Geoffrey Long
Tip of the Quill: Archives
On the virtues of lying fallow.

I should probably add that when Inkblots returns, it's most likely going to return to its quarterly state. My good friend Emily Leachman pointed out to me that my trying to make Inkblots into a daily was trying to fix an unbroken thing, and in fact this particular attempt actually did more damage than good. I might come up with a system by which I can add things on the fly, but our daily-update plan was just too ambitious for what has to stay a side project of mine. It sucks, but that's the way it is. Inkblots is a fantastic thing, and I'm afraid any attempt to commercialize it to the point where I could do it full-time would prove lethal. So it'll probably stay much the way it was, wiht a new edition appearing more or less four times a year, or whenever enough new stuff comes through my door to warrant it.

Further, there are virtues to letting the magazine lie fallow for a while. Each new edition is a lot of work, and going a while between updates allows me the time to try some new things each time. Like our migration to PHP, or the UI overhaul, and our eventual migration to some kind of content management system, although whether that will be Movable Type or not remains to be seen. (I hate to admit to being bested by Movable Type, but until Ben and Mena unleash MT Pro, I don't see any great ways to bend MT to do all the things we'd need. Upcoming additions may include some element of Flash or a more prominent integration with the Inkblots store – the latter of which is almost a certainty once CafePress gets their print line up and running, or we finish our book deal with... Ahem, cough cough, ahem, sorry. I'm not going there yet. ;-)

Right. As they used to say in the Bartles and James commercials, "Thank you for your support."

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