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Archive for the ‘accomplishments’ Category

9/3/2010 Cabin Day #1: 0 (zero) words

Loading stuff up in the van to take to the cabin I worried that the neighbors would think I was moving out and leaving Delia. Maybe that worry was just a projection of my own discomfort over making time alone/away a priority. Because there aren’t good models affirming pursuing time alone away from home unless it’s to do regular work that regular people do in the midst of whole bunches of other regular people. People who desire as much time alone as I do are widely regarded as unhealthy freaks or suspected of having other motives besides a simple need for solitude. Whatever the reason, I wanted to keep running back inside to hug Delia and get reassurance that whatever I‘m doing it‘s not what it might look like to the neighbors.

*****

At the cabin the wind blew and I wondered how come the skinny tall trees here don’t fall down. I amazed myself by not being annoyed that there’s a daycare with kid sounds a block away. I felt the sun on the back of my neck. I gazed at the crescent moon with breakfast around noon. I scratched up my arm and the back of my thigh on blackberry bush thorns. I figured out where I can stand and lie in the cabin with the blinds open without being seen by the girl in the big house or the people next door. I made a note to buy a couple of curtains to further hide myself when desired in those couple of places where I can be seen. I caught up on all of the pooping I didn’t get done while we were away from home for three nights.

I started to stop thinking about how to get down the ladder from the loft  (how do I mount it under the slant of roof? Do I turn around and climb it back down or just walk straight forward like I’m going down stairs?). I lit a candle. Then I blew it out when we left to get gas, but only $15 worth because we’re almost out of money until Tuesday so we didn’t reset the mileage on the odometer because our fuel gauge is broken/stuck on full.

*****

Things didn’t go exactly as planned, meaning I didn’t have time to plan to make things perfectly prepared.

Want to read more about Day One at The Cabin? I’m hiding the minute details after a break so as not to bore or overwhelm folks who don’t want to read about my zero word count day:

Read the rest of this entry »

I contemplate which award is a bigger honor. If you were trying to impress people at a party, which award would you rather have bragging rights to?

A more detailed comparison of my girlfriend Delia & her website and chopped pressed meats, along with a fantasy of taking a woman-sized formed pâté to my class reunion. I discuss fillers, green business, added hormones and more.

*****

We have company for a few days, our dear friends Kris and BeerCanMan, but there is work being done, too. Or at least TALK of work being done. Well, I am officially doing work now actually, not that this is the work you WANT me to be doing (and I’m sure you’re with me and would rather I hadn’t devoted hours to bills and money-juggling today) and some of the work is very behind-the-scenes promotional stuff but anyway. More later!

Over the weekend (on May Day) the members area of my site (TastyTrixie.com/members) turned eight years old!

Here are some pictures from this year’s and last year’s May Day galleries:

I *loved* these pictures last year; they made me fall in love with myself (an important state of mind to be in for a webwhore):

This year’s set wasn’t so good, but it was all worth it to get charming shots like this favorite of mine:

So after eight years you might wonder how the indie porn site business is holding up, and the answer is NOT SO GREAT! I’m still optimistic though because there are so many things I know I could do (or do better or do more often) to boost business.

The only “problem” is I’m becoming more realistic after all these years and recognize I can’t do it all and maybe it’s not really possible for us to do more! better! and more often! It even got to the point where I seriously considered focusing solely on promoting and shooting for DeliaTS.com and putting updates and promotion for all of our other sites, including TastyTrixie.com, on hiatus. We are trying to do the jobs of too many people.

The past few weeks I’ve shifted my approach to work a little bit by

1) using to-do list software (both Swift To-Do List and Daily To-Do List). It’s helping me prioritize and sort my ideas and tasks.

2) making a 40 hour work week a goal / forcing ourselves to take days off like normal people expect to do with good jobs.

I use a timer with a stopwatch to keep track of when I’m working. In the notes section of Daily To-Do List I keep track of the hours I’ve worked and what I’ve accomplished. Yes, it’s very wage-slavey, but it’s more manageable (and more rewarding) than feeling like WORK IS NEVER EVER DONE! BITCH, KEEP WORKING KEEP WORKING TEN TWELVE FOURTEEN HOURS A DAY YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T REST BECAUSE THERE’S JUST SO MUCH!!!

