A Paupered Year in Review: Themed Weeks Bring Fame and/or Indifference

8th Mar 2007

One technique that seems to ensure instant fame for your blog is to plop down on a Monday morning and announce that you're going to be taking the vast reading public through a "week" of themed material. Like the novel and three-hour movies, its epic scale means you'll be able to delve deeply into the intricacies of a certain topic, while still wrapping things up nicely by Friday. It's a blogging phenomenon, and less than two months into our own we decided it was our time.

Our first such week was a 5-day, 5-borough exploration of the city's pizza, with Slice and Ed Levin's book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven as our only reference. We traversed the city, exploring neighborhoods we hadn't visited, and ate entirely more pizza than any one should be pleased about. It was fantastic experience. When Adam over at Slice linked to us, it became our first breakthrough. People who weren't family members began to comment.

Our biggest week of all was the "Alternatives to Shake Shack." Nick, who used to work two blocks away from the Madison Square Park burger destination, was frustrated at the line and simply wanted to know if there were any other options around the area that wouldn't take an hour and half. So we tried out a bunch of burger places close by, took pictures, made a very shoddy Google Map (which no longer works), posted it late one night, and woke up to see it picked up by Gothamist, Eater, The Morning News, and The Food Section.

But that's the exception. When we spent five days grilling pork butts, live mussels, and a whole chicken, while taking lots of good pictures and basking in the sun drinking Coronas, nobody really seemed to care. Gothamist quickly linked when Nick spent a whole week coming up with ways to use a whole ham he'd baked, but it never gained much momentum. Even our nostalgia-laced School Days week, in which we recreated lunchroom classics like Corn Dogs and wrote long, political posts that we spent an inordinate amount of time on, brought no feedback or comments.

The blog world is a fickle crowd. In case you missed any of our weeks, here they are below.

Pizza Week