The Captain’s Log: It’s been a Long Road

And now a personal message from the editor-in-chief.

It’s feels like it’s been an absolute eternity since I announced that I’d be leaving my job of more than seven years to take on a full time job at enConnected’s publisher, and my start-up paige-aiden Media. Since then a ton has happened and you’ll noticed a ton simply hasn’t.

Let’s start with what has gone down. As part of my way to fund enConnected and paige-aiden I began doing freelance work for a number of technology publications. While doing so has limited the amount of direct time I get to spend writing enConnected stories, it has opened up another world to me in terms of hands-on experience.

To date enConnected has operated as a sort of enthusiast hangout with larger aspirations. This plus the need to support myself meant that I couldn’t invest the time and energy I needed to better develop as an editor and writer. Now that I’ve gotten a little more experience under my belt, I’d like to apply what I’ve learned to enConnected.

I want this place to have standards. I want it to be that place where people come to find stories that they just don’t find anywhere else. I also want it to have a different editorial tone from the drab non-sense that sometimes spews from other independent publications. This is technology. This is entertainment. Our stories and editorials should reflect the type of things we care about and the people we are in real life.

So far, I don’t know how most of these ambitions will translate to daily operations. Despite that, I’ve already made some course corrections. I’d like to outline a few for you.

• I’m reinstating the podcast effective August 1^st. Instead of airing one hour specials we’ll move to a regular time slot of recording on Thursdays and posting on Friday mornings at 8:30 a.m.
• If we’d like to play with the big boys, we’ve got to learn all the things that they do well and adapt to them. I’ve gotten feedback from a lot of you about how great our long form pieces are and how disappointed you are that we sometimes just don’t do a decent job of checking for grammar and punctuation issues. Your message is loud. Your intentions are clear. We will adapt. As editor it is my responsibility to catch these things. I’ve started taking night classes to get better at minding these types of things and my teacher has a ruler. Trust me, I’ll get better, or end up with bloody knuckles until I do. This won’t happen overnight, but you bet your ass we’ll get there.

   

Finally, I’d like to talk about some issues we’re running into. Right now, it’s still just me running news operations for the foreseeable future. In a perfect world, I’d be able to patrol for breaking news every hour or so, but sometimes that just isn’t possible. I plan to address this at some point, but right now I’ve got no hard plans to announce on that front.

Most of our social interactions on Twitter and Facebook are automated. Again, it’s not an ideal situation, but I have tuned these system to at least better inform you of content that’s actually still relevant. Until the WordPress foundation gets its stuff together, or we find a decent plugin that can manage these things this will continue to be an issue.

Right now, WordPress, or rather our installation of it, is about as slow as downloading a video from the Xbox Video Store on a 56k modem. I don’t think it’s a secret that I’m rapidly approaching my breaking point with WordPress. I can confirm that we have long-term plans to either break down the entire enConnected database, or architect the with another content management system. I’ll share more about that down the road.

If you’ve got any questions, or complaints send them. I want to hear from you. Send them to tpope@enConnected.com. I’ll see you in The Social. Until then, we are enConnected. Now playing.