3-Year Post (Vanity)

"Dam shortcuts!"

Way back on January 15th of 2009, Ink & Snow started out with a warts & all, experimental approach to documenting in-the-trenches experiences teaching a Beginning Drawing class at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Then it became infected by the Cartoon & Comic Art course the following semester, to mutate even further into the hybrid and erratic posting of random content it is today. Duly noted in 2010's milestone post (2011's was lost during the shuffle to Maine) these "New Years"-type retrospects are opportunities to recap and mull over where it's been and where it's going. Ever since the Blogger platform was changed, I've been doing a gradual and methodical comb-over, revamping older posts where the formatting is all wonky as they resurface in the archives. This has mostly been the resizing of images, as for some mysterious reason the older posts now display much smaller pictures than the improved, higher-resolution ones these days).

Stats have been steadily climbing as of late (over 6k last month), usually a couple hundred hits a day on the high end. Thometime in the nexth coupla months will come the momentouth thousandth post (no pressure but it probably ought to be something funny). No concrete goals beyond maintaining cruising altitude and diversifying into a couple other arenas. One aspect I've enjoyed pursuing has been interviews and more detailed process posts, and sooner than later I'll track down some more folks in this neck of the woods to pester and post about. And every so often I'll stick a shovel into the virtual mulch-pile of 50-odd backlogged posts that are incubating in draft form, turn 'em over and see if any fruiting bodies have sprouted up. Ew.

In the meantime, posting is now gonna down-shift to weekends only, as opposed to the M/W/F/Sat/Sun routine, so dropping a couplefew days off the schedule. I've been able to ascertain through monitoring of traffic that Fridays and Mondays are the main days for spikes in readership anyways (hmmm...). So look forward to new "Nuggets" and "LowTide" gag panels (plus the semi-occasional, vagrant classic dug up from the digital compost heap) will be interspersed with the intermittent essay and protracted mullings, unless, of course, something significant occurs that merits mention in-between all that. In theory I'm asserting some other priorities besides obsessive blogging duties, as in, make more damn art and take more damn hikes (not necessarily in that order). I sure appreciate the regular readers, and welcome again to all the recent visitors - like Life, it gets funnier eventually.