I have formally started my learning process for 3D printing, hoping sometime this year to buy one and start making things. I jumped ahead in the learning queue back at the start of January, and I think I already know which model I am likely to buy (ADIMLab Gantry Pro). However, some of the variables are still mysteries to me, and I picked up a few ebooks plus a paper non-fiction title to help with my early learning. The book I am reading is called “Make: Getting started with 3D Printing”, Second Edition, by Liza Wallach Kloski and Nick Kloski.
I’m so new to the topic, I’m even learning stuff in the foreword. It is written as an introduction to 3D printing and the history, arguing that like many new technologies, 3D printing has followed the “hype cycle” mapping visibility over time — the initial technology trigger, a large peak of inflated expectations followed by a trough of disillusionment, and then it rises back up a “slope of enlightenment” to level off on the Plateau of Productivity.
The authors argue that 3D printing has reached the plateau already, but I’m not as convinced of that yet. Part of the challenge is that these types of graphs are actually more like “averages” of multiple people, multiple industries, even multiple sub-disciplines where one group is still in the initial hype stage, while other more mature models have levelled off. I’m not ready to pronounce where I think it is for home hobbyists, which is my only real interest.
I certainly see the value to entrepreneurs of the ability to produce prototypes. There are many excited people in the field who think everything is wonderful, they’ll be able to print 1000s of products, and will retire. Until they realize that 3D printing is generally great at producing unique items or prototypes, or even a series of similar products for individual use. But it is difficult to take it to large-scale production with small printers as it just takes so long to print stuff. If you build an exciting new product, and it changes an industry, generating thousands and thousands of orders, but it takes you 3d to print it, you’re in trouble, because your single printer will only be able to generate about 120 copies per year.
Sure, you can buy MORE printers. But in many cases, it would be more efficient if you could do injection moulding. Which doesn’t rule out 3D printing — you COULD design the moulds in a 3D printer and cast it in something else that then is used for the moulds. As an example. And many of the online fora for newbies, like myself, are filled with the newly converted entrepreneur who sees this as their way to take over the world. Not unlike the new web designer who thinks if they can launch a thousand websites selling a few products each, and they simply use SEO, bright graphics and fast sites, they’ll start receiving millions of orders a day for their relative crap products. And then they start realizing that web design is harder than they thought and that they’ll have to earn the money they thought would just “arrive” in their inbox.
For me, my needs are simple, so I’m probably on the slope of enlightenment. I got excited, I saw some opportunities, it crashed a bit as I realized the time it takes to do a lot of the prints, and the manual nature of managing a printer, handling the maintenance, etc. My interests are around personal gadgets, doodads that make activity X or Y easier…hacks, if you will. Some of that extends into specific interests for astronomy. And I want to do some DIY projects for eyepieces. In my most hopeful times, I dream of 3D printing most of the elements for a DIY telescope (or 3 or 4 styles of telescope). But I also want to do some board game design. It would be prototyping if we were going to mass produce them, but these are more just fun for us. Jacob has some ideas, and likes doing it, so my role will be more turning his designs into a working version. I’m not looking to sell products on Etsy or start making things for other people. Just me. And with the printer cost ranging from C$220 for a simple one and about C$450 for a mid-range one, that’s eminently doable as a new hobby.
But I digress, I’m supposed to be talking about what I’m reading.
The history of 3D printing surprised me, as it noted that a form of it has been around since the 1980s. I thought it was much more recent than that, perhaps because it notes that 2009 was the time when it started to come together with open source tools for enthusiasts.
People have asked me about 3D printers given my new interest, all with the same initial question as me of “how do they work”. I really liked the description in the book similar to that of a hot glue gun melting the glue in its situation and dropping a bead; similarly, the 3D printer heats up filament, essentially making it a liquid, and it too “beads” in small layers onto a surface, hardening as it cools. I knew that the types of printers I was looking at were called FDM but I didn’t know what the letters stood for — fused deposition modeling. It fuses the filament, deposits it in layers, and voila, modeling. Makes perfect sense. I won’t use the FFF acronym (fused filament fabrication), although it too is probably a good way to remember how everything works.
As I mentioned, I’ve already had some disillusionment from my initial spark of interest, and the book mentions some of the “reality check” that I’ve already experienced. Namely, knowing that:
3D prints fail — not all of them work perfectly the first, second or even twelfth time, it takes practice and adjustments for the individual printer and filament type;
3D prints take a long time — this definitely disillusioned me, as I had thought a bunch of the things could be done in an hour;
3D printers need ongoing maintenance — this is what worries me the most as I’m not mechanically inclined, and I was stressed reading about DIY kits, levelling challenges, special beds, etc., although one visit to the local store convinced me most of my concerns were exaggerated;
Sometimes 3D prints need pre- and post-processing — this is the one that disillusioned me the most as I have very little interest in painting, for example, to make things look cool. I was hoping that I could just print in different colours instead, but that is not as easy as I first hoped.
And so, that’s where I am in my learning. I look forward to reading Chapter 1, the “introduction”.
I find it intriguing that on a regular basis, I get comments, enquiries and outright offers from people about how to monetize my sites. Mainly, they are referring to my PolyWogg site, and the HR content. That it is free money that I’m not “grabbing”. With suggestions of how to turn the site(s) into a consulting business or to sell the content as training, most often. I find it intriguing for two reasons.
First and foremost, I find it amusing that they think that I have never considered it myself. I have, I admit it, but it is always more of an abstract idea than a serious option to consider.
Which brings me to the second reason. I view my site as my words upon the waters. I write it, people read it. It’s not poetry, it’s not hard-won, it’s not a book. I have a well-paying job already. I don’t see any compelling reason to charge for the content, even if I could. It almost offends my sense of honour to suggest that I should profit from it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely altruistic. I have a desire to write fiction, and I would absolutely write that content for sale. There are a couple of areas I might write after I retire that again, I think, would be amenable to book format and sale. Yet for most of my content, the idea of profiting from it seems wrong.
A recent article came my way from WPBeginner.com and it lists nine types of ways to make money from your website. The categories blur a bit for me, and so I would group it by four headings as I try to organize my thoughts.
Monetize
The most common suggestion for any site is to run ads. You can do it with Google AdSense or sell your own advertising directly if your site is popular enough. I get a few nibbles from time to time asking if they can pay me to run an ad on my site. It is the crassest of the options and turns my stomach at the thought. I never want ads on my site, not now, not ever. I hate them on just about every site I visit, even when done tastefully. It also strikes me as a stupid question. If they had actually visited my site, they would know that I don’t run ads ANYWHERE on the site now. Is their product so compelling or the pittance big enough to say, “Oh yeah, let me change my entire approach?”.
I did consider affiliate marketing for my book reviews. If someone read my review, liked the book, and clicked on it such that a few pennies went into an Amazon account for me to buy more books? That seemed okay to me, more or less. It wouldn’t affect my review in any way, it was so removed from the review writing and wasn’t enough to push me towards the ugly side of reviews i.e., paid reviews. But it was too much work to maintain, and I didn’t really generate any revenue from it. I just don’t write enough book reviews, and I wasn’t going to put lists of books on the site just to get clicks. Meh.
