I'm sorry too, because I didn't intend for my reply to sound negative in any way towards Hubpages or earning an income from it. I need to go read some of your writing to better understand how you do that. I also recognize that my writing isn't as polished as I'd like because I'll always be learning.
But the thing is I am lucky to have found an audience that appreciates how and what I write currently. It feels like here I'm beating myself up by trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. I have given it a considerable amount of time (3years) and effort.
My practice of updating things every year has actually hurt me here because something may have been featured and my updating of it, which does oftentimes involve a lot of re-writing because I now see how it could be better than I did the previous year, causes it to go from featured to 'unfeatured' as it did in this case.
The fact is that I do write really long articles both here and at my site most of the time, because that's just the way I write and because of the topics themselves too. Sometimes I break a piece down in multiple parts at my site...I don't know how that would fly here and I'm afraid to put in the effort to find out. Even then though the parts can be relatively long.
Wordpress does not offer any kind of Automatic Table of Contents, which would help me tremendously. It doesn't appear Hubpages does either. So that leaves me with just an outline and/or good titles. I try to make each section's title useful. I haven't created an outline here because personally I find those useless unless they really function as a true Toc and each entry takes you to that section. And before I updated this it was featured.
My understanding is that using jumplinks is frowned upon here. While it would be very cumbersome to manually create a ToC using the jumplinks method, I can at least utilize jump-links at WordPress to take people to the most important sections.
My article about torrenting is a tricky subject because most people have never heard of it. Added to that is the complication that it isn’t addressing computer problems per se, but rather network problems which are a much more complex topic and which encompass so many more elements than a simple computer problem may. When you throw in the 3rd factor...botnets...which once again is not very well recognized phenomenon and you begin to see I hope how the length arises. Our own experience with this is important for many reasons, and I weave it throughout to keep readers interested in what might otherwise be very dry and boring content. At least that's my goal! Whether or not I've accomplished it is the question at hand!
Apparently I had achieved that balance and something I did during the updating and rewriting of it caused this balance to be upset. This isn’t the first time this has occurred and I doubt will be the last. But it’s is heartening to spend a long time improving and updating something, only to find your efforts were a complete waste of time.
Because now, having it changed to unfeatured, as I understand it, means it won’t appear in Google searches. So if I want to keep this content available to the public...which I absolutely do because it’s so important...I need to look at the best way to do that. The days I spent improving and updating it, were in my mind necessary or I wouldn’t have taken time away from other things to do it. I'm really busy in that I work at this 24/7. I can’t justify sinking more and more time into this piece, or really any one of them, blindly...not knowing if that time will make a difference in the end.
So it’s really more a matter of how can I make sure this piece remains available to the public and where my time is best spent. Because of the subject matter of this post, I've given it a huge effort here...more than I would have had it been a different topic...but I've failed. Yours and Dr. Mark's feedback (over 50%) seem to indicate a major rewrite is what’s needed. But because that’s what I just undertook, it’s not possible to do again. The problem with really long pieces like this is that rewrites take really long too. Every aspect just takes much longer.
My own Google ranking is good and my audience hasn’t really been introduced to this topic (by me at least!) I was intending to write a shorter piece at my main site linking to this...but now it seems to make more sense to just rewrite parts of this for that purpose and republish it there instead. Does that make sense?
Once again, I really appreciate your feedback and I don't want you to think that this in anyway is a negative thing. I would have done the updating regardless. I wouldn’t have spent the subsequent hours trying to get it featured again in retrospect because I've been down this path before. I think in the future when something is 'defeatured' as a result of my updating it I'll just cut my losses early and republish it at one of my sites instead. That's not the course I would have chosen because this seems like a great community, but it’s sort of been chosen for me I think. Nothing is static...Hubpages is evolving and I am too. Hopefully those are both good things in the end.
