Story here. You are telling me. This is probably the hardest thing I have ever done. Luckily I have the team sending me stuff and without them it would be a lot harder. But I wouldn't give it up. It has been nearly 4 years since I started the old blog Theo Spark and I have loved nearly every minute of it. The hard thing is to try and keep it growing month on month. Maybe it is time to think about a dot-com but am not sure. What do you guys think?
Monday, 7 April 2008
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13 comments:
Well, if it's anything like this blog, then OK by me.
Your contributions are excellent for the most part. Your "job" is not unlike that of a teacher because you are a teacher. It looks quite simple looking in. Of course, you know better. Keep up the good work! Remember what LBJ used to say, " It's better to be inside pissin' out than outside pissin' in."
Your insights are needed now more that ever before.
Thalpy
Keep up the good work. But don't kill yourself over it. Because I sure would miss the morning totty.
Informative,incisive,and educational.(and very pleasurable with the inclusion of Totty)
Maybe you should take ads to help with expenses.
Whatever you decide, keep us informed.
Keep going Theo but do look into taking adds i notice Rachel Lukas has started taking adds and she seems to think it helps.
You do a great job. Do what feels best for you.
Theo,
I don't comment, I leave that for Guido's.
However, you are second on my list so I think your site is pretty good.
A nice mix of totty, planes, jokes, vids etc etc.
Always entertaining.
Keep the flag Flying.
More older totty please.
Otherwise a great site which has taken pride of place on my link list since the demise of The Hitch.
Theo,
I check here first. There are very few who have the right grasp of reality and you are one.
Please, for the sake of the few sane folks left, keep it going!
Thanks,
Barrett
Swamp, just another swamp to cross, searching for the nugget ...
Cheers
Do what you must - just make sure the bile, planes, vids and totty don't get lost.
A nice bunch of supportive comments, but none of them really attacked your question.
Overall, I would say no to a dot-com in the immediate future. While there might be a few advantages, I think they'll be far outweighed by the learning curve and the problems that will pop up.
I suppose the mainadvantage is that you wouldn't have to worry about being censored, but, by the same token, as long as you don't put x-rated stuff on the visible home page, you shouldn't have to worry about it, and you shouldn't want to put outright porno on the home page, anyway. Putting nudies beneath a NSFW is certain acceptable.
As far as the learning curve goes, well, webmastering is kind of like plumbing. 90% of it is real easy. It's that other 10% that's a bitch. When suddenly things don't line up like you'd like, and everything appears to be okay in the web editor, that's when you have to dig into the raw HTML, and that can be a little daunting. Much of HTML is fairly straightforward ("i" means "italics", "b" means "bold", etc), but much of it is as esoteric as any authoring language.
Another advantage to a dot-com is that it makes you more of a 'pure' blogger. You don't see Michelle Malkin using a blogspot site, for example, nor any of the A-Listers. Admittedly, though, this is just a feel-good measure and doesn't ultimately mean anything.
One possible practical advantage might be the ease of the editing software. Looking over the source code, it appears you're editing this online using blogspot software. The reason I mention it is because ages ago you had a hard-to-read yellow header for some article and you apologized and said something about how you "screwed up the code", but you don't deal with "code" in a normal web editor. You merely highlight the text and select the color from a box. So if the software is actually kind of clunky, one small advantage to going to a dot-com would be the freedom to use better editing software.
One other advantage to a dot-com is that it gives you the ability to keep the master files on your own computer. Although most people edit their files online, there are some real advantages to keeping them local. Probably the biggest is making a global change to every page. If I want to change the color of my headers, I merely punch the old code and new code into Find & Replace, hit the button and it changes every instance of the old code to the new code on every page. I upload the pages and voila! If the master files had been kept online, I'd have to go through each of my 950 pages individually to change the header colors.
What you might do is bum a copy of FrontPage from somebody and make up a 'mock' site on your own computer, just to get the feel of things. Maybe even take a night class in webmastering at the local junior college. When you add some items to the regular page, you could add a few of them to the mock page, just to make sure you've got the procedure down and the kinks ironed out.
Regarding advertising, this is a slippery slope. You really need the traffic numbers to justify the hassle of digging up advertisers, maybe getting a business license, dealing with income taxes, etc. Maggie's got a Digglanche a while back and started considering taking on advertisers and decided it wasn't worth the hassle. Yet, presumably. More info here.
To sum up, I'd say 'no' to any kind of immediate change to a dot-com, but 'yes' once you get a mock site going for a while and have the bugs worked out of the routine. It's obviously cooler and more professional to have your own site, but, as noted above, it's a serious leap from the 'templates' you're using now.
If you have any specific questions, I'd be glad to help answer them. There's a contact page on my site.
Dr Mercury. There is also the rather pressing fact that I only have enough memory space in my Blogger account for about another 4 months at best.
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