Nature Blog Network

Meet this week’s featured blogger, Tim Eisele. He’s the blogger behind The Backyard Arthropod Project. Tim is not actually an entomologist, or even an expert in any of the life sciences. He is just a guy who has always been interested in insects, spiders, and other arthropods. He and his family have launched a long-term project to find, photograph, and at least tentatively identify every small crawly thing that is (or could potentially be) found on their property or in their house. Tim’s wife Sandy (referred to in the blog as “S_”), and oldest daughter Samantha (Sam) help out a lot with catching bugs for the blog.

Tim, thanks for joining us. Tell us a little about why you blog and what got you started.

I started out when my wife set up Livejournal accounts for both of us. After playing with it for a while, I realized a blog would be a good tool to do something that I’d been toying with for a long time. I’d been thinking that it would be an interesting project to really closely look at what insects and other arthropods live on a small plot of ground in the Midwest. This would both be a good way to teach myself entomology, and also make a field guide that would be really useful. Most field guides make me a bit crazy, because 90% of the birds, or insects, or fish, or plants that they categorize don’t even live up here. Identifying anything means wading through pages of things that only live in places like Florida to find the few that are actually possibilities.

The main things that were needed for me to actually do this were cheap digital cameras (which make it a lot easier to get pictures of small creatures), and blog software (which is actually a pretty good platform for assembling a book one page at a time). While I started doing it on Livejournal because it was free, after a time I became unhappy with the way that the Livejournal software managed photographs. A friend with experience with this sort of thing pointed out that we could set up an independent site that would let us use software that was better suited to the job, and if it included advertising then we could use the small amount of revenue from ads to at least pay the hosting costs, so it would still be free. And that’s the way it has worked out.

What do you like best about blogging?

The first thing is that it gives me incentive to keep working on the project. Having a strict schedule of writing one page a week keeps me moving. The occasional feedback lets me know that someone is finding it useful, and encourages me to keep at it. Also, when I make a mistake (which is fairly often, since I don’t actually have any formal training in entomology), people who are more expert than me can explain where I went wrong.

The other thing is that it is an activity that all of us can  participate in. Probably 2/3 of the subjects are bugs and spiders that my wife and daughter caught for me, and we end up keeping a lot of them as pets for a time before releasing them.

What’s unique or different about your blog?

I think the main thing is that I am using the blog as a platform on a very focused project to essentially write a cross-indexed on-line book, one page at a time. The blog software makes it easy to organize things, and I use the “categories” feature heavily to make it relatively easy to find particular pages. There is also a manually-created “quick reference guide” page with thumbnail pictures, that is intended to be a useful tool for someone to quickly identify some bug that they have found and go straight to the page where I talk about it.

It actually has more in common with websites like Bug Guide or What’s that bug?, but I think that my narrower focus makes it much more useful to the non-entomologist who has found something crawling around the house or yard that they want to identify.

Tell us about the name of your blog.

Well, I had a clear focus, it was a project to categorize all the arthropods in our back yard, so “Backyard Arthropod Project” seemed pretty obvious. The domain name, on the other hand, is something else. While we were getting ready to migrate to an independent site, the friend helping me had been looking at the pictures and entries that I’d accumulated over the previous six months. A lot of them were things that I’d found in the house, and he said “Now I feel a bit twitchy, and feel like something is crawling in my hair!”. And, of course, the domain “somethingscrawlinginmyhair.com” was available, so we went with it.

How do you promote your blog and attract readers?

Mostly people just hear of it by word-of-mouth and search engines. There have been a few times where I would get a spike in traffic due to getting exposure someplace, but it always falls back to the background again within a few days. The steady growth due to people gradually finding the site seems to be much more permanent. I think that tools to get traffic are fine as far as they go, but the people they bring in really aren’t likely to keep coming back, as they continue using these tools to find the next new thing. A lot of them will move on as soon as something else catches their eye.

The main thing I do is try to write entries that will be useful reference material for people trying to find out what bug they have, and will continue getting picked up by search engines for a long time. Pretty much all of my entries get readers every month through searches, so it seems to be working. Currently, about half of the visitors come in by way of search engines, with most of the other half being people who liked what they saw and keep coming back.

Any comments on being part of the nature blogger community?

I really appreciate the fact that I can get in touch with several other bloggers who are actual experts to help me out with identification, or point me to useful resources that I might not have found on my own.

Has blogging changed how you think about nature? or how you write?

I’d always been kind of aware that there were a lot of small crawling things around, but this has made it more clear just how many of them there are. I have over 100 species so far, and this isn’t even making a dent. One of the startling things is that just about half of the things I post about are actually getting into the house, which means that there are a lot more things crawling around the average home than people expect.

I like the style of writing in a blog, too. I can just explain things as I like, tell any interesting stories about how I captured the bug in question, and add any asides that I think are interesting. This is a big contrast with what I write at work (mostly research proposals and technical papers that have to follow a very rigid format). It’s refreshing.

Any words of wisdom for new nature bloggers?

Well, I think the first thing is blog about something you like, otherwise you won’t have much incentive to keep it up. I’ve been at this over two years now, and it’s still fun and I don’t intend to quit. The next thing is to write things that are the sort of thing that you would read if you found it elsewhere. You can’t please everybody, but if you please yourself, then you know that at least one person likes it. And, even if only one person in a thousand likes the same thing you do, the sheer number of people online means that thousands of other people might like it too.

The next thing is to pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. I think that whether you are daily, twice a week, weekly, or monthly doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether your regular readers will be able to rely on you to update at a particular time. It’s better to be up-front that you only update once a week, than to start out updating daily but then end up missing a bunch of days and effectively post once a week. For that matter, if you keep up a schedule for a while, but then burn out and go on hiatus for a month or so, most of your regular readers will drift off.

The third thing is to keep with it. You most likely won’t get a lot of readers for the first six months or so, because it takes time for word to get around and the search engines to pick you up. This is where making sure it is something you like is important, because if you are expecting immediate fame, adulation, and advertising revenues, it isn’t going to happen. I’d just like to note that as near as I can tell, pretty much all of the blogs that are on the first page of the Nature Blog Network Topslist have been at it for a minimum of two years.

Finally, I often get frustrated on other people’s blogs when I know they have some particular entry that I would like to read again, but I can’t find it. I really recommend multiple and redundant indexing: go ahead and use categories, and tags, and have access by date, and make sure you have a working search function, and if you have time go ahead and make a cross-indexing page. Nobody ever complains about it being too easy to find something.

Anything else you’d like me to ask you, or that you’d like to volunteer without being asked?

If you like people to comment, you should make it as easy as possible. Requiring typekey authentication, or captchas, or other measures just discourages people. Of course, you will get comment spam, but that isn’t actually that hard to weed out manually, and there is pretty good spam-filtering software that can catch pretty much all of it if it gets bad.

And finally, if there is a particular aspect of nature that you always wanted to learn more about, committing yourself to writing about it say, once a week is a great way to do it.

Tim’s favorite posts and pages include:

• Snow Fly
• Ant Lion
• Carpet Beetle Larva
• Wood Tick

and his page on macrophotography using a cheap camera and minimal equipment

Tim, thanks for joining us today.