I have been approached by people wanting to exchange posts or “sponsor” certain blog posts, and that is way too close to paid reviews in my book. My site, my name, my opinions, my reviews. Period.
There’s one other area that the article talked about, but it doesn’t really apply to me. The idea is to create a site, get some traffic, monetize it, and then sell the site to someone else. “Flipping” sites, they call it. The third circle of Hell would be closer in description, if you ask me.
Memberships
The short version of this is that you sell “memberships” and people get members-only content. A private forum, or articles only they can see, or maybe a Q&A section. A few enquiries have been aimed at this, partly because I already have the content. So lock it down, make it more interactive, and sell regular subscriptions or even one-time only subscriptions. Separate from the icky feeling I have of only sharing with certain paid subscribers, there is a lot of overhead in managing memberships, payments, and privacy. Pass.
A heavily-related version would create unique content, like a job board for example, or some sort of posting where people pay to post their content. Could be a job board, could be Ebay for certain products. Or people could pay to list their company. Or events. But instead of the site being private and people paying to access the content, it would be public with people paying to post. Except I have no desire to post other people’s content.
Sales and Services
These generally fall into five categories, one of which I’ll hold to the end.
For services, some people suggest offering consulting services, or coaching, or even freelance services in whatever field you do. I have no interest in starting a side hustle nor particularly in continuing to “work” after I retire. My brother has a gig that would be far more likely for me to embrace than this.
A second service people often suggest is to sell physical products online including standard stores, online t-shirts, dropshipping, or simply as a full-scale Amazon affiliate store.
The third is very similar to the job board idea, where you turn your website into a platform to host other sales, like an online marketplace or auctions site where others can post their goods.
Finally, if you build off that “flipping” option earlier, there are suggestions to go hardcore with the WordPress material itself i.e., plugins, themes or graphics tied to WordPress layouts and look/feel. My skills are NOWHERE that good, and again, it’s just a side hustle consulting business. I already have decent skills in other areas, but again, I have zero interest in using the site to build a business.
Things that don’t offend my sensibilities
Obviously, I could turn the content into a book (for the PolyWogg HR Guide), and I like that idea. It makes sense to have a book option, people can read it online or if they want a copy of the book, click and order. Very popular, doesn’t offend me. I’m a wannabe writer and I spend a LOT of time writing on the sites. If it was fiction, I wouldn’t hesitate to charge. Why not charge for non-fiction if it’s in a book?
My hesitation, like my initial intrigue, is two-fold. First, I want people to have access whether they pay anything or not. I don’t like the idea that someone could benefit from my approach, but doesn’t because they don’t have $10 or whatever to pay for a book version. Or that ordering just adds friction. I want as many people to read the stuff as possible. Charging for it kind of restricts that goal.
But I also hesitate because I wasn’t charged to GAIN the knowledge. I asked people about their experiences and a lot of what I write is not just my own experiences but theirs. If they didn’t charge ME, how can I justify charging others? It doesn’t feel right.
If I go sideways for a second too, I also feel like it’s part of my duty as a manager in the public service to help other public servants figure out how to prepare properly for selection processes. And I already get paid to be a manager. So wouldn’t I be asking someone to pay me for something I should already be doing as part of the duties in my day job? Not as part of the day job, obviously, but as part of my obligations to help others in the community.
Once I retire, my position will likely shift a bit in that regard as it will take more work to stay current on stuff, and I won’t be an “active” manager. No residual duty to “help” would be in the way of charging. I already said I don’t want to do consulting that much, or even really coaching. Too time-consuming in my view. I might for some occasional cash or to keep my hand in the game. But not as a major function tied to the website.
I have thought about changing the content from a static website into more of an online course option with modules. And some people have suggested doing so as a full training course that is “sold” by subscription. But I have the same hesitations in whatever form it is provided, video or text.
And yet there is one area where I’m more open to the idea. If, after I’m retired, someone wanted to pay me to make a presentation to a group, I’d be willing to do that. Truth be told, I love the idea. I don’t care particularly if I get PAID to do it, provided there isn’t much cost to me to participate. Reimburse me for my out-of-pocket expenses like parking or a coffee, and I’d likely be good to go. I do have another area of expertise where I could see it being potentially lucrative to get hired to present in various locales around the world on two or three specific topics where I could develop a stronger content base on my website.
The article I referred describes it as “paid engagements as an influencer”, although I prefer to think of it more as speaking engagements for expertise. If someone in Boston wanted me to speak to their Board about one of the topics, I’d be happy to do so relatively cheaply, so long as they pay for my travel. I just don’t know if I want to hustle that much to seek out those options.
Last but not least
I have zero interest in setting up a Patreon account to attract donations. I am not interested in “patrons” sponsoring me or whatever. And yet, I love people who set up donation buttons to “buy them a coffee” for a variety of different sites or services. It is the equivalent of “shareware”, which is another concept I love. Completely free to use, full versions of whatever, but if you want to send me a couple of bucks, feel free to do so. As long as I’m working FT, I won’t do that. I might consider it after I retire. I haven’t decided yet. But it does interest me at least a little.
And yet NONE of these are things are attractive to me anytime soon. Nor, if I do have interest in the future, do I need any help doing it. Yet, like I said, I get enquiries that intrigue me, even if my answer is a polite but firm “no”.
Ah, late summer. The time when a young man’s fancy turns to back to school tech. Papers. Notebooks. Maybe, dare I say it, the laptop of his dreams?
Okay, I’m not a student, but I do dream of getting the “right laptop” some day.
My quest started in the late 90s. I wanted to get a laptop, was debating whether I would get a laptop instead of a desktop, but it’s not really what I wanted the laptop to be. If it replaced my desktop, I wanted power to crunch spreadsheets, handle wordprocessing, some basic games, a bit of photo editing, and internet browsing. Call it the SWGPI protocol. Five basic things. I give it a name because it is going to come up again. Stay tuned.
So if it was a desktop replacement, I needed some power to do SWGPI, plus some video editing, and a good sized screen. But then if I did that, and wanted to go mobile, I would be stuck with this honking big laptop. Great to take my whole setup with me if I was going to Peterborough for the weekend, no chance of leaving anything behind, but battery life would suck AND it would be unwieldy. What they used to call luggables.
I decided to get a full desktop, which then left me wanting a simpler writing computer to handle wordprocessing, a small game or two, and a bit of internet stuff. WGI, if you will. Lightweight, good battery life. That was the dream.
And so off I went one weekend to Toronto with my nephew. We combed all the big and little computer stores in Toronto to see what I could find. What I found was bulky replacements (SWGPI) at a reasonable price OR I could find near WGI but at insane prices. $2500-$3000. My dream was found in a Sony Vaio at $2999, onsale from original pricing of like $3999. Way out of my price range.
Expanding my search to New York
At the time, David Pogue was a tech reviewer for the NY Times. I found his email online, and despite him saying very clearly “Don’t ask my opinion about stuff”, I wrote and asked him anyway. I basically asked him, “Are there any lightweight laptops that don’t have an optical drive, etc. at a reasonable price?”. I was surprised but he answered and said, “Not really.” Everyone had gone BIGGER with their designs, i.e. the desktop replacements, so there was supposedly no market for the little footprints.
