Time to get caught up and let everyone know what’s coming! (TLDR: the website rebuild project file is here.)
Moving & Shaking
ICYMI, I have relocated from my beloved hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan to Portland, OR due to lack of income opportunities or stable available housing. My friend Tony has graciously opened his home here to me, allowing me to take a couple of deep breaths and figure out “what’s next.”
While the interruption in work is unfortunate and inconvenient, it’s not fatal. After making the move and taking some time to really let myself process the last few years and all of the chaos and changes and – unfortunately – losses, I’m starting to ramp back up into production mode, one slow step at a time.
I’m also just about finished with a hiring process for a new part-time gig that should help relieve some financial pressure enough for me to focus on building my audience here, including being able to extent my content scope into more stuff that’s purely entertainment, like gaming and music and other hobbies. Some of you may recall I’d begun this process in the spring, opening a new section of the site dedicated to Fallout 4, and the beginnings of another for Cities: Skylines.
I’m facing some increasingly serious technical issues as my current computer is over a decade old and for instance it’s just not capable of loading Cities:Skylines anymore. On the up side, the exact same gear that works great for gaming is also required for media editing and production, so both the “public interest” and “entertainment” sides of that equation will benefit each other by working together toward the same basic goal of funding my work – with a bit of new expansion on the definition of “my work” to include some things other than politics and trying to save the world. Not that I’m losing energy or interest in saving the world, mind you, but there’s also a huge audience out there who doesn’t care at all about that stuff, and I need the biggest, widest audience I can build in order to have the necessary support base to really power this whole thing forward.
Thus, while I’ll be continuing to acquire and improve smaller existing tools, raising the funds for a new computer is tied for my highest current priority with getting a vehicle. I think the computer will come first; the expansion that empowers of even more, higher quality work will be an additional boost to audience reach due to higher visual quality in the content.
Regroup & Rebuild
The first thing on the docket is a complete ground-up rebuild of the main JohnHenry.US website. As things stand right now, the basic database that thing’s running on is nine years old and it’s all garbaged up with old data from plugins no longer in use and so forth. A few months back, just before I got hit with the announcement that I had to move ASAP, the WooCommerce implementation on the site crashed hard and killed something so dead that I couldn’t reinstall WC at all – as soon as I tried to activate it, the site would crash and refuse to do anything until I deleted the entire plugin directory.
Since WC is critical to the functionality of the merch perks storefront, which I’d only just got rolling in the last few months anyway, and given that a complete teardown and rebuild is long overdue anyway, that’s what I decided to do.
There are a few nifty tricks that I’ll finally be able to work on while I’m doing this, including getting this site polished up (as you can see that part’s done), and properly integrating user accounts to work across subdomains. Once that’s done, accessing supporter perks like “locked” blog updates, the vast majority of project files, etc. will be much easier for everyone and I should be able to start offering even more unique and fun incentives to gain support for my work.
As of this moment – about 4:30pm Pacific time on January 14 – that’s where things are. To avoid having to migrate more content, I’m going to resist the urge to write any new material for the site while we’re in transition, but I may drop something new on Medium or somewhere else if I feel the creative urge to do so.
It’s too early in the game to make firm predictions about timing right now, but I’m aiming to have everything back in production order no later than the end of the month.
There’s a lot more percolating on the horizon, but right now that’s where things are. Don’t forget I’ll still have all kinds of curated content coming out of the autoposter and will be continuing to post and comment on social media, mostly Facebook, so please do remember to stay engaged and keep those likes and shares and comments coming.
