I sat down this morning to write a review of Dear Debt by Melanie Lockert. Today marks ten years since I said good-bye to debt, and I thought the review would be a fun celebration. But I ran into problems right away.
Over the past 8-1/2 years, the previous owners made a lot of changes to Get Rich Slowly. This is only natural and I don’t blame them. They did the things they thought they needed to do in order to make money for their company. That’s all great.
It turns out, however, that some of these changes have profound implications for me now that I’ve resumed ownership and control of the site.
Down the Rabbit Hole
For instance, I knew that for my review of Dear Debt, I wanted to link to the post I made when I got out of debt on 03 December 2007. It’s one of the most important articles I ever wrote for Get Rich Slowly.
When I went to re-read the article, however, I discovered it had been overhauled drastically. The previous owners had stripped much of me from the piece (which, again, makes perfect sense from a business perspective). Worse, they had altered and/or removed links to supporting articles. Yikes!
“I need to fix this,” I thought to myself. “Before I can publish my review of Dear Debt, I need to restore this article to its former self. That should only take a few minutes.” Hahaha. A few hours later, I finally finished the project. Restoring that one article required that I restore 5-6 other articles that the previous owners had modified. I had fallen down a rabbit hole from which I could not escape.
Now we’ve reached 14:00 on Sunday afternoon, and there’s no chance that I’ll get my review of Dear Debt written for today. Instead, I’m going to take this opportunity to review the state of the blog. Sound good? Good!
The State of the Blog
I’m pleased with the progress here at Get Rich Slowly. I regained control of the site six weeks ago, and for the past four weeks I’ve been publishing regularly. If you’ve been following along, you have a good feel for how I want things to go in the future:
- I want to publish occasional longer, original pieces — the sorts of things I’ve been writing at Money Boss during the past two years.
- I’ll continue to share my own financial story, as I always have. But because I know this isn’t as relatable for some people as it once was — I’m financially independent now, not deep in debt — I’m also going to share some of Kim’s progress. Kim isn’t in debt, but she is feeling pressed for time. She’s 45 and has $200,000 saved — but she doesn’t feel like that’s enough. As appropriate, I’ll share what she’s doing to improve her situation.
- On a day-to-day basis, however, most of what I share will be “curated” from other sites. My goal is to track down the most interesting and/or most useful money information from all corners of the web. I’ll share the best stuff in short blog posts. The honorable mentions will be tucked away as “Spare Change” links that you can access from the front page of Get Rich Slowly.
To make this model work, I’m gradually expanding my list of source material. I need a huge library of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels to sift through in order to find good stuff to share. (If you can recommend sources I should add to my library, please do so! I’d be grateful.)
Still to Come
Meanwhile, there’s still tons and tons of work to be done behind the scenes.
For example, I need to move non-core material from Money Boss to Get Rich Slowly. That project may start tomorrow, in fact. Plus:
- Many readers have written to ask what happened to the forums. Are they gone permanently? No, they’re not. The Get Rich Slowly discussion forums will return soon. We’ve been focusing on the blog itself for the past few weeks, but I think we’re ready to add back in other features, such as the forums. Look for those soon.
- Other readers are wondering what happened to the Get Rich Slowly emails. The previous owners lost the login info for the existing email feed, which means I’ll need to build a new email list from scratch. I’ve begun collecting email addresses, but I haven’t yet sent out a Get Rich Slowly email. I hope to send the first email later this week. Each one will highlight the best articles from the previous week, plus point you to other interesting money info from around the web.
While all of this is going on, I have a mountain of work to do restore the blog to its former state. I paid for a “site audit”, the results of which I received this week. The consultant scanned the site to discover which pages are currently most popular, and to uncover prominent broken links. I now have a prioritized list of articles to go back and update/revise. I hope to tackle one each weekday. But each one is likely to take an hour. Or two. Or more. That’ll impinge upon my time to write new stuff.
Starting in January, I’ll be working with a professional designer to come up with a slick new layout for Get Rich Slowly. A month ago, I whipped up the layout you see here, which is an improvement on the blog theme the site had been using since its inception in 2006. But I feel like I owe it to you (and to me) to have a modern design that makes things easy to access. My goal is for that design to make its debut on the site’s 12th anniversary, 15 April 2018. Let’s cross our fingers!
Please Give Me Feedback!
That’s it for now. All of my work attention is focused on Get Rich Slowly, and that’s how it’ll be for the foreseeable future. Not all of my efforts will be visible, however, since much of what I have to do is restore old content and prepare for the redesign.
As always, I’d be grateful for feedback regarding the site’s design and content. What do you like? What do you not like? What would you like to see in the future? What would help you get better with your money?
Most of all, though, I’m still wanting to know what sites you folks read regularly — and think other GRS readers would profit from. I know all about the common sites, of course, so I’d love to hear about hidden gems. Help me expand my ever-growing library of sources for curated content!
The post State of the blog (November 2017) appeared first on Get Rich Slowly.
Via Finance http://www.rssmix.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment