Don’t Overdo It
According to the date that his second-most recent article was Dugg, Samuel Ryan’s Wake Up Later has been dormant for 100 days. His most recent post is one entitled, ironically, Falling Behind is Not an Option.
However, if the subscriber count displayed on his homepage is to be believed, he has lost few subscribers over this time. I myself was notified of his triumphant, and hopefully lasting, return by my own feed reader registering a new article.
Write Smarter, Not More
Your feed subscribers are your most loyal readers, in theory — so thanks to the 3 people and 9 robots who subscribe to this blog. With this in mind, one can infer that the penalty for falling behind is not a severe one. In fact, in recent memory, I cannot recall removing a single feed from my list due to inactivity. Most are removed because their articles are too frequent and too crap.
I subscribe to way too many feeds, and except for the ones in the “funny” folder, I hate when they update several times each day. I just can’t keep up with that, and there’s no way that each of those postings is necessary information.
Serve Your Audience
The legendary Jakob Neilsen has long advocated that people Write Articles, not Blog Postings. The way to popularity is to foster those return visits from people that value your informed expertise, not your fickle opinion.
Write posts catered to the consumers of this expertise. Don’t clog your blog talking about some movie you saw, or your vendetta against auto-flushing toilets, or frustrated rants about CSS and Javascript. It won’t win you any readers, trust me.
Stick to your guns and write what you know, and only about what you know, and you’ll go probably go far. Don’t worry about keeping the front page fresh if you have nothing fresh to fill it with.