Musings & Meta

My interest in this hobby has built up quite a bit over the last few months, such that instead of sitting down to play Warcraft at the end of a day, I’m building something or painting. I like the change.

I’m also watching the success of certain hobby bloggers, and certain podcasts and I’m a little jealous – I’ve been writing for 3 years (…that sneaks up on you…), and I barely know my audience, where my podcasty friends have fans coming to take photos with them at Adepticon!

I think a big difference is marketing. I started this blog because I love writing, and I wanted to get into photography some more, and wanted some motivation to paint more and bingo-bango, here we are. But that’s totally different than if you’re actually trying to build an audience.

Another difference is that of reliability. Certain bloggers are writing daily, even several times a day! The podcast folks put something out every 2-3 weeks. I write when I feel like it, and sometimes not even then! Taking photos, editing, writing, proofreading, etc, takes a lot of time when I could be sleeping or painting or watching Game of Thrones. 😛

It turns out that the blogs birthday is on May 27th, it’s third year of existence, and I’d like to celebrate by changing up my format a bit. Whenever I do something hobby, I’m going to post a photo, maybe two and some quick words about what I did. This will have a few effects:

• Smaller chunks of “what I did” are easier to follow. The first stegadon painting post is 1 step, out of a hundred and now you know how I did it exactly. (well…except for the water bit, which I never count exactly >.<)
• If I stop editing my photos and start just taking a few quick ones with my phone, the photo aspect won’t be as onerous.
• More regular writing, and potentially easier to follow writing, means that someone could toss my blog into their RSS and feel like it added some value to their daily reading.

I’ll continue to do “milestone” posts with the tripod and the good camera and lighting and maybe a gradient backdrop and some white balancing and fun stuff like that.

Thanks for reading!

I added the ability to Like, Send, Comment to/from your Facebook profile.

I use Facebook a lot, and I know that I dislike having to put in new login information on every blog I sign up for, so I’m hoping that this feature is helpful to some people. If you don’t have a Facebook profile, or don’t want one, you can still sign up using the blog-specific account information. It’s there for your convenience, not forcing you to Book the Face. 🙂

As well, I’m hoping to use the Like button to more easily share my blogs on Facebook. I tend to just copy/paste the link onto my wall, but now I can click the Like button, comment and go to provide more visibility.And I can see who has clicked the Like button, which is kind of nice – I tend to put these notes out into the ethernet and assume that people are reading. The only confirmation I get is when someone comments, so now I can see a bit more. 🙂

Let me know if something bugs you! (I was trying to get rid of the FB profile photos…) Or if I can do anything to make your blog experience a little nicer. 🙂

P.S. Apparently when I click “Publish” it now automatically pushes to my timeline. That’s pretty cool!

Heelllllllllooo readers!

A couple days ago I changed hosts. The old one was dumb. Now that I have my shit off of it, I’m happy to say – never use WebServe.ca. Terrible customer service, and then randomly…you’d find someone competent to help you out. I have a long list of irritations from them, and a 2-line list of good things. (They are cheap, and some CSR named Kate was actually pro-active about helping me out, instead of solving my problem and then neglecting to tell me about the other 2 things that needed doing…like her co-workers).

Also, WordPress updated to 3.0.3. Less exciting :).