A fork in the road

Image: Cliché cour­tesy of Mayr

We have come to a fork in the road; a road that has been excit­ing and tor­tu­ous to travel, yet a road wor­thy of trav­el­ling. A fork that we had to come to; a fork that will decide the future of this blog.

Was the Crazy Colom­bian on some illicit sub­stance when he started writ­ing? What on earth is he talk­ing about?

No, my loyal read­ers; I have not lost the plot; abused illicit sub­stances; or gone gaga on alco­hol. I am sim­ply at a point in our writ­ing jour­ney where I am at a loss to explain some things; things that are impor­tant to me and my writ­ing, and in con­se­quence, impor­tant to you, my readers.

In this arti­cle I will share with you some of the things that have me per­plexed; relate a few of our ups & downs since the early days of this blog; and ask for help. GASP! HORROR! The crazy Colom­bian used the ‘H’ word! Yes my loyal read­ers, the time has come for you to do some work. Yet it is a favour that I ask with the utmost humil­ity. I value your time (please don’t let my aver­age post length make you feel oth­er­wise), and appre­ci­ate the fact that time is your only truly non-renewable resource. And so, I will try again to use it wisely. So with­out fur­ther ado, let’s get started.

Para­doxes and insanely con­fus­ing questions

When I started this post, I was going into a lot of detail about the things that baf­fle me. And then I remem­bered I promised to keep it short. These are the top 5 ques­tions that per­plex me:

1. What arti­cle length do you pre­fer? My top 5 arti­cles have 52, 2000, 1000, 500 and 400 words respec­tively; kind of con­fus­ing, isn’t it? Do you pre­fer short, medium or long arti­cles? I just don’t get it…
2. Why won’t you talk to us? I am curi­ous about the absence of more com­ments to the arti­cles, espe­cially when I actively ask for ques­tions. Are my arti­cles too bland to be worth of a comment?
3. When is the best day to post? Lately I have started post­ing on a reg­u­lar sched­ule: Mon­days at 10 PM, Syd­ney time. Is this work­ing bet­ter, or do I go back to my irreg­u­lar post-when-you-feel-like-it schedule?
4. How many arti­cles do you expect per week? Lately I have moved to just one, as I pre­fer qual­ity over quan­tity. What are your thoughts?
5. What top­ics are of inter­est to you? I have been puz­zled by the diver­sity of top­ics that appear on my top 10 arti­cles. Are there spe­cific top­ics you’d pre­fer me to focus on, or should I con­tinue writ­ing on a wide range of top­ics? I am also inter­ested in your thoughts about the Peace­ful War­rior Series : What do you think of it?

Ups & downs on the way to wisdom

I’ve been at the sum­mit of ecstasy, and gone down the stairs of despair to the low­est dun­geons of my soul. The launch of the Peace­ful War­rior Series was a time I truly enjoyed, as was the day I found out in Skelliewag.org an arti­cle on find­ing and using incred­i­ble flickr images. The low­est moments hap­pened dur­ing our tran­si­tion from Wordpress.com to our own self-hosted domain; there were a num­ber of tech­ni­cal issues we were barely equipped to deal with.

Have you had moments of dis­ap­point­ment and wis­dom while read­ing this blog? Have you ever felt we’ve lost the plot, or that we have been par­tic­u­larly insight­ful? Let us know!

The moment of truth: will you invest a lit­tle time to help us make this blog better?

This is where I humbly ask for your help. As you read the pre­vi­ous sec­tions, did any answers or com­ments pop into your mind? If the answer is Yes, then please quickly move down to the com­ments sec­tion and jot them down. Don’t worry about edit­ing for polite­ness or gram­mat­i­cal rea­sons; we are happy to take it raw.

The sec­ond thing you can do is vote for a very sim­ple change. As I have men­tioned, I recently moved to a weekly post­ing sched­ule (every Mon­day at 10 PM). I am con­sid­er­ing intro­duc­ing a sec­ond post every Thurs­day at 10 PM, and make Thurs­day posts some­what shorter, say 200–400 words. They will likely be short reviews of books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, moments I’ve lived, or arti­cles I’ve read.

If you want to share your pref­er­ences with us, please go up and to the top and answer the short sur­vey. But before you do that, remem­ber to take a minute to leave some com­ments; when you com­plete the sur­vey, it will take you away from our web site to a page with the sur­vey results.

Thanks for your con­tin­u­ing read­er­ship and support,

The Crazy Colombian

Tagged as: Announcement, Help, Readership