Those of you who are following along have noticed that there have been a LOT of design revisions the last few months. By this I mean at least 4 different complete site redesigns, then this final design being tweaked all over the place to my satisfaction. And then bit and pieces being replaced with different bits and pieces that do the same thing, only differently, and then just getting rid of those bits and pieces altogether cough google ads cough cough. It’s amazing what happens when you realize you don’t need one piece. You’re whole concept can change. I spent the last few months tweaking the site so that it MIGHT generate some income and pay for itself. But I’ve been forgetting a key factor in having the website generate income for itself is something that is never going to work, not in a million years. That would be me. I am never going to market the site. I did good publishing and cross posting comics to Tumblr and facebook every week. Thank the makers that I never had to engage with someone. I do that all day long at work, I don’t want to come home and do it more, especially when it’s about meself. To give you an idea, I’ve been running google ads on the site, and the other sites like my blog and photo gallery, since Sept 2013, shortly after I started the comic. In 5 years I’ve earned $27.99. That’s across 5 different sites. So why was I bothering? Why was I nitpicking at how the site looked and functioned? how fast people were leaving (both of them). Once I got rid of the google ads, everything else dropped off too. I didn’t need the sharing buttons, (useless anyhow). I didn’t need secure logins for comments (everyone just comments on the facebook post anyhow) Didn’t need a newsletter, especially now that you have to have a physical address according to standards, I don’t want you all know where I live anymore than you already do! Just dump it all. Make the site look how I want/like. You don’t like the design? so what. You like the design? still so what. While I appreciate the compliments and criticisms, that’s not why I’ve been doing this for the last 10+ years, and I forgot that.
So where is this going? Well it’s continuing on how it is. I’ll tweak it here and there to make things work the way I want at that time. Some things I’ll be working on are building a photo gallery into the site itself, instead of in a separate system. I loved Piwigo, but it just really isn’t what I need for this anymore. (Though I may change my mind on that later). The gallery will have my photography in it, or some of it anyhow. No sections for family pics or the like anymore, as this site isn’t about the family and some of my opinions shouldn’t be associated with kids. Those types of photos will go back to mostlymaylone.org at some point with a NOFOLLOW flag set for the bots. I’ll be redoing the comics (again) at a much higher resolution so they look real nice on Hi dpi screens or UHD tv’s. Why? because I can. My non family videos will move from my personal account to PlasticPaddyPogue on youtube, to further separate things. The recipes that we started years ago, forgot about, then moved, then forgot about again will either move to here, or have their own page again. I redid the WP structure so that I can run it separately while maintaining a somewhat seamless look with this site. So, you few that had them bookmarked, I’m sorry that they are messed up at the moment. Message me if you can’t find them anymore.
This will take a while. I’m just going to pick at it all until it’s done. In the meantime, the comics are double posting, and the about page is mussed up, and I have about 100 links that just went bad because I no longer have the gallery up that they linked to. oops.