... And A Happy New Year

A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach

V1#18 - Dec-31-2019

Welcome to the first issue of 6FPS for 2020, which I intend to send out New Year Day Morning. As I write this, it's after Christmas and I'm in year end wrap up mode. This year, I decided to do an extended year end wrap up based loosely on the 12 days of Christmas, which I thought would be fun. I then realized just how much writing I had decided I was doing, but I'm happy with the result... Those articles are:

  • My 12 Favorite Photos of 2019 (Twelve Days of Favorites, Day 1)

  • My 11 Favorite Books of 2019 (12 Days of Favorites, Day 2)

  • My 10 Favorite Video Games of 2019 (Twelve Days of Favorites, Day 3)

  • My 9 Favorite Podcasts of 2019 (Twelve Days of Favorites, Day 4)

  • My 8 Favorite Youtube Channels (Twelve Days of Favorites, day 5)

  • My 7 Favorite Blog Posts (Twelve Days of Favorites, day 6)

  • My 6 Favorite Causes (Twelve Days of Favorites, day 7)

  • My 5 Favorite Blogs (Twelve Days of Favorites, day 8)

  • My 4 Favorite Birds (Twelve Days of Favorites, day 9)

  • My 3 Favorite Mammals (Twelve Days of Favorites, day 10)

  • My 2 Favorite Cats (Twelve Days of Favorites, day 11)

  • My 1 Favorite Me: 2019 in Review, and 2020 on the horizon (Twelve Days of Favorites, day 12)


6FPS in 2020: I had originally hoped for 6FPS to come out about every two weeks. In reality I did 11 issues and averaged about 5 weeks in between. As I planned out 2020, a goal of mine was to do longer, better researched and thought out writing, so I'm shifting the blog from 2 articles + 2 photos a week to a single article, planning to publish Monday for the written piece, and Wed/Friday for the photos. That will give me a bit more time to spend on each article, which I hope will improve the quality and interesting-ness of them. For 6FPS, I'm setting it on a six week schedule to start, again to maximize my writing time vs my production time, although I hope/plan to shift that to four weeks sometime during the year. That feels like the right cadence for now, and we'll see and adjust as needed.

In 2019, 6FPS grew from 86 to 132 subscribers, a nice boost given effectively zero marketing to drive growth. Even nicer is that almost everyone who has subscribed has stayed subscribed, and as this has grown, open/click rates have stayed about the same, so you all seem to be interested and paying attention to the content.

All I can say to that is thank you. I will try to keep this intersting as we move through 2020 and make each issue worth your time investment and attention. Please feel free to drop me an email with suggestions and criticisms and ideas on how I can make it better.

On with the Show!

And with that, on with the show! And thank you for being part of this.

What's New?

Here is what I've written since the last issue:

  • I wrote about Adopting the 5 Mile Radius Challenge in the Winter 2019 issue of Santa Clara Valley Audbon's Avocet.

  • A Christmas Gift for you: Downtime, a Short Story

  • Fox Sparrow

  • Morro Rock

  • First look — a long weekend on the refuges

  • Barn Swallows fighting over a perch

  • Mother and Child

  • Blogging through the holidays

  • Surf Scoter with a Clam

  • I woke up one morning to realize I had a personal style

  • Ent’s Chair

  • How to drag Time Machine to its knees

  • Black-crowned Night Heron

  • Sunset on the Newport, Oregon Coast

  • Quick tip: MacOS Catalina, Lightroom, and LR/Mogriphy

  • Lessons from my Workshop: Bald Eagle before and after

Photos: Red-Tailed Hawk on a Kill

This is one of a sequence of 12 images I have of this bird on this kill from my recent trip to Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. Click on through to the article to see all of them at high resolution. It's one of those rare cases where a bird let me get very close and completely ignored me, feeling no threat, and so the real challenge was not seeing how many good images I could post, but how few I could limit myself to and show off the bird in action without diluting the impact of the event with too many too similar images. 

I really find it annoying when I see someone post all 300 images from a trip onto their Flickr account and expect me to wade through to find the really good ones. If you're too lazy to edit it down to the best, why should I? And so, when I get into that same situation, I really try to not be that person, even when -- like this time -- I could have easily shown off 50 images of this bird. But would any of those other images added to the story? Or just shown off that I got really lucky with a bird and I couldn't help myself in proving that. 
 

