Month: October 2024

Categories
general

Speed, funnels, writing

A few vague thoughts on blogging and such on a lazy Sunday, which seems to be the only day I can ever pay attention to this thing.

I keep thinking about what I want to do here and how this blog should evolve (or whatever.) I sometimes think the big retirement project should be a grand reunification of all my content everywhere, into a giant meta-site of sorts, where one could see a mass of texts and books and pictures and videos and emails and whatever else, all poured into some giant Project Xanadu-esque thing. This is obviously something well beyond the ability of WordPress, because it can barely handle what I’ve got going here already.

Anyway, one of the bummers about this blog has been performance. I started using Pair to host this thing last century, and while they’ve always been rock-solid, they’ve also been somewhat dated in their offerings and tools. I mean, when I thought I needed to move from WordPress to some thing I wrote in Rails or whatever, I basically found it impossible to do anything except PHP unless I moved up a level or two on my package. Lately, I’ve been discouraged by the general performance and the fact that I have no CDN and this thing is hosted in Pittsburgh.

To be fair, it’s hard to tell if my site’s performance is because of my connection, the server I pay for, WordPress, my configuration of WordPress, or the sheer size of this thing. I’ve been looking with the P3 Plugin Profiler on the back end, and PageSpeed Insights on the front. I’ve messed around with the plugin config and switched SEO plugins, and that bought me about a half-second on page loads. I have no idea on how any of this works, but the general advice, in order, is to shell out for a good host, shell out for a CDN, look at your image situation, cut down the number of plugins, and cut down as much CSS stuff as you can. I think there are little tricks that could get this working slightly better, like switching themes, moving my archives links to another page, building my WP statically and hosting that in a CDN, or maybe finally giving up on WP and moving to Hugo or Jekyll or something else. I vaguely looked at moving to Ghost or moving to a hosted WP instance in Lightsail. The former was too limiting and the latter didn’t buy me much performance. It’s silly for me to waste time on this with the low amount of traffic this thing sees, but it’s an itch that’s hard to stop scratching.

The other thing I keep thinking of is funnels. How do people read this? How do they find it? Why do they stay? How do they come back? I don’t really market this thing at all, and I don’t fit any niche box that would make this go viral or get regular traffic. This is mostly me screaming into the void and hoping I can come back later and find something.

It makes me think back to the days of things like web rings and having a big list of favorite blogs on a page to find others and whatever else we used to do. This thing has an RSS feed, but it seems like nobody uses RSS anymore. I still use Feedly to read stuff, but everyone except three blogs have abandoned it. Is this because Google Reader is dead and nobody uses it, or is there some other reason like people “steal” content from feeds? No idea.

I think changes in the Google algorithm have made blogging organic content for the sake of organic content a lost cause. Twenty years ago, I could search for people involved in some niche hobby and find actual people, but now I just get travel links and shoe ads. I guess the big funnels are social media, but I don’t know that people leave their respective walled garden to go elsewhere and read content. And I can’t really post this stuff on TikTok or something. I guess if I had really snappy pull quotes, I could take just the text of that and put it over a video of a beach and play five seconds of a Taylor Swift song over it and people might see it. But not only is that work, it’s also stupid. I also keep thinking about how I’ve done mostly nothing with Substack, and maybe I should be pouring this stuff into that so people find it. Or not? I don’t know.

So, funnels. It’s an open question. I don’t know how I find content myself, let alone what others do.

The other big blocker here is I am far too busy with my own writing, and in deep on a project. I’m trying to finish the 18th book, or what I think might be the 18th. This thing originally started as a collection of short stories like The Failure Cascade, but it’s now almost as long as my second-longest book and will probably surpass it very soon. I’m trying to land this one by the end of the year, but every time I wrap up some little missing thing, I leave notes on three others. I think back in August, I thought I’d get this thing wrapped up by the first of September. Now we’re going into the back half of October, and I’m hoping December. Not a big deal if it’s not.

Starting in 2010, I forced myself to release at least a book a year, and got two on many of those years. It was one of those dumb self-publishing rules I thought I had to do, get something out to keep the long tail long, keep myself relevant, whatever. I now see no importance in that. I think I had a deep fear that if I missed a year, I’d miss two years, and then I’d wake up a decade later and wonder what happened.

I feel like I did that after Rumored was released – I did little things here and there, but I feel like the 00s were basically a lost decade for me. And I regret that, but I think the twist is that if I’d been productively writing that whole time, even without releasing anything, I would have been content with my output. And 2021-2023 were a wash for me, but I’ve kept busy this year, and that’s all that matters.

Categories
general

Sunday

Lazy Sunday and I have not updated in a while. I’d normally do some giant bulleted list, but I’m out of bullets, so I’ll just ramble for a bit.

The main reason I haven’t updated is because I’ve been busy writing. After almost two years of trying to write and failing, I decided to shift my writing hours. Since 2010 when I started working from home on east coast time, I would write religiously from 3 to 5 PM. This started to fall apart when my work started shifting to the west coast office, and eventually, I found myself either working from 6 to 6 every day, or finishing early and being in a complete daze, unable to write. Moving to the hybrid schedule and being in the city half the time also made this schedule impossible. So, I decided on the early shift. I started waking up at 3:45 every morning, and writing until 7. It takes a minute to get my head on straight every morning, and I’m usually blacking out at about 7 or 8 at night. But it’s been very productive with the writing. It’s good to completely block out everything and spend the time in the shower thinking about the writing, then brain dump it all for a few hours, and start the work day relaxed, knowing the writing is done for the day.

