Archives by Tag: Site News
Welcome to Guest Geek #2: Shawn Lampron
Since it’s inception, I have been interested in finding ways of making Geek Force Five a more community-oriented site, a place where everyone had a chance to join and contribute to the conversation. That’s why I started the whole thing off with a question: Who’s in your Geek Force Five? That’s why you’ve found me asking Questions of the Day in recent weeks.
Back in May, I featured an article by our first Guest Geek (and resident 90210 expert), Bethany Snyder, a piece she followed up on with another amusing article just yesterday. At around the same time, I started attending monthly meetings of New Hampshire Media Makers in nearby Newmarket, which is where, last month, I met Shawn Lampron, who later today will become our second Guest Geek.
A former high-school English teacher now working in Business, the twenty-seven year old Lampron has been collecting comic books since the age of 14. He has a particular interest in Marvel Comics, and even more specifically in the dude representing as Marvel’s avatar here at Geek Force Five, our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. When Shawn told the masses at NH Media Makers that he was looking for places to write, having him as a guest here on GF5 was a no-brainer.
Shawn will be responsible for what we hope will become a bi-weekly column. It’ll be called “Marvel Mythos and Media,” and it starts today with the first in a series of pieces on one of Marvel’s most popular “hotheads”: Ghost Rider.
So, everyone please give a warm welcome to Shawn.
And if you’re interested in writing about an obsession that you and I share (like Shawn) or an obsession of your own (like Bethany), please shoot me an e-mail. These guest posts are only the beginning of what I have in mind for the future of Geek Force Five, and I’d love to have your help in shaping what’s on the horizon.
Hustle 2.0 - My Fall Schedule
My fall schedule was already crazy when, a couple of weeks ago, I first watched Gary Vaynerchuk’s video on keeping a day job while starting a new career online. I was already signed up to teach two English Composition classes at a local university, in addition to continuing work at my full-time gig with a small non-profit. But watching Gary’s video made me realize that there was still time in the day to do more, that I didn’t necessarily have to give up on my writing or on this Website for the entire autumn season.
In his video, Gary makes the point that it’s all about cutting out the wasted time, that it’s all about “hustle 2.0”. Agreeing with basically everything he had to say, I cooked up this schedule, which I’m curious to get your feedback on. Certain bits of it are flexible, but most bits are not. Keep in mind that I’m writing a blog about things that I geek out about, which involves a certain amount of “research” that others might consider “goofing off”.
Oh, and this is my Monday-Wednesday schedule. A few things change from Thursday through Sunday. More on that after.
- 04:15 a.m. - Wake up, make breakfast
- 04:30 a.m. - Watch Early Today and/or quick podcasts (Geek Brief, The Feed) while eating
- 04:45 a.m. - Shower, check e-mail, drive to bus station
- 05:45 a.m. - While riding the bus to Boston, watch previous evening’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, providing NBC remembered to upload the podcast version of it (I don’t get MSNBC at home, so this is my only way to watch it)
- 07:00 a.m. - Take the Red Line from South Station to Harvard Square, walk from Harvard Square to the campus where I teach, and prep for class
- 08:00 a.m. - Teach class
- 09:15 a.m. - Meet with students as necessary; otherwise, grade papers and/or prep next class
- 09:45 a.m. - Walk 3.2 miles from campus where I teach to Kenmore Square, where I work full-time
- 11:00 a.m. - Work full-time gig, with half-hour break for lunch and walk around square (and/or reading during inclement weather)
- 06:30 p.m. - Walk 2.3 miles from office in Kenmore Square to South Station
- 07:15 p.m. - While riding bus home, work on Website and/or on class prep/grading
- 08:30 p.m. - Arrive home, eat dinner, help put Kaylee to bed
- 09:00 p.m. - Read, wind down
- 09:30 p.m. - Go to sleep
Now, as I said, that’s the Monday-Wednesday schedule. Thursday’s schedule is pretty much the same but, instead of winding down between nine and nine-thirty, I plan to start the first of four days in a row of writing (some late-night, some not). I don’t have a class to teach on Friday morning, and I can sleep on the bus if I need the extra rest before working my one long day at the full-time gig, so I’ll plan on writing from nine until midnight on Thursday night.
I’ll do the same on Friday night. Then, on Saturday, aside from recuperating and spending time with my family, I’ll find three hours to write again. I’ll do my fourth day of writing early on Sunday morning, and then spend the rest of the morning on Sunday (before football) prepping for the next week’s classes.
It’s a busy schedule, but it fits in nearly everything that’s important to me right now: writing, teaching, reading, exercise, this Website, and, most of all, time with my family.
How are you fitting everything into your own busy schedule? What improvements do you think I could make in mine? Let me know!
