Changing my Attack on the World at Large

This is me attacking the world…

A few weeks I wrote about spending a few months at The Iron Yard in Atlanta. One thing that I’ve been working on ever since “getting my place on the bus” is trying to figure out what to do with all of the projects that I’ve been working on.

What I mean is this. A month ago I was running, writing and creating content for three blogs.

Well, I don’t know whether you’ve ever had the opportunity to move a few hours away for a number of months and focus on learning one specific thing or not. It changes some things.

Making Sure I Can Focus on Learning

Because I have the feeling that I will be in classes or working on homework like a madman during these three months, I wanted to be sure that I didn’t spend too much time trying to keep all these separate projects running.

It wasn’t even so much that I would need to spend incredible amounts of time on any of my projects. Rather it was a culmination of things.

So here is an update on the state of my current projects…

PhotoSiteWP

If you’ve been following this blog for awhile you will know that I started PhotoSiteWP back at the beginning of the year. The idea was to create a blog that would help photographers (and creatives in general) get a WordPress powered website up and running.

The premise was that I would create three blog posts each week walking step by step through setting up a simple website.

At its best PhotoSiteWP was an experiment for me. One that provided me with an opportunity to build some kind of traffic and potentially a community of followers. It didn’t work out quite like that.

A few weeks ago I went ahead and shut PhotoSiteWP down. The reasons were many, and I wrote about some of them here.

PhotoSiteWP the website is gone. The content that I created for the blog is now here on my personal blog. The videos and everything will be available for some time. (forever if I have my way about it…)

PhotoSiteWP was an experiment and it taught me a number of things. Perhaps most importantly it taught me a number of things not to do!

CorePresets

Now let’s talk about CorePresets a little bit.

This is a project that I started playing with back in December. I built a quick website to test some ideas. It was basically a two page setup. The home page offered a video overview of some of my Lightroom develop presets and an option to sign up to receive updates of future preset packs. The contact page offered a way for people to get in touch with me if they wanted or needed to.

That was the complete site… in December.

The scope of the project has changed a few times since then. I started out with the intent of building a Lightroom preset store. I went through the paces of setting up a store and adding two packs of presets… Neither of these presets sold. At all.

Now, part of the problem of course was that I wasn’t getting a lot of traffic to the site. To change that I started a weekly video show, the CorePresets show. While it originally started as a way for me to get more eyeballs on my site, I soon found that I enjoyed creating the show itself quite a bit.

After some thinking about the whole thing I decided to change the entire concept behind what I was doing with CorePresets. Instead of trying to sell things to people I decided to just have fun with it. If I can figure out a way to make money off of it in the future that might be cool, but for now I’ve gone to the following concept.

Users, followers, fans, whatever you want to call them… can go to my site and sign up to receive email updates from me. When they do that they will also be given access to all of my Lightroom presets. No more levering people to try to get them to purchase packs of presets… I will commence to giving them away.

These email updates will go out each week when I post a new CorePresets show.

So it’s somewhat of a change in philosophy. I want to help people understand better how to use the products that I use on an almost daily basis. That is where the CorePresets show comes in, the Lightroom develop presets provide a good “jumping off” place for the work I do in Lightroom.

That is the current state of CorePresets.com. I do intend to continue running this site, updating and adding content (and presets) while I am in Atlanta at the Iron Yard.

My Personal Blog

Finally we get around to the site that you are reading this post on. My personal blog.

In case you hadn’t noticed I’ve changed how things look around here. A few weeks ago I started to get a bit tired of the overly complex layout and “way too many options” that were available when someone would visit my site.

So I started digging around for a very simple blog theme and trying a few of them. I eventually settled on this one. I made a few changes to it and here we are. (If you are curious it is the twenty thirteen Ryu theme from WordPress themselves.)

Here’s the deal. The change came largely because I decided that this is a blog. Not a website but a blog.

When I say that this is a blog and not a website I mean precisely that! I am not promoting anything here. (You could argue that I am promoting myself…) Rather this blog is a look at my life using words and images.

And that is how I will approach the blog from now on. This is my space to talk about “stuff…”

Pressgram 2.0

I wanted to put this in here at the end. If you don’t know already, I use and love using Pressgram. Pressgram is an app to simply and quickly publish my images from my phone to my WordPress powered site.

Well Pressgram got a huge update today. Version 2.0 is in the while and I’ve finally gotten my hands on it. It looks really good and has a lot of advanced stuff in it that is awesome!

If you’re interested in Pressgram, check out the official website right here.

Wrapping Things Up

And so once again we come to the end of a blog post.

I’m never sure what I want people to thing when they read these words I write. Today is no different, maybe I want people to know that they are not alone in their struggle to “figure things out.” Or maybe I just want those who follow along here to know about changes as they appear in my life and experience.

Whatever the case, if you’ve made it this far, you are a champ…

Take care folks!