DBCII

Weekend Coffee Share – It’s Only Been 11 Months…

If we were having coffee, I might apologize for the fact that it’s been almost a year since I posted on this site. I’ve had every intention of redesigning the site to be more of a showcase and personal website than a blog – that’s still probably going to happen.

And it has actually been more than a year since I have done a Weekend Coffee Share here – we moved those for a time onto ComparativeGeeks.WordPress.com. Which, oh by the way, is no longer a site that’s being updated! Nope, we have successfully migrated from a WordPress dot com site to a WordPress dot org site, which included finding a theme and learning it, designing new logos, creating a navigation scheme and category hierarchy, writing pages for various policies and information, and getting buy-in from contributors. Check out that final product on ComparativeGeeks.com!

One thing we did not do was move over the archives from the old site. Those live on on the old site, but we wanted a bit of a fresh start. Some of that is for considering advertising – it seemed easier to plan for that moving forward than to bring over the full archives from a site that was free. That does mean however that we are needing to build up an archives and readership so that advertisers will take the site seriously!

As to readership, we found out that WordPress can migrate your followers from a dot com site to a dot org site! You have to use JetPack I think to do it, but then it can be done. We hadn’t looked at any sort of migration because we weren’t moving the archives over, so we heard about it once the site was live, thanks to Gene’o! The new site instantly became a better place once our existing followers started seeing us in their WordPress feed again.

So what’s new on the new site? Why’d we do it? Well, one thing is we wanted to do more with original content, and first up with that is the Podcast. My wife and I have started up the Comparative Opinions podcast, and you can subscribe to that feed here, or find it on iTunes, or listen on the website. We try to limit it to 30-45 minutes, and hopefully you enjoy it! We go into detail about what it is and why we did it in the first episode.

I also have successfully (finally) started up a webcomic! I had discussed that idea here on DBCII as well as on Comparative Geeks, and had done some initial sketching and technology testing (with my tablet) on the Comparative Geeks Instagram. Well now it’s real! I wrote an introductory post here, and then at the bottom of each page I’ve been manually adding Previous and Next buttons to navigate through the story. I’m trying to think of better ways to do this – there’s probably a plugin for this, I’m realizing. Anyway, I’m really excited with how it’s been going so far, but I would love feedback from all of you!

The other big goal was just to get more people involved, writing, and talking. So far, that’s been going well – quite a few contributors, with more in the wings on the way. We’ve created a way to organize ourselves and communicate that has been a huge help. We’re also experimenting with a Forum section, with the hope that we can create conversations there that live on in a different way than a blog post’s comments section lives on (or disappears over time). The Forums are the most new sort of thing, so they’ve been somewhat quiet – but please stop on by if you’d like to chat! There’s a whole section for writers and another for self-promotion, and those are both open for business so go right ahead 🙂

As to the rest of the conversation, I suppose that takes readers! If you haven’t already, hey, it would be great if you followed Comparative Geeks, come check us out! And depending on your social media of choice, check out our Facebook Page (which has been growing nicely) or our unified Twitter account to get all the post updates. The Twitter, in particular, is quite new and could use some love! And if you’re already following us, hey, stop on by and say hi. Thanks!