For the last six to eight weeks I’ve been making mental notes to keep an eye out for the August issue of Wired Magazine on newsstands at the end of July.  I kept forgetting until last week, when I stumbled onto their site and saw the “How To” issue advertised.  This was it!  This was the issue I was interviewed for as a contributor to the Spruce Up Your Blog segment of their annual How To Guide.  Hooray!

I was called by their offices in San Francisco not once, not twice, but four times.  Voicemails were left, calls were returned and I had a couple fairly lengthy chats with a lovely woman whose name escapes me.  She asked me all kinds of questions about tips for improving your blog’s look, traffic, what’s hot, what’s not, etc.  Some of her questions were kind of complicated and open-ended. Most of this stuff doesn’t have a simple one-liner “pat” answer and I really had never read the How To Guide before, so I wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking for.  I just offered my best professional insight and hoped that I didn’t come off like a tool.

Today I ran out in between meetings to pick up a copy, as I had to run to Fry’s for a USB hub anyway.  On the way to the checkout, I eagerly snatched a copy of Wired, saw the ‘spruce up your blog’ subheadline on the cover and flipped like a crazy woman to page 106 where I was greeted with a big article on Julia Allison and how she’s a big “self-promoter” and “how to be cool” like her, basically.  I actually stumbled on her site recently via a Google alert and one of her posse, Meghan, kindly posted a copy of our book, which is a good thing.  So I, unlike the article, don’t want to make any judgments about her or her agenda – I don’t know her. She’s pretty, though – great legs.

But, after flipping through page after page of ”How to Win at a Carnival” and ”How to Twitter” (which, by the way, the finger to you Twitter Nazis! I agree with Taughnee!), imagine my dismay at finding absolutely, positively no mention of how to do anything with your blog, let alone spruce it up.  Nothing. Entire segment completely missing.  It’s not even in the How To Wiki on their website.

  Ouch.

I scanned the contributors credit at the end for my name. Nope, not there.  Maybe I missed it. Maybe they called it something else, but no… check and recheck tells me they mentioned it on the cover, but totally cut it from the feature. 

I could get all up in arms about it, but really, it was pretty cool to be asked in the first place.  Lots of things get edited out or end up on the proverbial cutting room floor, so that wasn’t that big of a deal.  I remind myself that it wasn’t necessarily my info or interview that lacked. Perhaps there just wasn’t enough room in the piece. Maybe the actual article wasn’t worth posting.  Whatever the reasoning…

It could have been worse.  They could have cut all my quotes and tips and published content from someone else.  That would have stung.  I’m just disappointed because Wired is such a widely-read magazine and it would have been great to have had a mention in it. Though, it’s changed quite a bit from what I remember. It seems a bit “Maxim for Geeks” these days. How to Win at Rock Paper Scissors? How to Dress Like a Hipster?  These are things that are technology-related… how?

But I digress. It’s still cool to have been asked.  I just wish they’d remembered to remove it from the cover… *sigh*