In this world of writing and directing… and acting… and producing… and also trying to do other things, the ongoing evolution of tech is both a blessing and a curse.
The blessing is that with greater and greater ease you can do more and more things for yourself. If, for example, you have the talent to write and produce and direct and perform in… plays… movies or whathaveyou… then you also have the tools needed to promote those ventures, to talk about them online.
Social media is one way. For many of us the heart of it all is an online home called a website.
The curse part comes in when you realize that you’ve added web creation, design, maintenance and marketing to your already full plate of things-that-need-doing AND that the tools that allow you to do so ensure that the job is never done. The tools themselves are made obsolete and along with them everything you created with them… which means not only do you have to learn new tools, you have to learn how to use them to RECREATE everything you’ve already created before because… new and shiny tech standards slaughter all that came before them.
Here’s an example…
This is my website.
I’ve owned this URL for a long time now… so long that the entire way websites were created forced me to create an entirely new site, on a new platform… the result? The decade or more of history that had my “free monologues for actors and actresses” page at #1 most Google searches… was lost.
Well… it’s not lost exactly… the old pages are still out there somehow and frequently still show up in searches even though, in theory, redirects should have sent all traffic to my new site where updated versions of all those pages still exist.
In theory.
In reality that didn’t happen.
So what’s the point of all this? The point is that finding the time to teach oneself web-design is hard enough, and finding the time to maintain and update frequently even harder… and BOTH those things are even harder when you have to scrap everything you’ve built every few years, learn how to rebuild it and then re-learn and re-learn how to do things you used to do as a matter of course.
Point being… it all takes time, effort and focus. And given that my focus is at minimum divided between 5 or 6 careers —writing (for page and screen), acting (for stage, film & tv), voice work for radio & other projects, teaching writing classes and doing script consults— it’s probably no surprise that I’ve had no time for updating websites. And given that I haven’t published any new plays/books for awhile, and since my published material pretty much takes care of itself, dutifully sending home quarterly royalty cheques… it is hardly surprising that this is my first website blog post in a long time.
How long a time?
So long that I was in the process of trying to figure out how to create a blog on my website, watching instructional videos and reading instructive how-to blogs on the subject… only to find that I ALREADY FIGURED ALL THIS OUT A COUPLE YEARS AGO…
So now that I’ve ONCE AGAIN figured out how to access and update all this web stuff, I’m going to give some thought as to how to best utilize that knowledge to create a more consolidated home for my content going forward.
There’s a lot in the works with me these days… and even more on the drawing board that is ABOUT to be “in the works”.
I look forward to sharing it all with you (random persons who have stumbled across this placeholder post) as it becomes appropriate to do so.
This particular post is really just a test pattern, allowing me to remind myself that I have figured out how to do a LOT of things over the years, and that I have the tools needed to figure out how to do even more.
And that’s good.
Because for me busy is good. Stagnation is death.
I’m posting this to lift this blog out of its stagnation. For now, that’s enough.
More will follow.
Hope all is good with you.
TMcG