Like Silly Putty - 02.18.02

One look at the front page of my site should tell me what is wrong with things. It's like looking at a pond full of stagnant water with chunks of moss floating on the top and flies so bored with life that they don't even swarm over to make you slap at them. I'm not even talking about the rather boring design, which is bad enough by itself I suppose, but the simple lack of new content on my site.

If I had to trace it back to a certain time period, I think I'd have to go back to almost two years ago when I went through one of my biggest growth spurts in terms of what I was creating with my site and what directions I was taking it in. It was about this time that I created the Photography section, as well as the In Other Words section. I had even bigger plans, so I thought up the absolutely (so far) huge time waste of The Photo Trust Project. I was on a roll. I was writing about 10 different things a week and new projects were taking off.

Zoom ahead 20 months and we're at the present time. I haven't gotten a Lesion Legion submission in almost half a year, it's been over 2 months since even one camera has made a movement, and I haven't updated either the Trip Journal or In Other Words in nearly a year. Crap, even the last time that I updated this section was several months ago. Granted, part of the problem lies in outside things that I can't control, but the majority of the problem is that I've simply stretched myself too thin with the site.

Again looking at the front page, I have 11 sections within the site. When I started out, one of the things that I wanted to do was keep things that were unrelated in their own seperate places, that way if I wanted to redesign something, I wouldn't have to overhaul the entire damn thing. Of course, I didn't know at the time that the site would contain well over 1000 pages of HTML (which it easily does now), but now I'm positively grateful that I somehow had the foresight to keep things broken up.

Enough patting myself on the back, though, because this should be the time where I put up or shut up. Even if I take away the sections with outside influence (2) (Lesion Legion and The Photo Trust Project), as well as two informational ones that won't change often (About and Design), that leaves 6 sections on the site, 3 of which see very little action.

I guess I'll chalk things up to evolution of the site, as that's about all I can do. I've still kept myself busy with writing (5 music reviews a week (most weeks), as well as daily updates in the new Glob section), but I've lost some of the fire I used to have and I've instead been putting it into other, non-web related things. Last year, I read well over twice as many books as I did during my more creative year on the web and although I didn't post many new pieces of writing, I didn't stop doing it. Instead, I found myself getting slightly more picky with what I will post on the site (which you unfortunately probably can't tell from reading this little rant). I have several things just sitting around on my hard drive that I'm kind of unsure about simply because they're much longer than anything I've put on the site before.

In truth, the past year especially has been full of lots of big changes for me, some of which have no doubt had an influence on my work. Part of the reason I haven't been on the computer so much is simply because my personal life away from it has been much more fulfilling than it used to be. That doesn't mean that I don't have the motivation, though, and I have plans for the remainder of this year and into the next.

Instead of making direct plans, though, I'm just going to sort of see which way things take me. I've never been one for making hard-defined plans, and I've almost always managed to still get enough things done to keep myself satisfied in terms of creative output. It may involve working on the site more, it may involve working on music, writing, or photography or all of the aformentioned.

Once again, it seems like I've gotten through an entire entry without really saying much of value. I've just been kicking around a lot of different ideas lately and needed to get some thoughts out, and felt this was the best way to do it. I guess I could call it a state of the site address, or even a state of my life address, but that sounds a little too formal. In essence, all I want to do is keep creating.

back