This is where I’m spending my time this year:
Full-Time Focus
My full-time focus is on my job. I’m currently employed as the Web Content Officer for the University of Huddersfield, where I write content and advise on information architecture, web analytics and SEO.
All views expressed on this website are my own and do not reflect the views of the University.
Part-Time Focus
I work on these projects in my spare time. Some for fun and some for profit.
The Worldbuilding School – A website dedicated to helping authors, artists and game designers build their own fantasy worlds. I write articles, guides, draw maps and create products based around worldbuilding.
Pennine Academy of Dance – This is my Wife’s dance school where I help every Saturday on the reception and front of house. Plus I manage the website and marketing.
She is a fantastic dance teacher with a prestigious list of experience and training. I am of course biased, but you can read her bio to see for yourself.
Milnsbridge Village - To test out my content and SEO skills I'm building a local site for one of the villages where the Dance School holds it's classes. I'm part of the committee at the Village Hall which doesn't have a website. So I'm letting them use part of my new village website to host their content.
At the 3 August 2019 the website has no rankings or backlinks according to Ahrefs and no traffic according to Google Analytics and Search Console.
What I’m Learning
Along with day to day learning these are things I’m specifically focused on learning.
Experiments: This is the way I learn – Create a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. Discover what happens. Make adjustments or a new hypothesis. Repeat. I’m starting to document the results from these experiments. When I can’t share detailed results or reporting on older experiments I’ve listed them as case studies.
Video: I’ve long been fascinated by video but never took the serious time to learn video production. So I’ve bought some lighting and a tripod for my phone in order to learn about making videos.
Podcasting: Along with video (which I've not done much of) I'm now running a podcast with Aaron Russell. The podcast is called Klocast and is a branch of the digital collective we're apart of. There will be some videos made for the podcast.
Ghost CMS: I’ve built websites in WordPress since about 2009/2010. It’s still a great platform and I’ll probably use it for a long time to come. However, as I’m doing more in the field of information architecture and content modeling I’d like a web system that gives me more control over the content models I want to build for the content I’m creating. Originally I was looking into Jekyll however I'm testing out Ghost CMS. This website runs off Ghost.
It’s faster than WordPress, has a really nice writing edtior and uses modern web tech. Plus the use of Handlebars.js looks like converting HTML templates for use with will be relatively easy.
I do have some frustrations with the platoform but I'll write a longer post to go into these.
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This “Now” page was last updated on 3 August, 2019. If you want the backstory, check out my about page. The idea for this “Now” page was inspired by Derek Sivers.