Hello, dear readers! You may have noticed it’s largely just been me (David) around these parts lately. Rather than bury the lead, I should just say… we’re expecting a second Geek Baby! Due in November, so we’ve been making a lot of plans around this fact, and it’s coloring our decision making otherwise.
And one big decision is, of course, Comparative Geeks. We started the site because we felt like we had so much we love to talk about, and the Internet gave us the place to put ourselves out there and do so. We’ve met a ton of great people along the way, and last year, we swept up a bunch of those great people and brought them along with us to this new self-hosted site to make a go of it on our own.
It’s not really gone to plan.
Life has caught up with each and every one of our contributors, up to and including Holly then with the pregnancy, and me just chipping away posting every day isn’t quite the vision we originally had for all of this.
We’ve also noticed that, surely, it’s not as easy to interact with this site, for our longtime WordPress-based readers. Easily measured elements like the “like” button and comments have been down. I know some of that is that quality has decreased lately – like I said, it’s just been me trying to keep things afloat – but it’s more than that.
So one thing that we’re going to work on figuring out in the coming weeks is moving the site back onto WordPress.com. More details on that to come. We’ll move this whole archive over, and bring along all the contributors as well for when there’s time and interest for them to write. Overall, I wouldn’t expect much of a change in that way – just that we’ll have WordPress taking care of the technical aspects of this whole endeavor.
One of the big pushes for going out on our own was to do more with advertising, which also hasn’t really come together. Given that I think we have more of a smaller, dedicated readership than necessarily some sort of growing brand, I’m thinking something like a Patreon may be more appropriate – and doesn’t need a self-hosted site at all.
We would tie something like that to the Podcast or perhaps the webcomic (or exclusives tied to those sorts of things). Which, speaking of those…
Comparative Opinions and Podcasting
One thing we’ve found – and discussed in this last podcast – was that it’s been a bit easier to podcast than write, of late. And we expect that to only be more true in the future. As such, we’re working on coming up with a second podcast, scooping up some of the bits of Comparative Opinions and overall leading to what will hopefully be more like two 30-minute podcasts, rather than one 45-minute podcast.
The second cast we would focus around geek news, and would include information and opinion around the world of geek. Then Comparative Opinions would focus around the longer topical element each week.
The Webcomic and other articles
One thing that’s happened to the webcomic – other than me taking a break and losing my stride – is that by picking up more and more of the weekly content, I haven’t had time to add the webcomic creation back into my life. It did take some dedicated time to do – usually the effort of a few sessions, not just one like many posts will be.
But I want to keep going with it, and even see if I can get to posting 2 or more times a week. However, to do that – and to more correctly align with our current life reality – I think that the goal we’ve set for ourselves of daily posting needs to be let go.
We got into daily posting in the first place as a reasonable, realistic goal to set for ourselves, and we kept it up for a good long while. Well, okay, it was originally 6 a week with a day off. During the first Geek Baby pregnancy, we dropped it to 5 a week. With the new Comparative Geeks, we went to one (or more) a day and I’ve tried to keep that going, without necessarily re-evaluating it. Well, that time is now.
I would rather we were providing good content – interesting, unique, or at least passionate – rather than just presenting content just because I’m forcing myself to do so. The biggest risk will be that we start to slide and post far less frequently, so please, dear readers, keep on top of us. I’m not looking to take big breaks. But if in two nights I could do one good post, rather than over two nights doing two filler posts, well, one of these scenarios is truly better.
Looking Forward
Holly will be back at it. Other contributors will return, and each will have time and not as their lives ebb and flow. Comparative Geeks is continuing on.
But it’s time to both return to where we probably should be, and to slow ourselves down to be a better voice. Thank you for sticking with us, dear readers, and let us know your thoughts and anything you would like to see from us. Cheers!
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