[megaman22]

You kind of have to keep up a regular cadence of new content to get people to keep coming back. For instance, Coding Horror has had only 9 posts in the last six months. For the most part, I don't revisit programming/software dev blogs unless there is new content or there is something relevant that I want to go review again. Ergo, if you write most of your posts on the latest teacup-hurricane scandal or the newest version of X software/hardware product, you aren't going to get the kind of long tail that sustains page views when your posting rate slows down. On the other hand, if you are producing quality content that stands the test of time (something like lazyFoo's SDL tutorials comes to mind), then you are going to move up the search rankings on that topic, which will reinforce that long tail.

[engendered]

For sure, but in a way it's a bit of a chicken and egg issue. Spend lots of time making content to see the same sputter and occasional luck on the social news sites.

There was a time a few years ago when you could ask what the best tech blogs where and there would quickly be thousands of posts. Now...most of those have been abandoned, and little has appeared in their place. Even among professional sites it's amazing how many technologies (for instance Intel's tablet chips) get almost no treatment at all, and astonishingly little actual effort is expended, so we just end up with some vapid, high-level commentary that is then blog spammed across autonomously created dupe sites.

It's just a wastelands. People stopped coming and people stopped being interested.