Launch Journal: Let the ride begin…

After a whirlwind beginning to our soft launch, we take a look back at our first three weeks of ups, downs, and complete system crashes…

April 26, 2015

The hardest part is starting. And that’s over. It’s been three weeks, and we’re a bit of a hairy beast. But we’re alive, and we’re standing… wet-nosed and a little wobbly, but also wide-eyed and full of wonder at the new landscape.

Digital has lots of neat bells and whistles that make the whole endeavour feel like a video game, where suddenly it’s not about the writing, but about the clicks. There’s this thing called analytics, which have nothing to do with Freud at all. It’s just one of those IT words for data, presented in histogram form. And who knew histograms could be so exciting?

Watching the roller coaster of consecutive lines unfold on the top of the screen was positively addictive in our first ten days: So many peaks. So many valleys. So many more peaks! So many more valleys… We were getting pretty giddy when things started to really crank after seven days — then everything went dark. Something about GoDaddy and WordPress. There was a coding issue with the Jetpack features and the myriad plugins — including the analytics.

So the analytics are off now. And it feels awesome. Flying blind feels much better than feeling the pressure of the histogram. Every time those bars shrivelled, we felt we failed. And alas, there’s no blue pill for Google potency. We’ve learned you have to feed the googlebots when they come crawling through your content looking for keywords and, thank goodness, all things original.

We’ve heard the Googleverse is democratic, and rewards content creators, which makes us feel somewhat optimistic about the future and our eventual hard launch. Yes. We are in the dusty corner of the digital galaxy. We are not easily google-able. But it’s actually by SEO-disabled design. We are hiding, for now, because what you’re seeing is a work-in-progress, or a preview night, or that awkward occasion where you watch a friend walk around in their underpants in a dazed attempt to get ready for a party.

Our appearance will be a little random because we’re changing. And hey, if you’re here, you’re special – at this point, we’re sort of invite-only.

So a thank you for your patience as we ramp up and start loading material in preparation for the big push, and also an apology to the 41 people who subscribed to the blog before we went dark last week: We lost our subscriber list in the crash, and you will have to re-subscribe if you want an email of every post. Sorry about that. We’re looking for a way to fix it, but in the words of the Iowa-based GoDaddy support tech who helped get us back up (and one of many techs we’ve been speaking to, of late): “it’s the Internet, there’s no predicting what can happen.”

Good thing we love roller coasters… and good thing we ditched our early addiction to analytics. We didn’t escape the daily histrionics to become slaves to hourly histograms. We’re just happy you could come, whether it’s once, multiple times, or on different platforms. We love you for you, not just your click.

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April 30, 2015

Just resting my eyes. Which brings us to design. We’re eager to keep the pages pretty static, because we find the rest of the scenery on the Internet seizure-inducing. We hate automatic video loads and promise that when we introduce moving images, they won’t be rammed into your eye-socket and eardrums.

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May 5, 2015

We’re slowly turning on the SEO, and so far, so good. We’re indexing. But we lost some button functionality in our crash: Facebook, Pinterest, email counters… not working. The Twitter counter works. But the others do not. Also, our feedback forum looks nice, but it seems we are not getting your comments. So profound apologies if you shared a comment with us via the feedback form, and we’ve been slow to respond. We didn’t see it. And a reminder, if you subscribed to the blog, you will have to do it all over again. Sorry!! The crash burned our user list. But from the ashes….

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More launch journal…

August 15, 2015

And you thought we fell asleep at the wheel, here — which we are kind of prone to do, given how old we are, and everything. But in fact, we’ve been flipping switches and figuring out the widgets. Those little packets of code are quite a wonder, and we couldn’t be happier that we’re actually starting to understand all the things that used to cover our collective upper lip in sweat. We’re even indulging in titillating thoughts of S….E….O. We’re starting to crawl. Slowly, but surely, the search engines are finding us. We even figured out why the site was crashing at the most inopportune moments: We were getting too much traffic for the starter account we have, and had to upgrade to accommodate the apparent demand. These are good problems to have, so thank you, for being a part of this exciting little journey we’re undertaking. The boat floats, the engines work, and now it’s time to crew up and stock provisions for push off.

August 22.2015

There is so much to do, it can all feel a little overwhelming. And given that this whole experiment needs to be a fun exercise for it to work, we’ve all had to negotiate with our inner workhorse and figure out a new normal working model for ourselves. We’re so used to deadlines, but we’re also programmed to be passive-aggressive about them, as well. We kind of hate them, but we kind of need them. So far, we’ve been able to muster enough muscle memory to feed the furnace of this beast we’ve created from dust. But we all feel like we’ve been slacking, which is kind of funny, given none of us are getting paid anything… yet. Maybe one day, this little monster will make a penny or two,  but that’s not the point. The point is writing. And right now, the writing is starting to feel like it always did — natural and relatively painless — only better, because now it’s all for us. And for you. The few of you out there who have found us, and found this. We’re full of hope for the future. After all, when you start from zero, it’s hard not to feel progress when you get to one. And hell, we’ve got 54 subscribers. (We’d have over 100 by now if we hadn’t lost our list in the crash….) But progress is progress. And 54 is mighty fine. Thank you very much.