We're back

Greetings and felicitations, nerds, sportsfans, and politicos. After a lengthy era of negligence, things here on StarshipTim.com are nearing a revival. There are a few reasons for this:

1. The world keeps throwing stuff at us that needs opining about.
2. I need to personally vent.
3. It is a golden age of fantastic TV that requires some proselytizing about.
4. My site covering the Seattle Mariners, grandsalami.net, is possibly (probably) headed for extinction and my Mariners and baseball columns will migrate over here. 

Number 4 is the most consequential. Had the GS site succeeded in bringing in enough revenue to break even, or even showed progress toward doing so, it would likely remain the time-suck that it's been for four-plus years and my online writing would still go there. I had been spending more time maintaining and creating content for that site than I had on really any other project over these years and (a) it began to be a chore; (b) the lack of engagement beyond single-page visits from Facebook groups was frustrating; and (c) it made me not want to do any other writing at all because of (a) and (b). As one can see from the most recent post prior to this one (scroll down), it's not a new thought. I contemplated this last year but ultimately decided to give it one more season to try and make it work over there. Nothing changed.

Which isn't to say grandsalami.net had no audience; it does have one, albeit one that tends to behave in the "new normal" of Internet users. Which is to say, readers spot a link to a GS post on Facebook (occasionally Twitter), click through, read it, and go back to Facebook (or Twitter). They don't stick around and follow internal links to other content or subscribe to RSS notifications or basically do anything except what they're told to by their social media feeds. It's annoying.

But it's also useful info; that behavior doesn't much depend on the GS brand or anything other than the links themselves. I speculate that the same behavior would apply to baseball-related posts on this blog shared on those social media groups and accounts. Similarly, that behavior can be exploited for posts on other topics with tags that place links in other Internetizens' feeds. It's not a done deal yet, I haven't 100% decided to throw in the towel on GS. But it's 85+%. That number gets higher as I factor in that the baseball season only lasts half the year and traffic over there goes down to nothing in the wintertime, while political and pop culture posts have year-round appeal. 

All of which is to say, the blog will rise from the ashes as GS slowly wilts away. Freeing up the time spent there—a not-insignificant amount of which is spent on stuff that nobody ever sees—will be a boon for not only this site but my overall time-management, which, frankly, can use some work.

Some redesign here might be part of the process, but only minor tweaks; I like the look of things here overall. Maybe deemphasizing the Trekkiness a tad with the fonts? We'll see.

Meanwhile, I remain a Mariners superfan even if not actively running that other site, so I am off to watch tonight's game against the Evil Empire, otherwise known as the New York Yankees. As my friend Mack likes to say, "FTY."