As the typhoon flops, it’s time to do some tinkering
MORNING GUYS. There was much gloating in my family home last night when at 10.30 pm the authorities in Hong Kong raised the typhoon signal from 3 (which means “it’s going to be wet and miserable but you still have to go to work”) to 8 (which means “party time! all schools and offices shut”). (pic by xinhua)
And then we woke up at 7 am this morning to just do a double check – and found that they had just reversed the ruling!
Stuck it back from 8 to 3! All schools and offices to open as normal after all. Grrrr.
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Anyway, it’s pretty quiet in the office (my office is at a university and the students haven’t arrived for term yet). And the newspapers still don’t know I’m back. So it gives me time to do some tinkering (see pic) on various things.
I’m going to try to change the website address from mrjam.typepad.com directly to mrjam.org – this makes no difference to the links, so no-one needs to change anything. But the site itself may disappear entirely for a few hours.
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I’ve also had some email from comedians who are intrigued at the possibility of making this more of a general comedy website.
The written posts, most of which are twinned with newspaper or magazine columns, will continue—but there are suggestions to add more video, more cartoons etc.
Also I have to work out the optimum number of updates. In general, it seems that some subscribers to the site like to keep the number of updates low, two or three a week, so that their inboxes don’t fill up. But casual visitors to the site prefer lots of updates, because they want it to be different every time they visit.
One possible answer is to keep the number of main posts relatively low, but make more use of the comment functions so that there’s always something fresh to read, especially from our brilliant regular commentators.
Good news: A new batch of readers is joining us, mostly from India, which is great. No shortage of people there, so good potential for growth.
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My publishers want more integration between the site and the book industry – there’s a death of good sites around for people who write creatively, and for authors and emerging authors. This seems wise, since there are lots of creative people around worth encouraging, and I myself have three new books (at least) coming out in the next month or so.
First to arrive will be a new children’s book – a volume on money ethics for children. It’s the third part of a trilogy on essential financial knowledge for youngsters, so there’s an air of completion that arrives with it.
I’m tempted to send a copy to the leaders of HSBC and other banks – they certainly seem to need ethical training. And this is simple enough even for them.
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ANYWAY, no jokes as such today, sorry. The weather is too gloomy. But do drop me a line with suggestions about ways we can revise this site, make it more friendly and useful to creative people, writers, readers from all over the world, people who can barely read, etc., etc. And if you are also feeling lazy, no problem, put your feet up, have a relaxed weekend. We’ll talk soon.
