2nd Annual "State of the Blog" Post

Year 2: the rear-view mirror

Well, here we are--two full years into the Spring Road Super Review.  Some milestones of the past twelve months, include:

a name change  

The blog's name official changed from Spring Road Superhero Review to simply Spring Road Super Review.  I found the original title unnecessarily restrictive in scope.  It was becoming more challenging to identify heroes that I was interested in writing about who were of "sufficient" obscurity; and I wanted to leave the door open to profiling supervillains.  Some of them are equally compelling and--given that they so rarely have their own ongoing titles--it's a lot easier to come up with obscure villains. Finally, the name change simplified the title text...always a boon given my tendency toward verbosity.

blog face-lift

Associated with the name change, the blog also experienced a public face-lift. Beyond the colors and fonts, there were three substantive structural changes. I added gadgets highlighting comic blogs differentiated between those that are: (1) about specific characters/teams, (2) about comics-in-general, and (3) actual ongoing web comics. (This final group is denoted under the heading: My Virtual Spinner Rack.)

post popularity

The Heroes of Lallor: brief thoughts on some square peg superheroes became my first post to receive over 1,000 page views. (Thanks, readers!)

blog networking

The Review made its first appearance on a public blog list. Thanks, Peerless Power of Comics!

failure of the fight series

There were, of course, some failures in the year as well. The biggest, in my opinion, was my attempted fight series. It never got quite the reader participation levels I was hoping.  Additionally, I found the series more difficult to write than originally anticipated. In the end, it was simply too much work for too little pay-off.

failure of social media strategy 1.0

A second disappointment was the Spring Road Superhero Review Facebook Page.   
Part of the failure may have been poor judgment of a page type. I set it up as a business page...and I just wasn't ready for that.  Though I've gotten a lot of great readers through Facebook, very few of them have come via the blog's Facebook page.  While I still believe there is some potential for better utilizing Facebook, I'm thinking of shutting down the current page and launching a different type of page.

Year 2: the crystal ball

social media strategy 2.0

I will continue exploring new and alternative social media strategies. At this point I've not decided precisely where to begin, but Tumblr seems promising. (If you've got recommendations, dear reader, please feel free to share. I'm not too proud to crowdsource wisdom.)

post planning cycles

Last year, I planned out the entire year's posts.  In an attempt to respond more quickly to feedback and blog stats, I'll be adjusting posting plans on a much shorter timeline.  This should result in posts that are more responsive to reader interest.

farewell to the structured review

Another departure from the blog will be my attempts at regular, structured webcomic reviews.  These wound up taking way more time to produce than their resulting traffic justified. After a certain point, they stopped being fun and just became a sort of drudgery.  What I had intended to be "structure" felt more and more like a strait-jacket.

Instead, moving forward I will simply profile these characters and stories the same way I do print comics and characters.  I may write broad overviews of characters, or include synopses of selected stories.

Basically, my assumption is that those who felt they benefitted from the old webcomic reviews will equally benefit from these posts...they'll just be a whole lot easier to write!

defined policy for commenting

Through the first two years, one of my major goals was simply to generate readers and commenters. Consequently, the only formal restrictions I put in place was that all comments had to be approved before becoming publicly visible.  My near-exclusive intention in this was to weed out junk-comment marketers that go to pages and say things like: "This is all very good. Much interesting information here.  Follow this link for great prices on Japanese lamps."

Well, over the course of the past year I learned that there's another reason for me to moderate comments.  I had somebody who posted, but used some profanity. Now, I'm not really into restricting free speech or policing other people's words...but this really bothered me because my goal has been to make this blog what I consider a "kid-friendly"space.  I just couldn't approve that person's comment...but I still felt conflicted about that decision since I had never formally announced any standards for comments. That ends today. From this point forward, I'm announcing that (in order to be published) Spring Road standards are:

Keep the comments clean.  I moderate all comments on this blog, and if I deem one not in keeping with the spirit I want to promote here it won't be published. I'm not publicizing anything that:  contains profanity, contains sexual commentary such that I think it would be inappropriate for children, and nothing that I consider legitimately hate-filled. 

I recognize that last criteria can be especially subjective--especially given the highly polarized and charged political environment here in the U.S. I'm not claiming my standards constitute some universal metaphysic. This isn't meant to squelch disagreement or criticism; but I'm not going to give a platform to anything that I feel like makes me complicit in the dehumanization of other people.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I want to say "thank you" to everyone who's read anything on this blog.  Special thanks goes to those of you who've reached out and interacted with me either through commenting on this blog, or on Facebook.  Your engagement is what keeps my spirits up and helps me find the motivation to grind out posts week after week. Here's to an even bigger and better third year!🍷