I am beginning to accept that if we can’t succeed by working a humane number of hours and allowing ourselves time OFF that IT ISN’T WORTH IT.

And that’s where the fear/knowledge comes in that I am going to have to give up doing some things I’m very attached to because it isn’t realistic to think I can do them all. Spiritually (? or emotionally or psychologically or whatever word you’re comfortable with) this is an important confrontation to have with myself and reality. I suspect there might be a life of bliss (with lots of time spent checking out books at the library and reading in the grass) awaiting me on the other side of this confrontation but I’m still balking at it and refusing to let go.

I wonder if it’s normal to take a decade to resolve this conflict between what you WANT to do and what you CAN do and still be healthy. Ten years sounds like a long time, but I think it might be about right. I figure I still have two or three years before life finally batters me into submission so for now my site is not on hiatus. Who knows? Maybe my timer-and-to-do-list-software scheme will actually make me more productive because I’m not so psyched out and overwhelmed trying to do everything all the time.

One thing I did let go of is driving myself crazy trying to be RELIABLE at posting a new picture gallery or porno video every week in my members-only area. Instead I’m focusing on posting more frequently (multiple times a week) in my new members-only blog with more uniquely personal and candid stuff like vlogs, webcam snaps, behind the scenes stuff, fantasies and other intimate thoughts I don’t want to post in the open here in my free blog, etc. Things got interrupted a bit with the dog dying and some other stuff we have going on (that I may or may not blog about here, but you can hear all about in my vlogs) but after a couple of months of doing things this way I believe it will take off and be more addictive/unique for members.

Obviously I will still do the regular porn stuff of high res photo galleries and videos but I am releasing myself from the pressure of thinking “reliable” is more important than “personal”. Because in the long run I’ve NEVER read a testimonial like, “I’m very aroused by the way Trixie is so RELIABLE.” I have, however, been told a number of times that people would maintain their membership even if all they got was the blog (and/or the spycams).

I pretty much think my “porn” is virtually worthless without the personality, especially with so much competition online, so that is what I’m going to make top priority on my site and the feeling of it being alive with more frequency and easily-digested candid content (albeit with *possibly* a *little* less standard porn site fare POSSIBLY . . . we’ll see how it plays out — I think it will wind up being the same quantity in that department once I get on a roll). The people who love me and my site tend to gravitate towards the bloggier, vloggier, twittier, webcammier, embarrassing confessions, taboo weirdness and daily details stuff (along with panties panties UPSKIRTS and panties!).

Over the years it’s started to feel like I had to make porn to meet porn industry standards — to be digestible in a standardized (though less consistently hardcore) way — so that porn site reviewers and other people promoting our sites would be able to sell my site. It has gotten to the point where we shoot HUGE galleries of a zillion photos less because we think that’s what our members want or because it’s more valuable that way, but because we need to have more promo material and because that’s how people assess the value of porn sites: how many pics are in your galleries? How HUGE are the pictures? How many formats do your videos come in? How often do you add another HUGE photo gallery? It’s pretty fucking boring and totally ignores the CONTENT of the content. And what is the point anyway when all of those things are the easiest to steal? I want to focus on the stuff people can’t steal or is less desirable to the people who steal content. I’m sick of feeling like we’re shooting things to make webmasters happy instead of ourselves and our members who really dig us (fortunately there are some webmasters who dig me/get me as is).

Sometimes I look at the stuff I did back in 2001 when I didn’t have a clue what a porn website was “supposed” to look like or offer, and I miss it/love it/want to do it that way again (but better and less stupid in some aspects). I can’t find the earlier version of this that talked about wanting my site to be like the magazines you’d stuff under your mattress, but I want to get back to that. Here’s one old version though (which of course I would change in some ways, but want to revive the spirit of in other ways):

I do not, however, want to repeat some of my earlier horrifying uber-cheesy design mistakes like this one from 2001:

What can I say? It was the turn of the century! And they didn’t even let our screen names be long enough for me to spell my name correctly! Aahh, those were the days . . . and all these years later the porn industry STILL doesn’t “get” camgirls which is how they’ve managed to destroy that platform for us as a way of making really good money and connections. Yeah, I’m getting off track and onto that bitter old webwhore lament . . .

