So things have been kind of quiet on the homefront here at the prestigious Hypertransitory Towers. I’ve been working away on my e-book, and also Life decided to start throwing elbows at me, trying to take a brotha down.
Little did Life realize – I ain’t going out like that.
JG vs. Life
He came at me hard, but I quickly sidestepped, then locked him up into a headlock. I walked him around in circle for a bit and forced him to hit himself in the face with his own hand -cruelly ignoring his piteous cries for mercy.
Soon, when I tired of the mewling and crying I released him, but the final punishment I exacted was my patented “JG Swift Kick in the Ass™” (patent no. 383467823-x2Iet3v-A), which sent him sprawling face-first into the dirt, tears of shame streaming down his cheeks, mixing with the snot and spittle that is the inevitable hallmark of a JG Ass-Whompin’ (patent pending).
And so with victory well in hand, it was time to go home and sleep the sleep of the just.
THE END.
A New Beginning!
Oh, crap. I keep doing this. It’s not the end. Not the end at all. I still have a whole bunch more to write.
As I’ve been working on the e-book and overcoming the various recent setbacks I’ve faced, I made some decisions on where to take this blog.
I’ve done pretty well with it over the last two years. Building some decent (but not great) traffic, gaining some decent (but not great) notoriety, and although this very blog has allowed me to quit my job all the way back in February, it still hasn’t done so in the way that I intended.
Essentially what I’m getting at is this: I can do BETTER.
Everything that I feel is lacking in my online presence here is solely, squarely my fault, and frankly a lot of it boils down to sheer laziness.
But I’ve decided to turn over a new leaf and stop being a lazy bum.
The reason for this is that this is my birthday month and I’ve made a promise to myself to not sit by and let things happen. I’m gonna make things happen, even if it kills me!
Actually, no. No, I’m not willing to die for a damn blog but you get the idea.
The Task at Hand
There’s a lot to do here on this blog.
I want to relaunch this thing but I’ve got to do it in stages. Issues to deal with are as such:
- Blog speed/performance
- Theme
- Posting schedule
- Blog Topic Focus
- Engaging the community
This stuff might be easier said than done. Let’s take it from the top:
1. Blog Speed: I’ve heard from a few trusted sources that my site is sometimes very slow.
I’ve noticed this myself. I’m sure it has to do with my antiquated 2009 theme that was meant for WordPress 2.8 and has never once been updated by the developer.
Also, I’ve hacked this thing harder than Jason Voorhies so no doubt my digging around has upset some delicate balance of code somewhere.
On top of that, this site is picture heavy so I really need to crunch these things down and not rely on WordPress to do it for me.
2. Theme: Related to number 1, I want to update this theme to either Genesis or Thesis (I’m leaning heavily towards Genesis), but there are some issues.
The aforementioned hacking has bitten me in the ass here. Whenever I backup my site and install it onto my local sever I end up with a ton of database errors. Then when I make the theme switch in my Dashboard to Thesis or Genesis the whole thing goes nuclear and all I get is a white screen. Grrr.
Nooooobody knoowwwwwwwws the trouble I see…
So that has to be overcome before I can even begin the switch. I suspect it might be plugin-related though. It is a mystery…
3. Posting Schedule: I’ve been so lax here. I think this will be the key item once the technical issues are fixed. I’ve been loathe to post a schedule because then I have to stick to it! I’m not sure if I mentioned this, but I’m a lazy bum, so I hate schedules.
However, not everyone knows or cares about RSS feeds or keeps up via Twitter/etc -but they will remember “come back every Monday for a new post!”
So this is definitely a “must-do” item on the list. No mo’ laziness!
4. Blog Topic Focus: Following up on the Posting Schedule, I need to decide what to post.
This blog is kind of all over the place because I’m into a lot of stuff. Now I think I’ll scale back on the things that I don’t enjoy so much and give more precedence to the stuff I do.
I suspect I might get some audience erosion but I should make these changes now because I don’t want to feel like I’m “stuck” blogging about things I don’t want to talk about.
To explain further. I’m an artist, and I like to draw, usually comics but also other things. I like to talk about pop culture and also talk about technology or software that helps me realize any of my artistic endeavors.
Some of the things I don’t enjoy as much would be social media, web design/development and graphic design type of stuff.
Although I am extremely interested in all this, I don’t enjoy it as much as the artistic stuff and therefore that sort of thing will take a back-seat here from now on. Other folks blog about this stuff more frequently and more in-depth than me, anyway.
Even though my top traffic posts are Joomla and Facebook posts that people find through Google, I don’t do that sort of post every week so they don’t really return, anyway.
Those technical kind of posts really only come about when I run into a problem and I feel the internet could benefit from someone putting a solution out there. If I come across anything like that in my future development travels then I’ll certainly do another article. For now though, ¡no mas..!
5. Engaging the community: I’ve feel like I’ve started to see some familiar repeat faces around here. While it’s possible that some are only in it for the CommentLuv I still appreciate the comments and the attention on my work.
I’m trying to think up ways to engage the readers who stick around and make it worth their while, so by all means if you have an idea then let me know, I’m all ears at this point.
Introducing: Hypertransitory Monday Comics!
So I think I can deal with issues 3 and 4 right away. I’ll take this time to announce my new posting schedule and blog re-focus.
Much as Garfield the cat would say, “I hate Mondays.” Man, who doesn’t?
Well, it doesn’t have to be all bad. The first entry in my new schedule is going to be a weekly comic, coming at you guys fresh and early on Monday mornings (Central U.S. time) from here on out until the end of the world in 2012. If we survive I’ll probably just keep on drawing, I guess.
Now, I’m not promising what that comic is gonna be about. Could be humor, or super-hero, or something else, but there will be something there every Monday, for sure.
