Post Zero

Welcome to the new blog.  I’m terrified.

Even though it’s been suggested, I’ve never wanted to pursue writing. It’s a solitary pursuit and unlike music you don’t get the instant gratification of a reaction. However, with the advent of the internet and blogging (yes, I’m old enough to remember before that…hell, I’m still using two spaces after a period) it’s a lot more of an interactive undertaking than it once was.

So I’m going to explain how this is going to work, as much as I myself know…

This Is A Work In Progress

Setting up this blog has been a learning curve. I wasn’t ready for all the twists and turns of coding css, and it took two months to get this page in shape to launch. It’s still pretty maddening. A few times I looked into other options but it appears that for now, WordPress is the best way to go. That said, I had to settle for a pretty buggy theme, since it was the only one that would do what I wanted to do, and though I’ve tried to fix it up as much as I can, there will probably be problems and I might change formats in time.

Things I Wish This Blog Did, And Doesn’t, But I Hope Will Later

I don’t have as much control over the layout of these pages as I would like, and I’m still learning coding and things like that.  I’ve already tweaked the hell out of this page to get it to the point it’s at now.  I’m not happy yet though.

First off, I really wanted something like a magazine format. The way I had hoped to set this up was to have a running diary-like blog down the left-hand side of the page and long-form articles in the middle that would stay up longer. That proved to be basically impossible at the level of coding I am currently at. This is a bummer because I forsee this being updated daily with content that’s more expat- and diary-oriented and less frequently with articles on the other topics, which take longer to write.

My solution is to provide a “Sort By Category” function where you can instantly turn this into an all-diary blog, or all unsolved mysteries, or whatever. Since currently the main page cycles chronologically I’m also going to be playing some games with the publishing dates so that the long-form content stays up longer and the diary stuff cycles through. It’s an inelegant solution but until I can acquire more coding skills – or a more flexible theme – and find a better way to organize the flow of information it will have to do.

I could easily spend two more months playing with this. If I had my druthers, I’d be able to play videos on the front page instead of having to click through, be able to separate out content by category – keeping the daily blog separate as I said above – and be able to customize which posts are two columns wide and which are one. For the travel photos, I’d like to set up either a full screen gallery or some other kind of dynamic layout so you can really immerse yourself in them. I’m going to figure out some kind of an archive system so that there’s a top tier of content and then more in another part for those who want to take a deep drive – this will be a great place for past writings from Facebook and elsewhere. I’d also like to have the background of the page be less static and more in keeping with the “wide open” topics of the blog.

Except for the last one, I don’t know how to do any of these things, and I haven’t figured out how to do the last one in a way that doesn’t look like crap. So for now this is what we got, but I’m optimistic that if this thing keeps going I’ll be able to make a lot of improvements in the layout and make it all less static and more visually interesting.

But it does look great on a phone.  So that part is cool.

New Stuff Every Day

This blog is a for-profit thing for me. That doesn’t mean you should feel obligated to subscribe or contribute if you don’t want to or it’s hard for you to do so. But I am going to try to scale my effort up or down depending on how much it brings in (since I suffer from neck problems and have to limit my time at the computer, which is my main viable source of income overseas, I pretty much have to do this).

The flip side of this is I want to make this blog interesting for people to read and have something to look forward to every day. The nice thing is that being in Asia, I’m up while you’re asleep…so I can have new content up during the day and it’ll be waiting for you when you wake up. I’m a little nervous about being able to keep up with this but I do have plenty of ideas.

Advertising

I am going to sell ad space here.  My idea is to have two ads side by side at the bottom of the page that will run for a full month, at $37/each.  I don’t want to have any more than that.  I’m curious to see if this is something anybody wants to do – my thinking is that though I don’t expect I will have a huge readership, you’re all a high quality bunch that supports thoughtful art and other endeavors.  I think you have valuable eyeballs, and a buck a day is not asking much to access them.

I’m not going to put too much effort into reaching out for advertisers — that’s not really what this is about — but obviously if you have something you’re interested in advertising here, shoot me an email.

I’ve Done This Before

As I was setting all this up I had a vaguely familiar feeling and I remembered that before I ever became a musician, I was a newspaper editor. It’s a part of my life that’s largely forgotten…but it’s been fun to have it start to come back to me.

I Want Your Input

I want you to feel free to comment on the blogs and I want to acknowledge that on Facebook, I can be pretty tough on people in the comments section. This is because there are certain things in our society that I feel like need to be pointed out and thought about that aren’t.

That said I want to keep this page a more or less politics-free zone. I may comment about things like that in the “Philosophy” section but I want to put it more in the form of ideas that in theory everyone should be able to agree on. I left the U.S. partly to get away from the conformity of thought, lack of perspective and disrespect for knowledge that I think are killing our culture.  This blog is supposed to help you get away from it too. I don’t want to grind axes here. I want to put ideas in your head about ways things could be different…and already are, in other places.

I also want to hear from you in terms of what content you’d like. I’m asking you to contribute financially to the blog so…what’s gonna make it worth it to you? The early indicators are that people would like to see more travel pictures and music content, so I’m thinking along those lines.  But as this develops feel free to make more suggestions. I expect this blog will flourish, or wither, in the first two months. I’ve put a lot of time into it so I don’t want it to wither. I want it to be fun for both of us, not something you and I feel like we “have” to do.

But more than that…there are gonna be bugs here. Probably lots of ’em. I haven’t had time to double-check every corner of this blog. If you run into a problem, shoot me an email at cockeyedghost {at} gmail.com. But…

But…Be Patient

Remember what I said about me being up when you’re asleep? That works both ways. When a lot of you are reading this, I’m probably in bed, so if you run into a problem, there will be a lag in my ability to deal with it. Remember for now I’m just one guy so bear with me.  Gradually I’ll work it all out.

Wow, That Was Long

One reason I like the blog format is it’s going to allow me to write about the expat experience – and the other stuff – in a more bite-sized format than I could with the weekly logs on Facebook. But I can type about as fast as I think and I think pretty fast.  I will try to keep things as short and pithy as I can, with lots of pictures…but there’s gonna be a lot of the long stuff too (the Ewasko blog is 20,000 words!). What can I say? It’s what I do.

Enjoy The Blog!

I hope you find enough here to keep you busy, and I have a lot of cool ideas for the future. If you like it, I encourage you to repost on Facebook and other social media and to spread the word. Thank you!