Simplifying and Complexifying

I've long known that I have a tendency to work on things based on some large attitudinal cycles that I go through over time. For instance, when I build things, I have a tendency to build the core piece and use it, then over time add things to it to improve it and make it do more. At some point, though, a switch flips somewhere inside my brain, and I shift into "this thing is too complicated for its own good mode". I usually don't recognize that shift at the time, but my thinking starts to shift from how to add things to how to improve it by making it simpler. 

If you're a programmer, I can bet the word "refactor" just popped into your head, and you're correct, when thought of as a series of tasks. But I tend to think of this as being in either simplify mode, or in complexify mode. 

I know there have been aspects where I've been trying to simplify for a while; a major one is trying to understand what to do in estate planning and activities so that should something happen (I have no current plans, but you can't exactly depend on that!) whoever has to sort it out afterwards doesn't spend a year dealing with crap and cussing at me under their breath. Decluttering the house is an aspect of that, and every month or two a couple of boxes of stuff gets dropped off at Goodwill. To be honest, it's hard to tell if I'm making progress, or just changing out old clutter for new clutter right now. But as a low level project, I'm working at it. 

The realization I'd shifted into hard core simplify mode, though, kicked in about a week ago when I realized I was pondering how best to move my blog from Wordpress to Squarespace. My first reaction was that I had no intention of a site redesign this year (I like how it looks, honest!), but I also know if I'm thinking about it I have reasons, even if consciously I haven't acknowledged them, so I usually try to figure out why it's popped into my mind (and honestly, if I don't, now understanding why tends to nag at me). 

What I realized is that in the back of my head is that I have a significant chunk of my content spread across three sites -- my blog on my own domain, and my photos, for which I use I use both Flickr and Smugmug (all my images, and my portfolio quality collections respectively), and for the latter two, neither ties to my name or domain so none of it helps name recognition or site SEO directly. Plus, I'm paying for three hosting systems. I could, I think, build out a new site on Squarespace that would handle all three sites and merge them together under one domain name -- and do it for what I'm currently paying for my wordpress hosted site, clearing two annual payments off the roster. 

Intriguing idea, one I still need to fully vet out. But there's a triggering issue that caused this thing to form in my head: my wordpress blog uses a theme by an outfit called Elegant Themes, which I really like, but the behind the scenes part are built on a system known as Divi, and over the summer they released a major update to Divi, parts of which I just don't really like all that much. There are parts of it that are also pretty good, but the editing bits and I do a lot of arguing, to the point I've gone back to writing my blogs mostly in BBedit and doing a copy/paste into Wordpress late in the process. Also annoying is that Divi doesn't, and from what I can tell never will, support writing in Markdown, which I use for pretty much everything else now. 

There is no practical way to divorce the divi editor without a major redesign and moving away from Elegant Themes (if I did, that would be a third annual license payment I could stop, and we're now approaching a savings equal to my annual Starbucks tab); and honestly, if I'm going to do a redesign, it's going to be off Wordpress and onto Squarespace, not because I dislike Wordpress, but because it'll reduce my administration time and I'll have a nice content creation GUI. 

So, it's a simplification but with advantages: fewer pieces to pay for, to administer and to have to try to get to cooperate and not mess each other up at inopportune moments. Downside? Boy, this is a lot of work. I was hoping for another year at least before thinking about a project like this, but it seems it's decided it wants me to think about it. 

The big hassle is data migration: Divi isn't something that I can just export from Wordpress and import into Squarespace like a generic Wordpress site. I knew that might be a problem at some point, and there are parts of this I can automate, but there's also going to be a lot of hand work. the image migrations are a complete redo from scratch, also a lot of hand work. Unless I make it a top priority, it's probably 5-6 months to see it do public viewing; if I did make it a top priority, it's still a good three months or more. Whee. 

But I've been mapping out the project and the new site structure in my head, and it has some nice things about it. I have a number of things to validate about Squarespace before I can commit, but it at least seems viable. Do I want to make that commit? I have to think about it, but it's obviously not something I've rejected out of hand. 

We'll see how this goes moving forward, if it does, but if it does, I'm sure I'll talk about it and show off the work in progress when it makes sense or I want feedback... 

Making life simpler and saving a chunk of money -- by making my life a lot more complicated and paying for parallel universes for a while. How could that possibly go wrong? 

For Your Consideration

About 6FPS and Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqui@mac.com).

Coming out in theory every two to three weeks, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

See you soon!


And with that, I'll see you in a few weeks with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along.

Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq


Copyright © 2020 Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.