Fastforward about 8-10 years, and netbooks were all the rage. Almost exactly what I had been looking for previously. I had made do with some other tools here and there, but never really found what I wanted at the right price. Netbooks seemed like the answer, but it took me a while to decide on a model. I still have it. The only problem? It was slow as molasses. Even with everything eventually stripped down to Linux. Adequate, but not the dream.
I also tried pairing a Bluetooth keyboard with my Android tablet. The result was buffering and fast battery drain.
I bought a more powerful and faster laptop, a nice HP model, 17″ screen, great. Not small, but powerful and met my needs. Poor battery life so I upgraded it, but it was never the dream either. It still works, and is strong enough to use it in my basement for a streaming computer. The wifi is kaput though, so not much good for coffee shops. And, of course, with a 17″ screen, a DVD writer, and a few other internal bells and whistles, it’s firmly in the luggable category too.
Family influencers
A few years ago, Andrea jettisoned her desktop in favour of a laptop. It is plugged into a docking port that connects her to an external mouse, keyboard, ethernet, and a monitor, and it serves her well. Well, it did until the hard drive died recently. She was ready to ditch it entirely and get a new one, so I thought I’d pay for a simple repair and use it as my portable machine. Bigger than I wanted, but not horrendous, even if still in the luggable category. Except it wasn’t that much to fix, it didn’t take too long, and by the time it came back, she hadn’t replaced it yet. So she just took it back. But it made me start thinking about a new laptop of some sort.
Last year in March, as the lockdown began, it was clear Jacob would be using a computer a lot more than he had. We considered the one he had in the office upstairs, a full-size desktop option, but we were leaning towards something a bit more suited to his interests. The one he had was a repurposed desktop that Andrea or I had used previously, and it got him going, but if he was going to be online all the time for school, maybe something a little nicer was in order than just what was doable for occasional surfing or playing.
We debated similar issues to what I needed. He was going to use it as a desktop replacement, so we were going to get some power. He has some eye issues, so a larger screen was also warranted and likely all the time (not just plugging into a larger monitor). And he was starting to get into gaming. There was a nice gaming laptop on sale at the time, way more power than he was going to need for awhile, and twice the cost of the type of laptop that would “do him for now”. We took the plunge. Of all the things we did in the last 16m, I think it was one of the best decisions. Jacob LOVES the computer and its power.
Enter the dragon
The dragon is my messed up head. I started thinking I wanted a new portable tool for writing, or simply anything I could use upstairs instead of always working in the basement where my office is set up. I spend the whole day down there, I don’t really enjoy coming down here at night too. But if I’m doing stuff on my computer, this is the computer I use.
I thought I was going to have Andrea’s used laptop and she would get a new one, but she ended up keeping hers. I like the power of Jacob’s computer and he has even been able to use it well at the cottage, but it’s more than I would need. My solutions? Not so effective.
We have been considering picking up a new iPad with a keyboard and having that as an extra tool around the family room, kitchen, etc. We have an old one already (Gen 2), plus Jacob’s (Gen 3, I think?), and they’re okay, but not awesome. Not something we would grab to play on, too slow by contemporary standards. And I’m leery about relying on it for writing anyway (given drainage of the battery from using Bluetooth connections constantly).
So I’m back to the same eternal question…full desktop replacement or portable tool? The solution is relatively obvious for me. I have a properly working desktop, upgraded within the last year, and I love the current power. I don’t need to change it. Ergo, I’m only looking for a portable tool. The WGI option again.
Possible dream dates
I did my due diligence online, but there is only so far you can go in internet research to know what you want. A friend lent me a Chromebook recently which is almost all I want. It lets me write, it can access the internet through wifi, and the footprint is about right. But the specific model has a keyboard that’s a bit wonky for layout (including one key in a really awkward position that I hate), and I found it limiting for my work. It does run, of course, Chrome OS instead of Windows, and a limited form of Chrome OS at that, so I couldn’t load an app version of Word even. I had to rely solely on Google Docs. Doable, but not really ideal. Almost, and the price was right. But not the dream.
So tonight I went off to Canada Computers first. I checked out three or four different models that they had, and it quickly became clear that I’m likely aiming for a 13.5-14″ screen. That’s on the smaller size for availability although there are some 12.5″ models too. The screens are all way above my needs, and the power is likely to come out to an i5 Intel option or Ryzen 5. They benchmark almost equally at the moment, and I don’t have a preference. The background for the size is almost comical though. I have a great shoulder bag that I got at MEC maybe ten years ago. I love it. And so I want a computer that will fit inside it. Anything bigger than 15″ for screen size is really challenging for that option. Don’t get me wrong, I have other bags, including a full padded knapsack. But it isn’t the dream. I want it small enough to fit in my shoulder bag.
One computer looked great until I checked the reviews and tested that aspect myself. A few reviews said the keyboard was compact, almost cramped, but on a small footprint, there’s not much you can do about that. It’s as wide as it is. Except on the one, it was also cramped for depth (keyboard to function keys). When I typed and went to hit the space bar, my thumb was tapping the trackpad. And not even “close” to hitting the space bar. My hands and fingers are just too big / fat for such a layout design. Pass.
Another one from HP was decently priced, good look, backlighting was a bit odd, but whatever. My current laptop is HP and I’ve got a lot of value out of it, so I was willing to consider it. It felt like I was typing on something made by Mattel. A toy, not a workhorse. Pass.
Asus has a series of small footprint laptops called Vivobooks, and I found a workable model. The right price and size, the keyboard feel was fine, as was the layout. I wasn’t 100% sold though, and battery life is not quite as high for the model they had in stock. I didn’t need to buy tonight, and there were some other brands to consider.
I headed next to Best Buy. I ended out checking out another HP model (Envy) that hadn’t been on my list yet probably should have been, but I wasn’t a fan of the keyboard again, and it was the same price as others that were better on specs. Pass.
I considered the Vivobook models as well as some Acer setups, but nothing was drawing me in. Nice but no sale.
And then I thought, not for the first time, “I really like the Microsoft Surface Pro that I use for work, too bad they’re so expensive.” It really does all I need it to do, but work paid for it. I had seen MS Surface options in the $2K range in the past, well outside what I wanted to pay.
But I happened to see on one of the review sites that there was an MS Surface option for less. What the …? Ohhhhhh, there is regular and then there is Pro. Well, what are the regular ones like? Slick as sh**.
I’m sure I’d like the Pro models more, but the regular new version 4s are equal to what I have on my desk for work. It runs full Windows so I can run 64-bit Word. I have enough power to do all my internet stuff, including editing blogs. I can do some basic gaming, and some basic video stuff no problem. And battery life? Off the charts. They rate it to 19h, but even the PC Mag benchmarks put them in the 15-16h range for video usage. If I took it to the cottage, I could likely use it for three or four sessions without having to recharge. Around the house? Maybe five or six outings. And it is well within my budget. Sign me up, amirite?
