Web site news

Boy, has it been a wild, up-and-down Year Five in the history of Da Blog. One year ago at this time, Da Blog had hit a low point, with me writing the annual blog-day post in similar conditions to when I wrote the first post in the history of Da Blog – the last time I will probably ever write a post in such conditions. I had just finished the least productive year in the history of Da Blog, one in which I failed to crack 100 posts, thanks in large part to a decision to scale back posting to focus on schoolwork.

That wasn’t entirely successful. The winter quarter was marred by the Bracket Ladder project, then the spring quarter was marred by Mom getting talked into something that proved to be bad for my schoolwork but fantastic for Da Blog: an internet connection for our home. That sequence of events convinced me that the best thing to do for Da Blog was to refocus on it and try to recover the posting frequency that characterized late Year Two and early Year Three.

However, things went back down again for Da Blog over the summer, as I only managed to get a fraction of what I intended done, thanks in large part to getting derailed by another project. Then the school year hit and I stupidly added new football projects (the SEFL and NFL Schedule), resulting in a miserable end of November and early December as my laptop stopped working and I struggled with a late blitz to actually pass both of my classes for once… a quest that ultimately proved successful. (And, of course, all that was wrapped around the move to a new house.)

Now, at the end of the year, I feel like Da Blog is very much on its way back up. On Tuesday I posted on the 100 Greatest Movies Project for the first time in a long time – and I tried to time it so that it went up shortly after the SNF Flex Schedule Watch post, trying to nab that traffic influx. I also raised a question there that could help accelerate getting it done one way or the other. I’ve also been working on trying to further other projects to supplement everything the site already has going on. MorganWick.com is not that different than it was when it launched back in 2009. I’m trying to break it out of that inertia.

More to the point, I feel like I’ve been pointed in a direction that promises to break me out of my inertia. A number of events have taken place in recent weeks and months that could do much to turn my life around. I feel like late 2011 may prove to be a turning point in my life, one that focuses me on the track that will take me to where I want to go, and 2012 will tell the story of how I get there. Da Blog had about 140 posts over the past year, but nearly 100 of them have come in the second half of the year. Passing my classes may provide me with needed money, which may resolve a problem that was fast approaching in June: my Hostmonster account expires then, and if I couldn’t come up with the money (over a hundred dollars) to renew it, I’d have to move the site to Freehostia or worse. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I feel like I have some breathing room.

I promised two site upheavals back in August, neither of which has happened. The web design course didn’t teach me anything that I felt I could apply to the site; as a beginner’s class, the stuff it taught was either stuff I already knew or that I didn’t feel was applicable to a personal site like mine. I gave the design of this site a lot of thought when I created it, so in retrospect there wasn’t much that I needed to improve on. The first one I intended to do, though, I intend to get done before the end of the year.

I feel good about Year Six on Da Blog. I’ve felt good about Da Blog before, but I have a really good feeling that this is going to be the year we turn the corner. And I intend to hit the ground running with it right after Christmas.

As this post goes live, I will be going unconscious.

About an hour later, I will come to, and my mouth will feel like utter crap and will continue to feel that way for most of the rest of the week after I get my wisdom teeth removed.

As a result, expect posting to be rather light for the rest of the week. I have already pre-written and scheduled the annual Blog-day post for this Thursday, and have attempted to back-load several other posts, but don’t be surprised if that and the NFL Schedule post are the only posts you get until maybe right before Christmas, if that.

You may or may not have noticed that, contrary to what I’ve said in the past, and this past week aside, posting has picked up substantially recently, especially where webcomic posts are concerned. You may have also noticed that some of these posts have gone up at rather… interesting hours.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is something I hinted at a while back: after years of my struggling to find an Internet connection, my mom finally got talked (not by me) into adding an internet connection for our house. This has made it far easier to update Da Blog, but considering what I said a while back about refocusing on school work, it’s not sufficient to explain this new focus.

The other reason I hinted at in my blog-day post. Having essentially unlimited access to the internet has illuminated to me just how addicted to the Internet I’ve become, and how far beyond Da Blog that addiction stretches. Given the opportunity, I can regularly surf the ‘Net late into the night, consequences be damned. I’d already passed only one out of two classes in each of the preceding two quarters, despite my commitment to suspend work on Da Blog and focus on schoolwork. But last quarter, despite the motivation of the Understanding the News series, you may have noticed I only put out one post in that series (other than the introductory post I linked to above). I wound up passing neither class that quarter. When it comes to passing classes again, it’s time for Plan B.

I realized that the last time I was regularly passing two classes was when I was regularly working on Da Blog, on webcomic posts and everything of that like. I theorized that having to spend a substantial portion of every weekday catching up on RSS feeds and working on posts (and Sandsday) provided a necessary structure and constraint on my addiction that allowed me to focus the rest of my time on more productive pursuits. (Note that there’s another theory here: recently, more and more of the classes I take require me to actually do the readings assigned, rather than just pick out a few important assignments and focus on those.)

So to rebuild my work ethic, I’m spending this summer focusing on fully catching up on my RSS feeds (right now I have only the feeds that most clog my reader to go, plus Darths and Droids), working on webcomics posts and future webcomics, as well as other big plans for Da Blog and my future. I’m hoping I can build enough momentum from working on those projects that when school starts in the fall I can shift gears and actually get work done without having other distractions. I still expect posting to decline precipitously, especially in fall, when football usually dominates Da Blog. And honestly, even this plan hasn’t been working very well, with two of my planned projects (in my opinion, the two most important) not having had any time spent on them at all with August about to start. Blame for that can largely be laid at the feet of a more personal project I’ve been working on, one which I hope will provide a shorter “last resort” alternative to Internet fun when the fall starts.

Now that that’s out of the way, now hear this… there will be at least two major site upheavals over the course of this year.

The first will be sometime in the next few weeks, and will involve finally upgrading WordPress to the 3.x series, putting in the forum, fixing the problems with the Sandsday archive, and probably completely overhauling the relationship between the Sports and Webcomics subsites and the main site. (This last I don’t want to do, but the plugin that creates the Sports and Webcomics subsites stopped updating IN THE MIDDLE OF UPDATING FOR 3.0, so it may be necessary.) This revamp will also allow me to start a brand new webcomic, something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to recently.

The second will be a more minor update over the course of late September through early December, as I take a web design class, and may involve next to nothing at all. While I like the general layout of the site and the basic principles behind its look, I’m not blind to the fact that it has some potential problems (the “how do you like my site” poll that came with the WP-Polls plugin didn’t come out with the best results), although some of the problems are things I’ve been meaning to change from the beginning, and it goes just enough against the WordPress standard I’m kind of dreading how on Earth I’m going to get the forum to work (one reason I didn’t start it last time I tried was because I just gave up trying to get it to work), so I’d like to optimize the site and identify those problems and fix them.

Between these upheavals and several new projects I hope to unveil over the next few months, it’s a bold new era in Da Blog’s history. Here’s hoping it all works out for the best.