Anyway, the point is that I want to pull some of the purity of my old personality porn into 2010 and approach working in a realistic way that’s personally rewarding. I’m not sure if it’s possible, though, considering how much time I have to sink into promotion and the technical aspects of maintaining our sites and cams, etc. Just as one three example(s): there is nothing pornographically fun or personally rewarding about spending hours dealing with Blogger pulling the rug out from under those of us who FTP our blogs or with searching high and low for my router password so I can modify all of the settings because our cable company decided to fuck with my IP address AGAIN or with getting set up with additional payment processors because one of them is scrubbing so hard you think they’re trying to erase you from their roster of clients. There’s precious little time left over after those kinds of bullshit that I am TOTALLY FUCKING SICK OF. It’s not all sex and games and horny-girl-diary-entries here, it’s a lot of technical minutiae.

I think I blew all of my really-hard-working years (nonstop, no personal time except for ramen and sleep) working for other people and on not knowing what I was doing. I’m almost forty and I’m done with that.

Note: I have a feeling this post might be stupid, but part of being realistic is hitting “publish” without trying to make every fucking thing perfect. Thanks for understanding and putting up with years of me wrestling with these same challenges of self-employment as an internet sex worker and webmaster.

We shot a whole set of bushy pictures specifically to recreate one yummy vision of my bush visible beneath the hem of my short red skirt:

I can’t overstate how fucking hot that image is. It could never get old/unsexy to me no matter how many variations of this pose and similar ensemble I were to be exposed to.

You can check out more Half Nekkid Thursday pics for this week here (links are in the comments).

Here are a few teaser thumbs to give you an idea of what the whole set is like up in my members-only area:

I’m not hairy right at the moment, but I will be again (and in the meantime will shoot more “smooth” stuff for people who like it that way while also trying to keep things furry with stuff we shot during hairier times). I would like to get enough shaved content shot and queued up that I could have time to grow everything out again ALL THE WAY including my armpits and alternate between hairy and smooth updates because I am genuinely aroused by a variety of body hair “styles”.

*****

Note to members: we have camshows and members-only chat scheduled Friday – Saturday. Speaking of chat and cams, we’re in the process of making some slow improvements to our main spycam plugin. For now the only visible change is that we’re using “our” chatroom on that site now, so our members-only chats will be held there right on site. In the past that site was leased to other members-only areas so we weren’t able to “steal” their members by talking about our own sites. For now that’s not a problem.

In the long run we hope to have at least two or three different versions of that site (one for camgirls’ members, one for affiliates to promote and one non-compete version for leasing) and get the software and user interface improved to make it profitable again. We are still in the planning and fundraising stage and there are still quite a few unknown factors and variables. Overall, though, we’re very excited about the possibilities of realizing the long-overdue potential of our favorite adult spycam site. Fortunately we are not doing it alone; Mina and Joe are equally committed. UNfortunately, all of us are already attempting to do way too many jobs so we can’t focus nearly enough attention on this particular project.

Our spycam and behind-the-scenes portal for our members, SpyOnUs.com, for example, is now a big hot mess that I’m not sure how to fix. I hope to tidy up a few things before Saturday’s chat session, though.

This is totally cheesy, but it brought tears to my eyes watching the girl win the Teen Tournament on Jeopardy tonight. I’m not posting her name here because I don’t want people to google her and wind up at my porn site, but it’s rare enough when women win, let alone YOUNG women and on top of that for her to be so poised, mature, articulate, confident and comfortable while also being so personable and such a joy to watch . . . it was inspiring to me and made me so happy to see a real young woman on television conduct herself in a way that I’d want my daughter (if I had one) to aspire to be like. Watching those kids on that show is usually so painfully awkward, I just felt so much (possibly misplaced?) pride for my gender as I admired her performance.

I know. I’m a total fucking dork. But I often get choked up watching women win in any kind of competition.

And okay, I’ll admit it: I have PMS!!

We’ve been working on a new site, TrixieAndFriends.com. Sounds pretty exciting, right? Like maybe it’s all about me sexing up my buddies? But actually, it’s not. It’s much more practical and mundane than that.