Well, no, cuz there are 4 different models. Son of a biscuit. There’s a really nice 12.5″ footprint, but I feel the typing is a bit challenged. Another in the 13.5″ that is highly doable, another in 14″ and then options that are either tablet-y or 2-in-1 foldables. All reasonably within a couple of hundred dollars as each other. I even considered one that would take a SIM card. But I ruled it out, dumped the tablet-y one, passed on 12.5, went with 13.5.
Whew, all settled.
Everyone wakes from the dream
I want to take it with me to the cottage, I have 10d to get the laptop and get it set up, plenty of time. Except none of the Best Buys within 300km have ANY in stock. Are you freaking kidding me?
I grabbed the info for the model I want, I’ll do some more searching tomorrow online, but in the meantime, I trotted down the road to Staples. Hey, look, there’s one! Same price, same model, all good. Oh wait, small distraction, there’s an open-box version of an older model, really sharp and small, $300 less. I feel like Red Leader was talking in my ear, “Stay on target…”.
Copy that, Red Leader. I’ll stick to the 13.5″ model, MS Surface 4. Great, let’s do that one. Oh wait, they don’t have THAT model in stock. There is, however, the same model with an extra 256GB of SSD space, only a measly $400 more. Umm, no. For way less than that, I can use a USB key or upload to the cloud. None of the base models in stock. Frack.
I really thought I was coming home tonight with a lightweight, small footprint laptop with long battery life. I was SO happy that I had it figured out. Alas, the quest continues. Sure, at least I’ve assembled the clues into a coherent map, but that isn’t the same as grabbing the Holy Grail.
I have already mentioned the accidental nuking of the site by tech support, the rebuild decision tied to mental health issues, and my decision to separate everything into two sites plus add Flickr for my photos. But one big question remained…if I was going to build back better, what else would I change in the process?
If I was honest with myself, I had to face the reality that perhaps, shockingly, I didn’t design the site incrementally over time the way I would have liked to design it from day one.
The problem-ridden version I had was a dumpster fire, that was clear. But could this be an opportunity to think outside the box? Could I, in fact, set the box on fire and start with a fresh page?
Yes, yes I could. So where should I start? My big four website choices were relatively straight-forward:
Theme/layout;
Front-facing design functions;
Behind-the-scenes functions; and,
Behind-the-scenes workflow options.
Theme / layout
For layout and colour, there are a lot of themes out there for websites, often coming down to a series of elements. Some sites go with a top menu and then a big splashy header, often combining that header with a slider to advertise multiple contents or the latest posts. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime all do this with their movie listings for example — slider areas that show videos or pictures that advertise content elsewhere in their offerings. On news sites, there are often similar layouts followed by spotlight boxes, three or four across, that highlight the latest articles or popular posts to click on. High energy, lots of images or videos, driving people to click, click, click!
They may be popular, but that’s not me. I don’t want a big giant flashy site, partly as I live and die by the word, not the graphics that go with it. Heck, other than my featured image, many of my posts don’t even HAVE graphics (gasp! the latest design bloggers would be aghast with my approach!). That’s not accidental or laziness, it’s the fact that I only include what advances the story I’m trying to tell or imparting info I think is relevant. I don’t use “optional flash” to add sizzle or pizzazz. If the words aren’t working, I’m already lost. Nevertheless, even ignoring those big layout issues, I’m still left with three types of theme options.
First and foremost, the latest approach is to sell people on using “page designers”. Secondly, you can choose an theme that has a fair amount of customization options. Or third, you can buy a theme that is EXACTLY what you want, no customization required.
If you think of it like buying Microsoft products, it’s kind of like buying MS Publisher (a completely open page layout program), MS Word (as a good editor with some layout options but generally looks like a page), or a custom background for your document that can’t be edited.
I don’t want or need a big Desktop Publisher / page designer program to do my blog as there’s a lot of extra overhead that comes with it. I confess that I think the common advice that newbies hear i.e., to start with page designers, is the worst advice possible. People get into it having no idea what a post or page even is in WordPress, have no real design background, and suddenly things start going wrong, with no idea why or how to fix them. Eventually, they get frustrated and give up, when if they had started with a simple blog and theme, they could wait and complicate their lives later when they have a working blog to keep them engaged in the meantime. People often buy MS Office for business and have options to use MS Word or Publisher. Which do they use? MS Word. Publisher has its use, and most people don’t want or need the overhead to get something looking the way they want.
I played with a couple of page designer plugins/themes, but honestly, my view is that WordPress is opening up design more and more, and eventually page designers are going to be redundant since WordPress’ block options will be able to do just about all of it anyway. I’ll stick with the core.
I have looked at the third option — prebuilt static themes — and most of them are not quite what I want nor do they come with support or customization. I’m “vanilla” for my design, sure, but I at least want to add some sprinkles or syrup occasionally.
Which leaves me with the MS Word-level of theme (Weaver XTreme Plus) that I have been running for over 10 years in one form or another (premium, free, plus, etc.). As it has so many customization options, I really don’t need anything more powerful. Sometimes I need LESS power. But I like it because it allows me a format that works for me and enough tweaking under the hood to add the sprinkles or syrup occasionally.
But I did my due diligence anyway, played with a couple of new popular themes, tested the layouts, inserted some flashy graphics here and there, tried a header, and in the end, I kept coming back to what I already had for the tool.
Yet, as I mentioned earlier, I DID want to play with branding. So on my PolyWogg site, I went with my main header (a photo where I grew up, with a nice logo overlaid on it) and then added custom headers for my HR Guide, Reviews, Recipes, conference, and Astronomy. I have one waiting for trivia at some point, but I’m not ready for that yet. I’ve also gone with some “splash” pages on PolyWogg with intro pages for each area rather than simple blogs and menus, and ditched the sidebars.
Meanwhile, over on ThePolyBlog, I went with the lilypad header that I like, based on a photo from the Bruce Pit, but no custom headers for the rest of the site, and generally a pure blog-style layout, albeit with reduced content hiding in the sidebars. I have kept them — for now, at least.
Front-facing design options
For the public side of the blog i.e., what the average viewer sees, I have 21 plugins that help with design, layout or functionality. Most are relatively straightforward — adding social media buttons, controlling spam, adding a bunch of layout blocks that aren’t in the core WordPress options, adding navigation menus to go from post to post, providing links to other related posts, or simply displaying the posts in a specific format.
For the post-dumpster-fire build, I tweaked a number of things.
I already mentioned removing sidebars and changing headers, but on PolyWogg, I also have different headers for different areas of the website and with those separate areas, I also installed a plugin that lets me display different menus in each section. So if you’re in the reviews section, you see a narrower reviews-related menu; if you’re in recipes, you see a recipe-related menu. All of that is done through a special plugin (Conditional Menus).
Another part of PolyWogg has my TV Premiere posts, i.e., reviews of individual premieres, and for most of the posts in “reviews”, I created a separate index of them in sortable tables (with TablePress). But the TV Premiere list is different…it’s literally just a list of posts by date. The simplest way to generate that list was a plugin called simply Display Posts along with a related addon called Date View. Between the two, I generate a list of all the posts in that category and place it on a page. It’s a pretty powerful tool, and I may decide in future to expand it to other areas on both PolyWogg and ThePolyBlog. It makes a really simple navigation tool without a lot of overhead.
