As I wrap up six (!!!) years of blogging, I've been looking back over Kickery's history and content, and I wanted to let folks know that sometime in the new year, hopefully fairly soon, I'll be making a few changes. I've made a list of some of the areas I want to work on. I'm open to suggestions for any other elements of Kickery that need addressing.
The archives:
As far as I can tell, the monthly archives are fairly useless -- no one looks for a post by when I wrote it. (Correct me if I'm wrong here!)
The category archives are clearly the way to go, but at this point there are enough posts in them that they are becoming unwieldy to just scan through. I've also been somewhat inconsistent in tagging posts, as well as having developed some categories much more recently than others, so some posts, especially early ones, aren't showing up in all the places they should be. Google archives my posts fairly well, but that requires knowing what keywords to search for, which isn't always obvious, and Google does not produce results in any topic-logical order. And I'd like to do a lot more cross-linking between posts.
All this suggests that I'm going to need to go through every single one of my old posts and do manual edits and maybe a manual category archive (the current one is automated via the tags) that organizes the posts in a way that's easier to find. I am not looking forward to this project.
Unfinished posts:
I'm pretty horrible about writing draft posts and then never getting them all edited, linked-up, illustrated, and actually published. I've got over a hundred backlogged drafts. My new year's resolution is to try to get these old posts finished and online and to stop adding to their number by actually finishing anything new I write. As I clear the backlog, I'll leave old posts dated to when I originally wrote them, so there may be some surprises turning up in the archives this year!
Support:
I love writing Kickery, and I am committed to keeping it free, but I do have to note that it is a serious time commitment. While some posts can be tossed off in an hour or so, others take many hours of pulling together research and references before I even start writing. My record so far is a post which I've been working on for nine months, maybe thirty hours of work so far off and on, including one out-of-state research trip, which is still not finished. I have a couple of other post-projects of similar size. And that doesn't account of all the general research time that provides background for everything I do.
When I am writing regularly (one or two posts a week), Kickery is a lot like a part-time job, except for the part where it doesn't pay anything. And that may have to change, since research and writing take time which I am not using to teach or lead balls (activities which earn a living) or do marketing work to get more such gigs.
I don't see much of an advertising market for a blog with such a specialized topic and audience, so I'm thinking of putting some prominent "donations, please" links up, either on the blog as a whole or possibly on every post. Let me reiterate: Kickery will remain free. No paywall, no subscription needed, nothing like that. I hate asking directly for money, but something's got to give here -- either less Kickery-writing or some money starting to trickle in.
Calendar:
I've had requests for a master-calendar that goes further than one month ahead. I hear you.
Comments:
Yeah, I'm irregular at best about responding to comments. I'll try to do better going forward, and possibly go back and answer some old comments with questions in them as well, if that's useful. Even if the original commenter isn't reading, other people might have the same question.
I've already had to implement one change: all comments now require a "captcha" screening. I hated to do this, but lately I've been drowning in spam comments, dozens (sometimes hundreds) per day. My blogging host, Typepad, used to have good spam filtering, but something seems to have fallen apart at their end. I've been deleting it in bulk (and probably accidentally trashing some real comments in the process) but I just don't have time to go through and delete spam on a daily basis. Putting in the captcha screen has cut down the spamming enormously. I apologize for the minor inconvenience, but it's going to stay.
Requests:
Once upon a time, very briefly, I had an open thread for questions. I quickly realized that either I was going to have to flat-out refuse to answer a lot of them or else get dragged into time-consuming research or writing projects not of my own choice. So much for the open thread. I'd still like to have some way to take questions (which keep coming, but now they arrive via email), but I can't figure out a good way to do it without running into the same problem. Possibly I just need more willingness to say no. Any other ideas?
General cleanup:
I am still reasonably happy with my layout and color scheme, but the side links are a mess and need updating and replacing. The stores need fixing up and links to my book and CD reviews. The bio is out of date. My teaching availability and repertoire prominently featured. Etc.
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