TrixieAndFriends.com is mostly just a preview blog showing our most recent updates (and eventually a categorized, searchable catalog of all of our porn going back to when each of our sites opened so that members can find what they want; THAT is going to take weeks/months of data entry to compile). No one will actually be able to JOIN TrixieAndFriends.com, instead it links to each of the sites in our network so people still have to pick who they want to support, but AmberLily and Delia and some of our members are keen to have a members-only forum/bulletin board so we WILL have a protected area on the site for that.

We’ve been using the members-only area of SpyOnUs for members to go to and see network-wide updates, but it was clunky and not very inclusive — DEFINITELY not searchable, so TrixieAndFriends.com is replacing & greatly improving what we were doing there (we also need to totally revamp SpyOnUs.com to make it strictly about voyeurism, our behind-the-scenes stuff, and of course our SPYCAMS). If any of you techy people are wondering why we don’t have a CMS to do all of this for us, the main reason is that each of the sites in our network is unique and independently owned/operated; we have no desire to standardize everything or force everyone to use one of the limited and difficult scripts on the market.

I feel self-conscious and narcissistic about buying and using the domain, TrixieAndFriends.com, for this (like how I keep saying it over and over? TRIXIE AND FRIENDS DOT COM!!!), but wanted to hurry up and DO IT and couldn’t come up with any brandable, inclusive, open-ended domain that would describe our network and allow for indie sites of any stripe to network with us down the road. Anything with the word “webwhore” in it is off-putting to many and brings to mind the kind of hardcore, stereotyped sites that are pretty much the opposite of what our sites are about (not that I, personally, am ever going to stop calling myself a webwhore, it’s just not a good moniker for everyone). I could come up with a lot of generic and good domain names, but they didn’t feel like anything I thought people would remember and associate with us, though IndiePornPass was one we tossed around, but what if we make sites for tech-incompetent little hotties down the road? What then? It might feel a little deceptive. I suppose, though, that we might network with people who aren’t really great “friends”,  but I think people are used to that term being used loosely (and I *do* love loose friends!).

Speaking of friends (the great kind, not the loosely used), it’s AmberLily’s birthday! One of the things people don’t seem to notice much about AmberLily’s site is that she does assloads of private webcam shows every week, practically every DAY, and those shows are archived in both streaming video and snapshot formats so her site is basically updated every day with a really wide variety of role plays, masturbation, and hot little outfits and fetish attire like pantyhose, gloves, bodystockings, schoolgirl skirts, shiny satin panties, etc. Whenever porn review sites look at her site this fact is rarely mentioned or, if it is, is given very short shrift. It pretty much happens to all webcam content. Instead of being highly valued the way it SHOULD be, reviewers are so unused to seeing it that they don’t get it and just focus on what they’re used to: generic photos and videos. They don’t understand that webcam grabs ARE jerkworthy even though they aren’t HD. It’s frustrating, to put it mildly.

Anyway, my hope is that at least OUR members will see and appreciate (in that very special way they have) how consistently hard AmberLily works and the range of her special offerings. Before announcing TrixieAndFriends I wanted to have all of our October updates catalogued there, but we’re only maybe halfway through representing the days AmberLily has added archived shows. Still, I think it’s already apparent what she’s doing, even if few people really have a clue how much she puts into it, especially considering the heavy burdens and gigantic stressors she and her hubby have been thrown this year.  She’s not the type to complain or let on when the chips are down and she’s under so much pressure that a normal person would just be curled in a ball in bed with a variety of prescription-strength sedatives so I don’t think most of her fans REALIZE. Also, I don’t think she really WANTS to hash over that stuff — she wants to do a good job on cam for her customers and let her mind be taken off all of that bullshit.

Point is, it’s her birthday, I hope it’s a great one for her and that she is rewarded for all of her hard work (and hotness). The week already started out in tears for her when their favorite cat and beloved pet of many years succombed to cancer, so . . .  yeah. If I could, I would shower her with a trip to Disneyland, piles of Star Wars toys, and as many hugs as she could tolerate.

The past week was filled with concentrated efforts on the mundane things in life, namely preparing and filing our very-late taxes, making a long trek to suburban mall-land for Delia’s laser hair removal appointment (which didn’t happen because they mysteriously stopped doing laser and, also mysteriously, disappeared Delia’s appointment right off their computer) and shoot-shopping, cleaning house in a big way for our landlords to visit, and just trying to stay on top of our usual load of tasks to keep things going.