I’m not sure what days/topics will occur on the rest of the week. I’m looking at doing art/pop culture and such. So far the comic is all I’ve decided for sure, but you can let me know if you have suggestions.
So with all that said I’d love to know what you guys think, so let me know in the comments section. See you on Mondays!
Hi JG. Thanks for sharing your story here. It’s a nice story of you against life. :)
The battle continues, Andrew! Stay tuned for more terrifying tales. Well maybe not so terrifying but every Monday you’ll get a tale of *something* :)
This story is funny!!!
Thanks Sarah, that’s what I was going for!
What does it take to used the patented move? Is there a form to fill out? :P
I think you should write on all topics or at least I like them all. Hollar if you need some help troubleshooting Genesis. It’s all I use with the exception of one site I manage.
Melinda, I will have my people contact your people so we can set up the merger acquisitions indemnity annuity fee of the compulsory license and supplementary protection certificate…and..
..oh what am I explaining this for? you already know what I’m talkin’ ’bout! :)
As for Genesis, I think I figured out my white screen problem (stupid plugin) so now I’ll have to see if I can force all my crap into a genesis template…let the battle begin!
Hey JG,
Let’s take these in order, if I may (I do this to Mitch Allen all the time)
1. Your blog speed probably has little to do with the theme, but a lot to do with images. I run a plugin called Smush It, which will reduce the size of images if you use the WP upload thing for them. Works pretty well and helped speed my blog up last year.
2. I’ve changed themes on some of my blogs but never to a paid model. Still, it shouldn’t cause you any issues, although when you start thinking about backing up, one thing you need to do is to actually transfer your image file folders to your computer because those don’t get backed up. If you’re like me your backup is fairly large and thus won’t work well on its own, and it’s because of the images.
3. I don’t have a posting schedule, but then again I write often so I guess I don’t need one. I don’t think you have to beat yourself up on it, especially if you have other things to do. If you’re going to go this route and hold yourself to it maybe set yourself up where you only have to write 2 posts a week, just to see how you feel. You hate Mondays (who doesn’t?), so maybe every Tuesday and Friday.
4. While blog topic focus isn’t a bad thing (actually it’s a great thing), I say just write what you want to write about, whenever you want to do it. If you only talked about one thing I’d give you a different answer, but you tend to be somewhat eclectic, and in looking at how you were going to focus it seems you’ve still given yourself a lot of leeway.
5. Engagement goes both ways, my man. Just responding to people here isn’t going to get it done. If you’re going to schedule things you also need to schedule blog visiting time to reach out to other bloggers, especially those who comment on your site. Even if you just gave yourself 10 or 15 minutes 5 days a week it’s enough to spark more interest.
That’s all I have. :-)
Mitch! Thanks much for the thoughtful comment, bro. I appreciate your feedback!
1. Wp-Smushit. I just installed that mofo right now :) Looking forward to seeing how it runs. Did you ever do the “bulk” smush, where it runs all your existing images through the service?
My theme has some jQuery issues that keep popping up in metrix analyzers as a cause for slowness. This theme was never updated since it was created, and I don’t have javascript skillz like that so the time has come to dump it and move on…
2. Thanks for the heads up on those images, that will now be worked into my plan!
3. I figure if the only thing I do is get that comic out each week I’ll be happy. Anything else I decide to post will be gravy (well, for me at least).
I went with Monday because that’s one of my “off” days where if I’m a little late in the morning I can still work on it during the day.
It also keeps me from tricking off the *entire* weekend. Make no mistake, part of every weekend *must* be tricked off lol. But at least this way I can stay productive and not waste the whole thing…
4. There was a time where I thought I was going to make a new blog for each of my interests, but I nixed that when I just got pulled in too many different directions.
Although I’m not lazering in on one thing, I do want to make it easy for people to get what this site is about. I don’t want to end up at the “Seinfeld” of websites – ‘It’s the site about nothing!’ (although I would strive for that level of popularity!)
5. Yes, no doubt! visiting other blogs and forums is one of those areas where I’m going to put a lot of effort into.
I have a lot of you guys in my RSS feed and when I see the posts going I’m like “Oh Crap, gotta get over there”, then it’s like “damn, I missed that post” -count keeps going- “dang, now I missed 3” “now there’s 7 posts I missed…aargh”
So yeah I could alleviate that just by spending an alloted time each day to hit up my friends and other blogs online.
I also have some forums where I’m a member but notoriously inactive. That needs to change, too.
Thanks again man, I’ve already benefited from your comment, peace!
No problem; it’s what I do. :-) No, I’ve never run the bulk “smush” because it wasn’t all that long ago when I learned I could add images through the program instead of having to upload them first, then write the code to access them. Wish I had, but oh well.
A reply regarding your theme. Maby you can make something that is related to your comics?
Hi Reena, I thought about using something like ComicPress, but I didn’t really care for that format.
Although this reminds me though to do another sweep of templates before I go all in. There might be something new that would be perfect for me.
Thanks for commenting!
I like the picture, did you hire a cartoonist or animator for this? Ifnot where did you get this? I really like it man!
Hey canama22, I draw the vast majority of the art on this site myself, so thanks for the comment and the compliment! :)
I really like this post and I also love this blog. How did you learn to draw this good because I really like the drawings you put in the post.
I like your sense of humor and your drawing skills. very entertaining!
I like the idea about the weekly posting. This is what I’d do in your place. Make a routine out of it and when you stop being lazy (you said it first!), allow yourself more relaxed schedule.
Actually, I just like your stuff and want to be able to see it weekly.
Hi Ana, yeah I can’t hide from the “lazy” label because it’s been true in the past…but No Mås! :)
I think I’ve got the weekly thing down and I’ll start throwing in a smattering of other posts that maybe aren’t comic related in between. Thanks for commenting!