My best posts that got no attention

Philip Brewer — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 12:00:37 +0000

A few times I've written a post that I thought was good, but that seemed to vanish into the blogosphere without a trace. On my two-year anniversary of writing for Wise Bread, I'm going to link to five of them and suggest that you take a look at them. For a few long-time readers it may be a second look. (But, judging from the number of reads these got, not many.)

A year ago I wrote an anniversary post called What I've been trying to say that tried to synthesize a unified message out of the posts I'd written in my first year of posting. As the time approached to write a second anniversary post, though, I realized that I was still pretty happy with that summary of my basic message--I didn't have a lot to add.

So, you're getting this instead.

And did you do it with respect?

Due to a posting glitch, this particular post never got its turn at the top of the front page, so a lot of people never saw it--and I've always been bummed, because I thought it was really good.

I never liked the aphorisms "Always do your best" or "Anything worth doing is worth doing well," because I never found them to be useful guides when I was trying to decide what to do or how hard to try. A while back, though, I found an alternative that works for me. That's what this post is about: And did you do it with respect?

Fix energy in tangible form

I wrote this long before last summer's energy price spike, but it didn't seem to draw much interest. I thought it was important, though--and I thought the energy spike might have given readers a new perspective--so, when energy prices fell again, I wrote a new post on the same topic: Invest some of this cheap energy.

If you want to do one thing that won't cost much now but will raise your standard of living for years to come, this is it. Energy prices are rising again, but it's not too late to permanently capture some of this still-cheap energy: Fix energy in tangible form.

What would da Vinci have paid?

There are certain things (like fountain pens and mechanical watches) that used to be incredibly expensive miracles of engineering--but nowadays something as good or better can be made so cheaply people give them away for free. The point of this article was to get people to think about the implications, but I guess it looked a lot like a "deals" post--and as a "deals" post, it's a pretty lame one. So I suppose it's no surprise that it didn't get many reads or comments. Give it a second chance as a "think" piece: What would da Vinci have paid?

How low interest rates might save the world

This last one, I guess, was just too wonky--it's about present value and the discount rate. But present value is the key to making smart economic decisions--both personal economic decisions (like how much more to pay for something that'll last twice as long as the cheap one) and big policy decisions (like whether interest rates are too low). Understand this and every economic decision gets easier: How low interest rates might save the world

You don't have to fear a series of posts like this--those are the ones that I thought were worth more attention than they got. I'll be back to writing new posts as usual in a couple of days.

This article is from Philip Brewer of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

da vinci

My best posts that got no attention

And did you do it with respect?

Fix energy in tangible form

What would da Vinci have paid?

How low interest rates might save the world