A friend constantly complains that my website shows posts in feeds as the full post, and she hates it. She feels like they should always be in “excerpt” mode so you can scan more quickly. While I understand her view, it’s a design choice that has two competing views in the design world. One side agrees with her that you should show the excerpt and let people click to see more; on the other side, they argue people want to be able to scan quickly without having to click. The same happens with newsletters or auto-feeds — if you send the entire post by email, then people don’t have a reason to click, and so they don’t go to your site and they don’t generate ad revenue. But I don’t run ads on my sites, not now, not ever. And I have always preferred the long form in feeds and on the site. One fewer click. But in the end, I decided to follow her advice, albeit for a slightly different reason. I use a newsletter (to be mentioned in the next section), and it doesn’t like certain types of blocks. If I use them, then the feed looks terrible. It looks great on screen, but not in email. Soooo, if I only go with excerpts, problem solved. I don’t use those types of blocks in the first 100 words anyway (another plugin to help where it cuts off).
Earlier I mentioned that I have social media icons already, and I have multiple ways to do those. However, while they also include options for printing or PDF, I added two PDF-related plugins as well (PDF & Print, and PDF Embedder) as they work well with my HR guide so people can access it more easily on the PolyWogg site. I have more docs coming, so I added the functionality now.
Before I come to the big front-end change, I’ll mention quickly that I also changed my Forms plugin (to go to WPForms) and I reinstalled my trivia plugin called Quiz Maker.
All of the above changes are, for the most part, relatively cosmetic changes here and there. Tweaks, I would say. The next one is huge.
As I noted earlier, one of my biggest areas and the most work on the original site was my Photo Gallery. I paid for a premium version of NextGen Gallery and I have been using it for sometime. I doubled down on the plugin, I found ways to do things that others hadn’t, and I’ve even thrown myself into the support forum, acting as an informal extra resource for anyone and everyone. Due to COVID, the plugin developer has had trouble providing ongoing support to users of the free plugin, and where I can, I’ve stepped in to offer some suggestions. Sometimes, a week later, the support person will chime in and say, “Yeah, what he said”. Often with more aplomb and gravitas, and with additional suggestions, but a number of people have been able to try what I suggested and fix their problem. Not necessarily with “my” solution, but in testing my solution, it better defined the actual problem. I often joke that I may not be able to fix your problem, but sometimes I can break something else that I can fix.
NGG is the most used plugin in WordPress for photo galleries, it has power out the wazoo and I had almost 10,000 photos uploaded using it as the basis for my galleries prior to the crash. How many have I uploaded since? Zero.
I killed the plugin.
Remember I said I was doing my due diligence to build back better? Well, one of those changes was to go with Flickr as my online repository for my photos and video rather than embedded directly in my website. As I noted in a previous post, I went for “ease of use” over perfection. And NGG was the solution for direct embedding. With all of my photos in Flickr, what I need NOW is a good tool that lets me embed the photos FROM Flickr into the site. Now, WordPress already has a default embed option for individual items, and it works just fine. But if I want to better embed galleries or albums or subsets, then a tool like Photonic Gallery directly connects to my Flickr account and lets me embed. Another tool called Meks Simple Flickr Widget also lets me embed easily too, with a bit more control than the standard WordPress embed. But make no mistake. This is a HUGE change on the front-end and the back-end. It is also the change that reduced my rebuilding workload from a year to probably six months of normal revision.
It’s a total gamechanger for the front-end, the back-end, and everything in between.
Behind-the-scenes functions
On the back-end, I have 18 plugins that I use to manage the site’s functions. The obvious ones that many people use are there — an advanced editor, a broken link checker, tools that maintain wordcounts, security certificate manager, a tool for managing redirections within the site, and a status checker to make sure the Cron tool is running regularly.
Not too long before I lost my site, I had upgraded two back-end features, including a tool that auto-posts to the Buffer website which in turn autoposts to Twitter and Facebook for me, as well as a newsletter plugin called MailPoet that lets me send out posts to people who are subscribed to the site. When I created the initial newsletter, a bunch of people subscribed, but when I was rebuilding the site, I had to “force stop” their subscriptions and invite them to rejoin afterwards (otherwise they would have received 1500 emails saying “Hey, this post is back up”).
But beyond those basics, I made five fairly large changes behind the scenes. Each of them are significant on their own, to be honest, and most of them I had not done previously as they didn’t work well with NextGen galleries and some other tools I had running. With the rebuild, it was time to “fix” the site and do it right.
Up first was simple Google Analytics. Every site owner should get the reports of what Google thinks of their site, but I am not a slave to metrics since that isn’t the kind of site I have (I don’t really care how I rank or the load times as long as they aren’t measured in decades, people come to my site for specific content they can’t get anywhere else, I’m not a random stop on the information superhighway). Yet, even though I’m not a slave, the analytics can help tweak the site for performance and user experience, so I added a good setup to monitor it.
The obvious related area was Search Engine Optimization, and well, as I said, people tend to come to my site because they’re looking for me. They aren’t randomly searching for info on widgets that I happen to sell, I’m not a commerce site. People are either looking for specific posts I’ve written that they have been referred to by others, OR they are looking for me in particular. It’s an unique niche so the “one size fits all” advice that people say “every site should do” doesn’t really apply to my site in the same way. It’s an issue, sure, but it’s not a DEFINING issue. But I can do more to be SEO friendly, if not exactly SEO optimized. I asked in a few online fora about good options, explained that I was really looking for a plugin that does the basics without getting into the weeds, and someone referred me to SEO Press. Everything I need, and easy to run? I’m in.
Security is a necessary staple of any site, and I had a small quandary. I have tried various plugins over the years for firewalls and anti-malware, and I like several of them. But two of them didn’t work well on my servers or with NextGen Gallery. First up was iThemes. I like it, I liked the interface, it seems intuitive to me, and more than a million other users agreed with me. But the way it interacts with the main config file for WordPress for security didn’t seem to work consistently on my previous host (I was overloading their server and they couldn’t tell me why, so I eventually left that company’s hosting plan). When I started with my new host, it did it again after about six weeks, and the guy was able to narrow it down to that plugin and how how/why it was doing it. Simple fix, but not exactly warming to the heart.
I then tried WordFence, which is the big guy on the block, but it didn’t seem to be very intuitive to me at first, and then I had a conflict with an old plugin I was running. I ended up going with All-in-One security, which was working relatively well on the old setup. Except with respect to Next Gen Gallery. There is a partial conflict with their firewall settings and NGG’s update process. Each time NGG would need an update, the plugin would stop working afterwards. But if I deactivated the firewall, ran NGG, and then reactivated AIO, everything would work fine. It just didn’t seem to “complete” the update for NGG when AIO was running. AIO and NGG both tried to narrow it down, and while neither could identify WHAT was causing it, we did manage to agree that temporary deactivation fixed it. But I’m not running NGG any longer, nor the older plugins. So I joined the 4M+ people running WordFence again. I feel it is the most reliable, and it makes more sense to me out of the box with a lot less tweaking than I had to do for AIO.
