Hurrah for Humorfeed!

So, there I was, preparing a post about how I was going to scale back my commitments to The Sleaze, maybe even put on a hiatus for a while - after all, a large proportion of its contemporaries amongst satire sites are currently inactive or defunct - when, out of the blue, I receive news that plans are afoot to revive the fortunes of Humorfeed.   Over the past few years I've announced the death of Humorfeed on several occasions, only to be proven wrong.  The site has limped along, with fewer and fewer contributors as fatigue, Google's decimation of organic traffic and ennui have taken their toll on the roster of satire sites, with, effectively, no one at the tiller.  However, the captain and officers are now back on deck and the site has a new sense of direction.  Hopefully, as well as eventually generating some non-organic traffic to the online satire world, it can also provide a much needed focus for the satire community.  In view of this, I'm left reconsidering my plans for The Sleaze.

I'd never intended to take the site offline, but in the face of ever declining traffic thanks to Google's constant de-ranking from its search results of smaller and independent websites (including, last week, the absolutely worst traffic I've seen in over ten years), it has become clear that simply publishing good quality content on a regular basis isn't enough.  The fact is that my attempts to drum up traffic and create content were taking up increasing amounts of my time and I was beginning to resent this.  There are other projects I want to pursue - I'd like to have another crack at podcasting, for instance, not to mention possibly starting a new, non-satire, site - and I can't do that whilst The Sleaze is taking up so much of my time.  The only solution, it seemed, was to reduce the amount of new content I was producing for the site and effectively putting it on the back burner, allowing it to simply tick over whilst I devoted more time to other things. 

As part of this process, I planned to use The Sleaze as a test bed for some experiments in Wordpress theme customisation.  I also planned to start shifting the focus of the site, looking at new forms of content, including shorter, up to the minute, stories and possibly some video.  All of this will probably still happen, but with the revived Humorfeed  in need of contributions as it gets back on its feet, I've decided to modify my schedule.  Whereas I had originally planned to start 'mothballing' The Sleaze at the end of March, (it will be fourteen years old come April, after all, which, in web terms, makes it decrepit), it is now more likely to be the Autumn.  That said, I will be slowing the rate of output in story terms so as to free up some time for other projects.  Hurrah for Humorfeed!