Cosmetic Changes
I made some cosmetic changes to the site over the weekend, including moving the position of the navigation bar, sprucing up the content of the nav-bar a bit, and touching up some of the site-wide styles. So, if you’re an RSS-only reader of GF5, please do stop by and check out the changes. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, and I think that this minor revision will sate my desire for a site overhaul until I’m done with the craziness of this semester (about which more soon).
And if you’re looking for some ChrisClark/ecc1977 content on this fine Monday afternoon, please do check out my latest video, which was featured on the Viddler Spotlight blog today.
Geek Force Five Social Network
PHOTO: PodCamp Boston 3: Chris Clark by Steve Garfield, on Flickr CC BY-NC-SA
Shortly after fellow PodCamp Boston 3 attendee Steve Garfield shot the picture I’ve included above, he, along with John Herman, Leslie Poston, and a couple of others, convinced me that I needed to build a social network for Geek Force Five right away. They suggested Ning.com, which John and Leslie promised me would take literally two minutes to set up. And, since this whole site began with a social discussion on who each member of the community would include in their own personal Geek Force Five, I figured, “Why not?”
Thus, Geek Force Five on Ning was born.
If I’ve read correctly, a Facebook application may be possible using Ning, as well. And this is just the quick and dirty beginning. I have great plans for how to get the community more involved here at Geek Force Five, and I hope you’ll all stick around to see how those plans develop. Here’s a hint of what’s to come: Picture MTV Celebrity Deathmatch-style confrontations between each community member’s teams, maybe even in a March Madness-style bracket. Cool, right? I think so.
In the meantime, please consider signing up for the Ning site and answering (or re-answering) the question, “Who’s in your Geek Force Five?”
A Few Notes on the New Look
Last night, I launched a redesign of geekforcefive.com. (If you’re reading this by RSS, please come over and check it out.) This morning, I wanted to take a couple of minutes to explain the rationale behind some of the changes I made.
Here’s what I was hoping to accomplish with this redesign.
- Make the site easier to read by adding more white space
- Make important navigational elements easier to access
- Use “advertising” space more wisely
White Space
To accomplish my first goal, the first thing I did was drastically reduce the size of the header image. While I loved featuring Spidey and Silent Bob and all the rest so predominantly, the header image dominated the screen too much. It also took a long time to load, all things considered. So, I chopped the thing in half and came up with a much thinner compromise.
The next decision I made was to reduce the layout from a cramped three-column design to a more spacious two-column design. I repurposed the design I used for echristopherclark.com and changed the color scheme.
By doing those two things, I was able to add a lot more white space into the design. The end-result is that the Website is a lot easier to read.
Navigation
When I designed the first version of geekforcefive.com, I forgot to add space for a search box. That oversight has haunted me ever since. Sure, I was able to pop one in at the bottom of the page, but it was hidden away and I’m sure that hardly anyone thought to look down there for it. I know that I sometimes forgot where it was, so that’s saying something.
So, my first concern with navigation was to make sure the search box was easy to find. I also wanted the links to each news category higher up on the page. And I wanted the link to the about page (previously visitable only by clicking the picture of me in the old sidebar) to be easier to find.
I threw the search box and the category navigation into a horizontal navigation bar, right underneath the new, thinner header, and that part was taken care of. Then, I added a brief blurb to the top of the social networking box that I borrowed from echristopherclark.com, and linked that up to the about page to solve problem #2.
Advertise Wisely
One of the biggest decisions I had to make was what to do about advertising. Since its inception, geekforcefive.com has featured Google AdSense ads in the sidebar. They haven’t done all that well for me, so I decided to scrap them from the sidebar altogether. There were better things I could do with that space, I decided. If I was going to advertise something, why not advertise my book? And why not move the donations box out from the bottom of the sidebar to near the top? It had done more business for me in four months than Google AdSense has done in two years. How much more business might it bring in just by being more visible?
I decided to keep Google ads on the individual article pages by throwing in a horizontal box between the body of the article and the comments section, where I’d occasionally posted them before. We’ll see how that goes. Maybe now that they’re back in the flow of things, they’ll be more useful to readers.
While making my decisions on this front, I spent quite a bit of time reading Colin Devroe’s posts on how he uses advertising.
A Couple More Things...
I decided to put a Share This link on every article page, because it was criminal that I wasn’t making it easy for readers to share my work on their favorite social networking sites.
I also decided to use Gravatar.com to throw avatars into the comments section. I thought that’d be a fun touch. I know not a lot of you visitors are using Gravatar yet, but you should be. It’s dead simple and all it takes is a photo and an e-mail address.
Comments and questions are welcome below.
