Happy New Year! Comparative Geeks thoughts for 2016

Happy New Year! We don’t really have big news like last year, but the New Year is a good time to look back and reflect, to look forward and plan. Definitely plenty of that going on here.

Reflection

What the latter half of 2015 showed us was that, even with the Geek Baby, we want to and can keep blogging. I would like to think we’ve kept at least some of our quality and consistency. Hopefully that will just improve with time, but at its most basic – we can do it.

More importantly, what the first half of 2015 showed us was that we have a strong community around us and supporting us. We ran the blog for 6 weeks on guest posts by a variety of people and on a variety of topics. Opinion pieces, old stuff, new stuff, large-level reviews… just a bunch of really great stuff. This post has links to all of it, and I highly recommend checking it out. We’ve had some additional contributions from folks later in the year – and have even added a full-time weekly contributor, Julia, the newest comparative geek!

There were some things that didn’t work this year, sure. For one, we didn’t create a great communication system for all our contributors and guest posters – so it’s hard to tap them on a continual basis. For another, some of our series have just kind of fallen. I still owe everyone a Geek 501 page that I’ve promised – it’s about halfway done. And our LitFlix have really fallen to the wayside – more on our thoughts on this to come in the next few weeks. And overall, I had a lot more thoughts of what I could accomplish this year than what I really did.

Future

So looking ahead, I’m excited for what we can do this year. We’re coming up on three years of Comparative Geeks – it’s hard to believe! Thank you to everyone who’s been here with us through this. We feel we’re at the point that it’s time to consider moving forward, moving onward – growing.

We’re going to take our time with it, but our hope is that by about July, we’ll be running a self-hosted blog. The archives here likely would not come along for the ride, so this blog would stay here and live on, but without necessarily updates.

As to a self-hosted site, and the things that go with it, we have a lot of thoughts. One would be the webcomic I’ve been saying I want to do. I had some good starts before I completely fell off the wagon… And the fact that I’m not hating what I am creating is the most important thing. I might like my writing, but my drawing? Coming to terms with that has been huge. There are other things we’re considering too, that should be fun.

However, the number one thing that we want to see in a grown and improved blog is you – so let us know in the comments what would be good ways to have folks follow along to a new blog, or better yet what would work for you. And the thing we’re going to want too is contributors – to take what we accomplished early this year, drawing all those bloggers together, and channel that as a long-term thing. To magnify what we’re all doing by doing together, in one space, that can be a one-stop for people to check it out. So spend some time thinking about that, and feel free to comment on that as well!

From our family to yours, a Happy New Year indeed!

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