Another area for the sites is how they send emails from the site. There are default ways to send stuff, and most of the default approaches get flagged as spam or might never send in the first place. Instead, I went with a new upgraded plugin called WP Mail SMTP and linked it to better email sending. I’m not 100% certain it’s a significant update, but it is a more professional way to do things.
Last but not least, I added an optimizing plugin. I know, I know, if you have read my previous blogs, you’ll know that a server-level optimizer was part of what killed my site in the first place. However, this one allows some granularity of control AND it provides a simple caching solution. It does a couple other things too (minify, image compression) that I don’t use, but WP Optimize is compatible with my setup and doesn’t cause gremlins to proliferate. I’ll take it.
Together, those are five pretty significant upgrades to the back-end. I had tools doing some of it before but nowhere near as extensively or even, dare I say it, “properly”.
Behind-the-scenes workflow options
When I had two small websites (for family and friends) plus one big PolyWogg site, it was relatively easy to maintain. I would never confuse any of the three with each other for the back-end as I generally don’t have to do much on the back-end for the other two. But now that I have two BIG sites to manage, and I’m administering both almost daily, I need to make sure in the back-end that I’m working on the right site!
That may seem obvious to the non-user, but it isn’t. The back-end has the same colour, layout, look and feel. Except for the small name in the top left-hand corner, you wouldn’t know you were on ThePolyBlog rather than PolyWogg. And in the first two weeks of the rebuild process, I made two mistakes where I did something confusing the two sites.
The first was simple. Before I nuked the whole account and started over, I moved ALL of my PolyWogg content to ThePolyBlog. ALL of it. Then, when PolyWogg was running again, I moved a copy of it all back. So my content was actually in two places at once, even though ultimately it would be in only one. For example, I put all my reviews on PolyWogg, went through everything, got it up and running, and deleted all the reviews from ThePolyBlog. Good to go. Except I went into PolyWogg the next day, and couldn’t find some of it. WTF? What did I do? Oops, I accidentally changed the category it was in, thinking I was on ThePolyBlog instead of on PolyWogg. I almost deleted all of them, but fortunately I just misfiled it by confusing which site I was on.
The second was stupid but potentially devastating. I run a plugin called TablePress that lets me have sorted tables on various pages. You can even filter them as the user on the front-end. But it is really only used for lists of Reviews, and since that is only for the PolyWogg site, I don’t need the plugin for ThePolyBlog site. So I went into ThePolyBlog, deactivated it, and deleted the plugin plus the data. Next day, I’m on PolyWogg and one of the tables isn’t showing right. Hmm, that’s odd. Go into the admin area, TablePress isn’t even an option. WTF? Ohhhhh. I accidentally deleted it from PolyWogg, instead of ThePolyblog. Okay THAT needs a fix. I could recover the data, no problem, but I needed to solve the confusion problem.
Fortunately, there are two easy ways to do this. Built into WordPress is an option to change the basic colours of the admin layout. Which sounds perfect except I didn’t like any of the other three simple options. Instead, I found a plugin called Admin Color Schemes which adds about 10 more. Voila!
Now my ThePolyBlog admin area is a relatively bland beige because it is the secondary site. If I lose a post, or forget something, no great loss. It’s calm, it’s soothing, it’s daily wear and tear.
The PolyWogg site? I have a very bright blue interface! It screams HEY PAUL PAY ATTENTION THIS IS YOUR POLYWOGG SITE WITH ALL YOUR BIG CONTENT LIKE YOUR HR GUIDE. Nothing calm or soothing about it. It’s not raging red, but it stands out. As soon as that page loads, I know I have to pay attention to what I’m doing.
Problem solved. I think.
Oh sure, I have other tools too, such as an admin menu editor that I used to make both sites look rather similar in the backend for administration (Dashboard / Posts / Pages / Comments / Media / Reusable Blocks/ Menus / Widgets at the top as my most active areas). I also use a nested pages tool to help me drag and drop pages, which is incredibly useful for the PolyWogg site for my HR and astro guides, even my review indices. On both sites, I used WordPress Importer to bring the data back in, and particularly on PolyWogg, I used Tako Movable Comments and Bulk Move to parse comments into 8 different pages rather than all on the one “main” page for my HR guide. For ThePolyBlog, I frequently blog about articles, so I use the Press This plugin, but I don’t need it for PolyWogg. On both sites, I use Yoast Duplicate Post to clone or copy existing posts into a new post, often to duplicate a post layout easily.
Hmm…something’s missing, right?
What could it be?
Backup tools
It would be an obvious conclusion, i.e., better backups. That’s how I got into this problem in the first place, right? The assumption is generally if you have good backups, everything’s right in the world. Except that needs to be unpacked a bit.
Any backup solution actually splits into three elements:
Creating the backup
Storing the backup
Restoring from the backup
If you haven’t read my previous posts, first, what’s wrong with you? How could you read this LONG post without having whetted your appetite with the previous laments? 🙂
Second, you’d know that I actually HAD backups. It was the third part that was the problem.
In fact, I was already using 3 backup options, one that was completely up to date, and two that weren’t. I’ve already covered multiple types of backup tools for a WordPress site, so let’s talk about the three I had in rotation at the time of the nuclear blast.
First and foremost, I had a complete download of EVERYTHING. It’s the simplest form of backup, but is entirely manual to do.
However, it was about four months old, and I had made a lot of changes since the last download, but it was relatively there for structure. I could have tried to restore from it AND then just add in all my content. The problem was that the latest version of my content was a bit suspect. Not completely, but when you merge different sources, you multiply your chances of an ongoing gremlin problem. Which I already had, and was trying to erase. This failure though is on me. When you’re in the process of making updates, and you have another 20 to go, it’s hard to remind yourself to “stop” and make a big manual download when you’re busy. This isn’t news, it’s why systems designs include automated backups. So it doesn’t rely on the dumb user to remember to do it. I could have gone with the existing option, rebuilt the data manually, etc., but with a small corruption problem in the data, it wasn’t clear this would be reliable. Equally, having a complete backup wasn’t the problem. I had that solved already with another tool.
Second, I had a proper backup done automatically by my server about six weeks before. I was running an WordPress-based backup tool, and I disabled it while I was doing some reconfiguration (you don’t want it trying to run while you’re in close to maintenance mode), so again, I had a complete but slightly out of date version. The problem with this one was that it too wouldn’t restore properly.
Third, the core “problem” was again, not the backup. The server runs JetBackup every single day. It had a complete backup of every day going all the way back to November 2019. It COULD restore everything. In theory. And it had a great version from about 2 hours before the nuke.
So again, going back to the top of the section — I had 3 backup options that were creating the backup, check. I had the info stored in three separate places — the host’s server area (separate from mine), within my own area (the WordPress plugin-based backup), AND I had a complete download. Check.
The first two elements wee tickety-boo (creation, storage).
The third? A restore function? Welllll, therein lies the rub. The host was running LiteSpeed Cache at the server level and it was interfering with the restore function. That couldn’t be disabled, so that’s a problem. But I had an “out”. I could download my backups, up to date as of 8:00 a.m. the morning of the nuke, and take my whole site somewhere else. Photos, WP, data, everything. All good.
