Making the Most of the Medium

It took me a long time to understand even part of the full range of things you can do on the Internet, and every day brings some new lesson or trick I can try out, mostly with this blog. It is very different from the old days when I worked as an editor for a print magazine.

For one thing, I can fix my mistakes online as fast as I notice them. If I create a blog entry and discover later I've misspelled something, I can go back in and fix it. If I don't like the look of the blog, I fix it. If I want to use a different picture than the one I started with, I fix it. You can't go back and fix a magazine article or a short story in an anthology if you notice you made a mistake. You have to publish an erratum later and look silly to the whole readership.

I credit Kara Wild with getting me to think about putting all my fanfiction online in my own website, which was a godsend for me since I frequently re-edited my stories and sent them back to websites that had already posted the earlier, uncorrected versions. This perfectionist habit drove many website owners nuts. With my own site, however, everyone could link to each story I did and I could make all the changes to them I wanted, and the changes would take effect immediately. Webmasters could thus reduce their bandwidth, and I could also track information on my stories: which stories were most popular, which countries were most interested in reading my stuff, etc. And, best of all, I could work at my own pace toward my own deadlines.

This is such a different medium from paper hard copy, it is hard to believe sometimes. I do miss the old days on the magazine staff, but I confess this is a lot more fun to work with. One of my resolutions for 2008 is to make this blog the most useful and effective resource for Daria fans ever created, as well as one of the most enjoyable, which is a lot to ask for but I hope no one will hold it against me if I try. It could be a hoot. Happy New Year to you and yours.