The Blog of Xangis

I’ve been busting my butt as much as possible over the past couple days. I think I nearly shattered the thing.

On fictionclassics, I added The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s kind of to the point where I just space out and edit and I don’t notice the passage of time until I’ve finished something. I guess that officially qualifies as “flow” as described in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book of the same name, which I haven’t actually read (though I’m familiar with the concept).

I’ve more-or-less managed to get the leftistblogs.com site working as I want it to. It just needs a few minor adjustments and some more good blogs to feed from. Even so, it’s a fine start - I actually use the site now, so that’s an indication that it doesn’t totally suck. I still read Slashdot first, even though it’s gone downhill over the past half dozen years.

The really big project(s) I’ve been working on are the indiewriterchallenge.com, indiefilmchallenge.com, and indiebandchallenge.com sites (notice that the links have been added to the blogroll). They’re totally going to rock once they reach critical mass. I’ve learned and figured out so much about Drupal over the past few days that my brain should be throbbing, but it isn’t. The writer site is going to be the first to go live, with the others following in quick succession. Since they’re nearly identical functionally it’s going to be super easy to admin all of them.

I’ve been spending most of my effort on function and content for everything I’m working on. Soon I’ll have to change my focus to promotion. That’ll be scary, because even though I’m sure I’ll be able to manage OK, the crutches will be gone (crutches in this case being my metric ton of experience with implementing technology and code) . The biggest dilemma for me will probably be finding a balance between being interesting ["That sounds cool, I need to check it out.] rather than annoying ["Will this irritating spammer please just go away!"] Maybe I can call it the fine line between guerrilla marketing and gorilla marketing… Since my survival will soon depend on getting people interested in showing up, it’s not like failure is going to be an option.

Another thing I’m going to have to think a bit about is graphics. Most of the sites I’m working on are basic templates with a minor tweak or three. A bunch of them still have that silly drip icon and/or the default bookmark icon to name just two things I’ll have to give a polish to. I can only do twelve things at once, so it’ll have to wait. (Honestly I’m fairly incapable of multitasking, I’m just a fast task switcher.)

Suzanne has been pretty helpful in checking for stupid phrasing, omissions, and glitches. She rocks. Sometimes it’s hard to spot things when you’re looking at it from the admin/implementor point of view.

I feel a little worn out, but I’m still going to squeeze in a bit of The Path of Daggers (The Wheel of Time, Book , although it’s kind of lame that it’s the hardcover version. Why? I usually read at the end of the day when I’m pretty tired. At some point my arms are going to give out and it’s going to fall on my face. Thud! Ow! Give me the paperback version any day.

And how do I disable that stupid-looking smiley in the book title?