Hello everyone! I hate that the first blog post is a post about no new episode, but such is the way things go.
I’ll try to keep it short but I do want to give everyone an honest explanation. Jess and I have been doing the FFF podcast every month for a year and a half now. When I originally pitched the podcast to Jess I had hoped the standard review podcast would give us a foundation to spin up other projects. Instead we have had very little growth in that time. We are both fine recording new episodes as it is a hobby for us, but as I have been the only editor, the primary website developer and the primary moderator of our forum (as well as technical assistant for our facebook group, Jess stream moderator/IT, father) I am getting burnt out. So we’re skipping a month. Maybe two, but no more than that. We will be back and we will be discussing Mario Strikers.
Now that is out of the way, the website. I started the website last year, which was actually way later than I wanted to start it. Being a parent is hard and hobby projects get pushed back. When I first created the site it seemed to run fine. I had it formatted in a way I liked and it worked and I then left it untouched for 6 months. Well a couple months ago I came back to take a look at it and wonder why we have basically zero traffic. Obviously a complete lack of content is the primary reason, but I also discovered the homepage was basically non functional! I installed a caching plugin and asked some people in the discord to test it out, the cacher worked abit and I cleaned the site up to make it have a more modern aesthetic. Well fast forward to today where we are still getting little to no interaction on the website and I find it’s yet again almost non-functional.
I have tried many different things to get the website to function and be performant but only time will tell. If today’s modifications don’t work my next course of action is to migrate hosts, something I’d rather not do.
So that brings me to the future of FFFPod. Jess and I had a serious discussion about our feelings towards the little community we’ve built, and it’s many shortcomings. The podcast will continue after a short hiatus, but there are going to be changes. I’ve discussed in the past putting the podcast on Youtube, but I wanted to add something more than a static image with the audio. Sadly neither myself nor Jessica has that free time, so a static image is what will be coming. Jessica is going to begin contributing blog posts to the website (we sorted out some login issues she was having). Both of us are going to begin adding the games we’ve reviewed as short, simple blog posts so people can quickly see our thoughts, and if they want a more nuanced review the link will be right there for them to listen to the episode. Jessica has done a little design work for merch so expect at least a store link if not store integration eventually*tm. I will also be finding ways to integrate our twitch streaming directly into the website.
Sorry about the long text dump.
~Matt