Dose of Reality

This probably happens to every anxious blogger that enters the blogosphere. You post obsessively for a month, watching your stats, hoping to see your authority on Technorati increase, or your page rank eventually happen on Google. You make friends, you comment on other blogs, you work 24/7.

And then sometimes nothing happens. Or a lot happens but not the sort of happening you hoped for. You start to question all your efforts but enough good happens to keep you going. You keep posting every day.

About the time you start to see success…you get really tired. So tired, that it takes more success the next day to keep your posts coming.

Do you give up? No, of course not. You’re still in denial. You still think it’s a maintainable system to pull off 80 hours weeks between your full-time day job and your full-time blog. (By the way, I truly believe creativity cannot happen in a tired mind.)

Then events happen that are never expected. Tipping points that make your realize you’re going to have to make a decision. You’re going to have to trust that people will still visit without posting every day. You have to trust that the foundation you’ve built will last.

Yes, this cartoonist is at that point.

PixelMarx was launched as a simple experiment: Draw one political cartoon every day until the election of 2008. The first cartoon took exactly 1 hour. The quality sucked. By the end of the week, the cartoon quality had increased dramatically, but each drawing now required 3 hours from start to post. And that didn’t include the time necessary to nurture the site, and grow its web presence.

30 days became a target date for evaluation. And 30 days passed with success. But the evaluation never happened. It was just easier to keep on drawing.

Then this blogger realized quality was better than quantity - after a few select cartoons really started to draw traffic. This happened last week, and ever since then I’ve been debating posting this third blogger bomb - The Dose of Reality.

For my regular readers - thank you. And keep checking back. Or better yet, subscribe to my RSS feed so you only visit when I have a new post. I do plan to keep posting, just not every day.

For those readers just visiting, take some time and explore. And a tip to any new blogger looking to start out…look for an idea that allows balance, and that’s maintainable. Post everyday for the first 30 days to establish your blog. But then have that evaluation period, and don’t keep posting just because. You need to rest.

At least that’s what the Doc’s told this IrishSpacemonk.

Blogger Bomb #2: And Real Work Came Crashing Down

Well, as you can see, real work shat on me.

As you might have guessed, this cartoonist also works a 40 hour work week and that work week just went to 50 hours, killing a bit of cartooning time.

No fun there.

Sorry readers.

Check back on Saturday for the first political cartoonist history lesson. And on Sunday for sports.

Until then, best web travels,

- IrishSpacemonk

P.S. Bill, I’m still mulling your idea…it’s just a bit of a tough one.

Blogger Bomb #1: Sidebar.php File Destroyed

At 10:25 pm, on August 14th, (or something like that), in my random hunt and gather for cool sidebar widgets, I managed to copy/paste widget code over my entire sidebar file. And then save without thinking. The effect wasn’t fully understood until moments later when I realized that Ctrl-Z didn’t work and I didn’t have any backup. In exactly 1 second, two weeks worth of work had disappeared - poof! (And as any WordPress blogger probably knows, your sidebar.php file is where all the stuff happens.)

With my web designer hat on, this would have never happened. I would have had version history, backup…yada yada. But I’ve been a cartoonist these past few weeks, and in my lazy cartoonist way, I’ve been just editing all my CSS and HTML files directly in the WordPress admin tool. Bad mistake.

And so I have my first Blogger Bomb.

A Blogger Bomb is one of those days where I’m unable to create a new political cartoon for whatever reason (in this case rebuilding my sidebar.php file). I hope to have very few of these, but I suppose in my goal to post some drawing every day, I’ll eventually hit the wrong button.

In the meantime, enjoy your journey, and please check back tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll have something more funny to draw. And thanks for stopping by.