Except we had done a full restore. Which completed without errors. And yet there were gremlins in the new version. If I went to “new host provider X” and installed those versions, chances are that some of the gremlins would remain. AND I had already paid for the website for the next three years. Which meant I would be paying again somewhere else with no guarantees of a successful restore, I would have to “pay” to try it out, and I would likely have to repair everything manually as I suspect part of the gremlin lay in the creation initially.
I needed a fourth backup option
I mentioned above that generally you need an option that generates and stores the backup and permits restoration. All good. But all three of my options above were generally tied to the server that my site was running on. If it malfunctions, all three of my results were generally at risk. It’s not exactly technically accurate, but I tend to think of it more as an unmitigated risk. I wanted a fourth option, and by happenstance, it links to another tool I had in mind.
I already said that I was going from 1 active site + 2 inactive sites, to 2 active sites and 2 inactive sites. Or put more simply, doubling my workload (1 active to 2 active). There’s an app for that though.
Well, technically, there are plugins or websites for that. What they all basically do is tie all your websites into a single interface. They have different ways to do that, some require a separate website to be created, etc., but you end up with one ring to rule them all, errr, one site to administer them all. Sorry, my precious, I got distracted.
In the end, I went with ManageWP. What I essentially can do, for free, is link all four websites into the ManageWP site, and it will let me go to that site in order to THEN go to any of the four sites for individual management. Or if I want to upgrade a common plugin on all of them, I can do it from the main site. It’s a bit like running MultiSite, without the sharing of plugins and themes. Each site runs its own install, I just get to share admin in the background.
Know what else I can do? Add a regular backup that stores that backup on a TOTALLY separate server and doesn’t require me to do downloads manually. It costs me about a $1 a month per site to do it, but for about $50 a year, I have a fourth backup. One that, in theory, I should be able to re-install on any server anywhere with no issues in the future, and isn’t quite as dependent on the original server. More of a “pull copy” than a “push copy”.
I can’t rely on it as my SOLE tool, but it is a nice addition to the ones I already had. So I’m ditching the server-based one, since it had some challenges running properly anyway with a cron issue, I still have the daily backups, AND I will set a schedule for regular full downloads, something that will be simpler now that I don’t have 10K photos installed with it too.
Wait, didn’t you say it would take you six months?
I did say that. I estimated a year if I was rebuilding EVERYTHING the way it had been, including the photo galleries. Working at a normal website management pace. When I ditched the gallery tool to upload into Flickr, I reduced that estimate to about six months. It seemed ambitious, even though a few people thought I was being dramatic. Nope, I knew it was going to be a lot of work.
Yet I managed to do it all in six weeks. How? By killing myself.
Starting on March 6th, when I fully committed to the rebuild, I worked about 4h a night for Monday to Friday every night and week. EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. Sometimes longer. It was not uncommon for me to start working around 7:30 and at 2:30 to be shutting down so I could sleep. Sometimes I would work at lunch too. Or from 5-6 in the afternoon before supper. Some nights I wouldn’t start until 9:30 or 10, or I would watch a bit of TV while doing the grunt work.
And make no mistake, it was straight grunt work. No fun, no designing, no creativity, it was either reconfiguring plugins until my eyes crossed, or opening, editing, and resaving posts or pages until everything started to blur together. At a minimum, it was 4h a day through the week for six weeks.
On weekends? I generally doubled- and tripled-down. For each Saturday and Sunday in those six weeks, I generally worked a minimum of 10h a day on the rebuild. I’d take a break, hang out with Jacob, do some more, eat, watch some TV, and then be back at it for the night shift. Between the regular week 4h/day x 5d, and the weekend of 10h/d x 2d, it was about 40h a week I was spending on the website. On top of working my normal full week for work.
I’ve been doing almost nothing else for the last six weeks in my spare time. My estimate is that I spent somewhere between 240 and 260h to build it all back the way I want it. If I had put a more normal 10h per week into the rebuild on top of my normal workweek, it would have been the full six months.
But I just wanted to do my due diligence, check a few things as I went, but then to just blast through. It took about 2.5 to 3w of that time to get through most of the structural changes, testing new plugins too, and to get PolyWogg relatively where it needed to be. I then spent 3w getting all the content back up to where it needed to be, and another half week or so putting the final touches on some of the elements. It was a ton of work, and almost none of it was fun. It was just a grueling slog.
How now, brown cow?
About the 5.5w mark, I had to take a break one day and just BLOG about something. I needed to feel a sense of progress. That I could actually create NEW content again. So I wrote a few posts and it gave me enough of a boost to get over the final hump.
There are a few niggling things I want to tweak, or fix. There are about 100 posts where I am missing a photo that will need to be repasted from Flickr instead of from an upload to the gallery built into the website, but generally speaking, I’m done. The sites are running almost at full capacity.
And yet, I’m essentially starting from scratch. I sent out my invites to all the previous subscribers, and only 2 have resubscribed. I even sent all the invites MANUALLY so it wouldn’t go to their spam filter.
I’m also posting a bit each day on this journey, summarizing what I went through, part catharsis, part transparency. And because I have those great trackers, I know that almost nobody is reading any of it. My traffic is way way WAY down from low to mid triple digits all the way to single digits. I get almost no comments, not here or on FB. I’m typing into the abyss.
I’ve been here before. Hopefully it will grow again as I write about more interesting topics that don’t sound like I’m writing computer manuals in four parts. Or, in the end, if nobody reads it, then my site is a glorified digital diary.
But it’s back, and I hope, better than it was before. Time will tell, I suppose.
I already discussed the fall of my website and the hit I took on the mental health side before I could commit to rebuilding my website. It’s just too important to me to simply let it go, and honestly, as much as I pretended it was a real choice, it never likely was an actual option. But if I’m going to rebuild, might I revisit some earlier decisions that I had made in the previous version?
Bifurcation is a lovely word
I have had a dual online personality for quite some time. PolyWogg vs. ThePolyBlog. It is a regular conundrum…I had my initial website as PolyWogg.ca for almost ten years and my personal email was ThePolyBlog for almost the same length of time. About seven years ago, I tried separating all of the content into two sites — PolyWogg.ca and ThePolyBlog.ca — thinking it would somehow improve my blogging approach. But at the time, I was blogging sporadically and the division itself never made a lot of sense. I couldn’t really picture in my head what the real difference between the two sites was…and honestly? I could go either way on just about every topic.
Take something about mental health for instance. I am PolyWogg, and I’m writing about mental health, shouldn’t it BE on the PolyWogg site? But I’m BLOGGING, shouldn’t it be on the ThePolyBlog site instead?
Eventually I gave up due mainly to the large overhead of running both sites without a clear delineation between them, and rerouted ThePolyBlog to PolyWogg. Either website would take you to PolyWogg. I’ve debated over the years letting ThePolyBlog.ca domain lapse, but something always held me back a bit. A niggling thought somewhere in my head that maybe I just didn’t separate things out right the first time.
So here I am again. A giant site of 1.6M words that is really quite large for a site. With a TON of pages and posts and photos, oh my.
Could I split the load between two domains?
The wisdom of the crowd
If I was going to separate the two, then there were two giant questions to ask myself:
Which elements would go to which site?
Would I brand the sites differently (and how)?
