you have a site of your own, linked to.

Every suggestion will be read and considered. I’m quite excited to see what you guys come up with!

» Leave a suggestion for Skellie.

Another exciting month for Skelliewag.org has drawn to a close. It’s been great to see a number of new faces around the place and it’s a pleasure to welcome almost three-hundred new RSS subscribers into the community.

On a personal note, this month has taught me something I wish I had learned seven years ago: beginning your blog or website on something you ‘think’ will be popular (but is not necessarily your passion), or a topic you feel you can grow into, is one way to ensure you burn-out when the going gets tough.

As a blogger or webmaster you will experience periods of adversity and without a driving passion, not just for your topic, but for the site you are building, it will be difficult to pull through them.

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Apologies to everyone who tried to comment in the last 12 hours or so. It appears comments (and several other features of the site) were temporarily broken by the yes-www Wordpress plug-in.

Plug-in is now deactivated and all is well in the world.

This blog welcomed readers on the 26th July, and a month has passed since then. I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on the content so far and ask you a few questions about where you’d like to see Skelliewag go from here.

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