* * *

I don’t like to talk too much about works in progress, especially because my hard drive is littered with projects that never did and probably never will see the light of day. But the current one is a book of 20 stories, maybe a sort of successor to The Failure Cascade and Vol. 13. The main difference is that it’s much longer; it’s currently twice as long as Failure Cascade and not done yet. Most of my books were flash fiction, maybe what’s called a short-short story, between a thousand and two thousand words. FC had one story that was 5,000 words. This book has maybe five stories that long; one is three times that long. There’s still a lot of abstraction to the stories and it’s definitely not Raymond Carver or something. I don’t know if this is at all interesting to the reader, but I’ve enjoyed stretching things out a bit. The book has a title and a cover, which is a new one for me; I usually wait until the thing is 90% done (or more) and then freak out about what to do about that. I’d like to wrap this up by the end of the year, but I’m not too worried if that doesn’t happen.

* * *

Something else I’ve been doing is a slight variation on the Richard Feynman method of “favorite problems.” His method was to come up with a list of a dozen big-picture problems he wanted to solve in his lifetime. Then, as he found new lessons, new sources, new information, or new inspiration, he’d take that and see how it applied to these open questions.

I’ve been bouncing around between projects too much, and have too many dead manuscripts and morgue files of pieces and parts lying around. So I started a list. And right now, half of the dozen and a half things I have on my list are dealing with reissues of old books (or not), but roughly eight of them are full-sized book projects. Aside from the aforementioned book, two others are 100,000+ word manuscripts that are past the first draft point, but in heavy disrepair. I still have this idea for “The Big Book” which is vaguely outlined and would be a 400,000-word, four-story novel that covers a few disparate things that all weave together perfectly by the end. I have a nostalgia book about the 90s (although I’m done with nostalgia) and there’s enough travel junk here to make a book or two, but I’m not interested in either.

Anyway, the method has been useful, because when I stall out on something, I go to the next thing on the list that interests me, or I start digging through the few million words I have in these various junk files and see what can be harvested for what.

* * *

Something that’s not on the list is what to do with this and with all my other social media or whatever. I have a professional blog I haven’t touched since I posted about my MBA two years ago. I have the KonStack, which is largely dormant because I can’t figure out what goes there versus what goes here.

There are three basic problems, not to go into a diatribe about this:

  1. Each different content pool has a different persona, and trying to focus on what I should be writing in each different place brings out this crippling self-censorship which totally blocks me.
  2. The content pools have a certain overlap and I never know what to put where. Like when I take a nifty picture, does it go to Instagram? Do I use it as a heading here? Is it part of a Substack post? Do I need to go back to Flickr?
  3. There are various dumb rules and requirements and problems that set exceptions to each pool. For example, this blog is public. I can assume that it’s being read by family members who I don’t want to read my stuff, and I have to limit what I say here. I have a completely locked down Facebook group where I post the most obscene or crazy memes and thoughts, but it only reaches a maximum of 40 people. Nobody looks at Flickr, ever. Certain stuff is only going into books, so I don’t want to burn it on posts and then have someone who buys the book realize they already read 37% of it months ago.

Etc. The real solution is to write what I want and not dictate what I do by what works for the algorithm or what other people expect or want or do. That’s what I’ve been doing, but it obviously means I do a lot less here and on other sites.

* * *

I think travel is about done for the year. I had this wise idea that I was going to leave the country the week of the election, and blocked the time off. Then a couple of weeks ago, I threw my back out in probably the worst episode imaginable, and it completely immobilized me for almost a week. I spent about four days on the couch, unable to even sit up.  My back often goes out after flying halfway around the world, and it’s been getting increasingly worse. In Vietnam, I was completely immobile for the first morning I was in Saigon, and thought I was in serious trouble.

Now I’m starting to doubt my ability to take such long trips anymore. My back is mostly better now, maybe 90%. But I’m in food jail until further notice, so I can get some of this weight off my lower spine. And I’ll do whatever stretches and exercises they give me to do. Flying to Europe or whatever next month is out of the question. We might have some holiday travel, but that sort of depends on what happens next month, and I don’t want to get into that.

* * *

I fired the con artist dentist who did my Invisalign earlier this year. When I got it taken off, he did a half-ass job getting the attachments off, and then started in on me about how I needed four crowns redone immediately, at a cost of five grand each. The last crown I had done was like $1800, and insurance picked up half of it. So, done. I went back to my old dentist, who is in a dead mall just south of where we used to live in South San Francisco. He did a few x-rays and said I needed a hundred-dollar filling at the root line of a back crown, and he polished off one of my front teeth that had the remainder of an attachment button on it, which was driving me nuts. I love this guy, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the mall is imploded and he retires, but I’ll keep going back to him until then.

It’s always weird to be back in the old neighborhood, and it gives me such 2008-2009 flashbacks. But it’s also changing very quickly, and a lot of what used to be car washes and fast-food joints on El Camino have quickly become vast 5-over-1 apartment buildings. Parts of the strip are the same, but others are radically different now. I decided to stop for lunch at an old favorite, which really hit the spot. The weather was perfect, and this was the first I’d left the house since the back incident.

I went to this low-key Mexican bar and grill, an unassuming brick building with a big hand-painted Fifties-looking sign and a horse statue on the roof, and a mural on the brick wall that just said “RESTAURANT – BAR.” Inside, two old guys nursed drinks at the bar, locked into a soccer game on the screen. A Mexican family were just finishing up lunch, but I otherwise had the place to myself. Aside from the TVs and the credit card machine, the inside of that restaurant could have been 1961 or 1979 or 2008. I got an incredibly good chimichanga plate for twenty bucks, a food jail furlough. I need to do that more often, instead of just shame-eating twenty bucks of Crunchwrap in my car. It was incredibly relaxing, as was the walk to my car and back.

Anyway. Time to reset for the week and avoid the Sunday Scaries.