I reached out to friends on FaceBook, and I had trouble articulating the questions in a meaningful way to get much useful feedback. One overwhelming suggestion was to make PolyWogg just about my HR guide (under the rubric of my “professional” side), but that is peanuts of the whole. Sure, it’s popular, I’ve gotten a lot of hits over the years, but in terms of content, my HR guide takes up about 10 pages, perhaps 30K words. A drop in the proverbial bucket. And if I’m honest, as great a niche as it is, once I retire, it will be of diminishing relevance over time as I get more and more removed from the working world.
I was hoping for guidance from the crowd on branding, but it didn’t go too far, and I had trouble articulating what I meant. I have about 10-12 different areas that I blog about, but I can’t run them all as separate sites, I’m not THAT squirrelly.
In the end, I went back to basics. And instead of focusing on content per se, I thought of the division more as a question of products. Which opened a productive thread of brainstorming with myself.
I do, in fact, have generally two types of products.
The first are what I consider writing products. I have my HR guide, of course, that’s the biggest. And it is associated with PolyWogg, so that is easy to put on that site. I also have a bunch of “reviews” that I do … movies, books, music, TV premieres and seasons, and even podcasts of late. They tend to be “stand-alone” items, very formulaic in layout, a consistent product that I “produce”. I’m also working on a guide for astronomy, I have trivia games underway, a small but increasing collection of recipes, and a report from a 2002 HR conference. All of these are finite products.
The only thing they DON’T have is much in common with each other. So I found a way to have about six different areas on the same site, all linked from the main page, but once you get into the sub-areas, all of the sub-areas have their own menus and their own headers. All completely different but shared under the same site. I had considered trying to do this a long time ago with my old site when it came to the Photo Gallery, but it never quite worked right, and with another 6-8 possible additional areas, it was way too much work previously.
I designed a bunch of different headers using Canva, uploaded them to the site, assigned conditional menus and headers, and voila, six sub-areas within the same site, yet totally different branding for each of them.
My second “set” of products are my blog posts. Most of them are a bunch of little areas, nothing too huge on their own, nor are they necessarily “products” like the stand-alone ones in the first batch. Instead, these are more running commentaries or musings about a variety of topics. I threw them all into the ThePolyBlog site, updated some of the categories to collapse a bunch together, and then grouped them into a few small menu collections. I’m not 100% sold on them yet, so I may make some tweaks in future weeks, but it works for now.
The first group I call simply “Life”. I started to call it “Lighter Fare” as it tends to be a bit more about my life in general, experiences of different types, maybe some family trips. I also have jokes of the day / humour posts in there. But when I added “computers” (which includes all the website drama) as well as “family” which includes my posts about my son, some mental health stuff, my parents, etc., it no longer seemed entirely “lite”. So I grouped it under a general heading just called “life” — which has posts about jokes, websites, experiences and my family. All big chunks of who I am.
The second group is harder to name, and I struggled even more with it. It is generally a collection of posts about more serious topics that I have tentatively named “The Little Grey Cells” (with a nod to Hercule Poirot). Learning is a huge area for me, with lots of posts about courses and non-fiction books, and I had another area about ideas (around governance or development, for instance), that I merged into “Learning and Ideas”. And just as with “Humour”, I have one that is more general in nature and called simply “Quotes”. Some are funny, most are more thoughtful. I merged a bunch of posts about health, mental health, philosophy, gratitude etc under “Health and Spiritualism” and then merged anything to do with writing, publishing, books, libraries, etc. under “Writing and Publishing”.
I maintained a third area for my posts about Goals. I have a LOT of posts on the site about goals, goal-setting, monitoring, tracking, bucket-lists, etc. as well as individual goals and how I’m doing on them. It seemed like an obvious grouping all on its own.
And finally, for a fourth area, I added one simply called Challenges. To be more precise, these are my Reading Challenges, with the materials for 2019, 2020, and 2021. I enjoy running them on FaceBook as a little book club, and I wanted to keep them somewhere. I considered putting them on PolyWogg.ca with the book reviews, but they’re not really “products” in the same sense and they didn’t really fit with the “reviews”.
Ease over perfection
I have already posted that I’m back up and running, but I confess I decided to cut a fairly large corner in my rebuild. (Well, it seemed like cutting corners at the time. Only time will tell if it was a cut corner or a brilliant tactical move.) I chose to NOT rebuild my photo gallery on the website.
For a very long time, I have wanted to be able to share my photos and videos online. I’ve tried standalone galleries, I’ve worked within WordPress, I ran separate installations on my website, I considered totally different software, and I even went with SmugMug for a couple of years. But the biggest irritant previously was that I was paying for other sites or running extra software when what I REALLY wanted was to embed my photos and videos WITHIN my regular website. And in the last year, as I said earlier, I spent a lot of time up until February of this year getting those photos and videos into the site. An enormous amount of work. And ultimately, fixing the uploading of photos was what triggered the error by the technical support people in the first place.
So when I looked at how much work it had been just to get it to where I was at in February, I couldn’t in good conscience think that was the right way to go a second (or seventh) time. It was just too much work.
I didn’t want to go back to SmugMug, Google Photos is dying, a few other big sites don’t handle video properly, and then I decided what I really wanted was to reduce my workload at the same time as I was trying to find a good working solution. I didn’t want perfection, I wanted something that worked well and cut my processing time. If I was going to pay for something new, I wanted easy.
I use Mylio already for managing my photos and videos. It isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t add all the overhead the way Adobe products do. Nor do I want to shell out the cost each month for the proper Adobe package I would need. And what does Mylio have built-in? Export options that let me send by email, export as pictures, save as a video, or…wait for it…upload directly to Flickr.
I already had a free Flickr account from back in the day that I’ve used sparingly over the years, trying out things here or there, or for sharing photos for a photography course that I took a few years ago. I spent an hour or two doing a deeper dive to try out a bunch of features and testing uploads, as well as finding ways to embed Flickr photos and galleries in my site. And then the kicker came. Flickr would let me upload small videos easily. No conversion of format, it would handle just about anything I threw at it, and then I could embed them into my website whenever and wherever I wanted.
Is it perfect? No. But it is WAY easier than the perfect solution of embedding directly within the website. And suddenly all of the rebuilding work looked a LOT more manageable. My “up to a year” projection was down to perhaps “six months”. So I upgraded my Flickr account to the paid “pro” version, and I’ve uploaded more in the last three weeks than I did in the last three years. It isn’t “embedded” in the site yet, it’s just on Flickr so far, but I’ve linked a few pages here and there. I will eventually add an “index” to the Flickr Gallery somehow and include it as an option on ThePolyBlog.ca. For now, I’ll settle with sharing albums to FaceBook.
A final question before I began the actual rebuild
Okay, step one — I committed to the rebuild. Step two — I decided how to divide up the content overall. Step three — I had a solution for my photos that would be a lot faster than the previous solution, if not as efficient, and about the same or a little less for effectiveness.
But if I’m going to “Build Back Better”, what exactly does “Better” mean? All of the above was mostly about building back “different”, not necessarily “better”. It was better for a bit of workflow, and some branding, but could I make it better in the way it WORKED too?