Last night it started raining. HARD. Our first big rain of the season. In no time at all we heard drips in our bathroom; there’s a vent in the ceiling where water always leaks when the wood is dry/not swelled up. Usually it doesn’t leak much and stops once the wood around the opening swells back up to seal the cracks, but it was still raining like a son-of-a-bitch AND leaking like a sieve this morning when we woke to our alarm set early (for us, or most people on a Saturday morning). Delia climbed up into the attic to fix it and did some other stuff so by the time the owners got here all was remedied. I know, most renters would think of this as perfect timing, for the owners to see a problem and get someone else to come over and fix it, but for us? Working at home? With porn and webcams and stuff? I do not want the interruptions and invasion of privacy. It is bad enough knowing they have friends that they send to drive by the house to spy on its condition. Of course, if I were a landlord, I’d do the same thing, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy being on the receiving end of it. As it is, they want to make some (understandable, and nice for us) fixes to some things, but I feel totally stressed out about the idea of strangers being in our space when we totally cannot afford the intrusion, especially since it’s impossible for me to use that time to relax. Jesus, I’m about to give myself a panic attack right now just thinking about some handyman coming over on his own schedule, doing shit piece by piece, never knowing when he’ll arrive or leave, not being able to schedule shoots or shows . . . yes, I feel very pessimistic about it.

Anyway, the rest of today I tried to stay awake and just enjoyed our fresher, tidier house. I finished a couple of books (the Lauren Bacall autobiography and the first Trixie Belden book), stared vacantly at nothing and stayed warm. We also watched television (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dollhouse, Jeopardy) and stretched in our very dimly lit parlor listening to new age music with the stars shining bright outside (yes, it finally it stopped raining). I keep getting many-days-long headaches because my shoulders are so bunched up and my neck so stiff.

So. Our shows that we *were* going to do Friday and today are happening tomorrow (Sunday) and Monday. Members: you should go here for our schedule & group shows, and here for our spycams and members-only chat session.

I took the last pill in my birth control pack on Tuesday so I’m not sure why my period hasn’t started yet, but it won’t be a big shock if it happens around showtime.

Emailing back and forth with a webwhore/stripper/blogger extraordinaire, I found out she was under the impression that I am a Very Successful Camgirl, or as she put it,

I got a newsletter saying you made a gazillion dollars doing webcam.

This was totally news to me since I’ve never broken the million dollar mark, let alone the gazillion dollar mark. Or course, she wasn’t *directly* quoting from this mysterious newsletter, but now I am very sad to have to burst her bubble by saying that I’ve never been a Very Successful Camgirl. I momentarily did okay with it back in the days when it was much easier and knew I could give up working a regular job and support myself camming (and maintain my exorbitant studio-apartment lifestyle of top-ramen-eating), but I was never ever a top earner, unless it was a week here or a week there on very small independent camsites (NEVER on a big site like iFriends) with very little competition and it only took a small amount to get there. I never logged the kind of hours it would have taken to be rich or started early enough to get on the first wave-of-webcams before all the camsites started giving streams away for free.

I’m not saying I was an UNsuccessful camgirl, I was just never on the “Top Performing Hosts” page at iFriends the way some girls were, a few of them my friends, who actually were in the top ten earners some weeks. IF I remember correctly (and I might not), one of the girls said that amount was around $12,000 one week to be number one. I could be totally wrong, though – I didn’t write it down, that’s just a figure that sticks out in my head (and it was MANY YEARS AGO; I doubt *anyone* could come close to that figure in a week these days). And the number fluctuated every week depending on (obviously) how business was going and how many hours the top webwhores were logging in. Girls didn’t just SIT on the top ten, either — it’s not like they logged in and were guaranteed to make a couple thousand dollars in eight hours of looking pretty. Most of them could work their asses off nonstop for seven days every so often, on TOP of being Very Attractive and extremely personable worker bees with lots of regulars.

Of course, there were always conspiracy theories about how some girls would wind up on the top ten making lots of money. The main one, which was probably true (I never paid attention enough to know for sure or feel like it would change anything if I had this “proof”), is that the camsite would figure out who their golden girls would be and put their feeds on a special server where most of their traffic was delivered. The rest of us wouldn’t get as much exposure, and by virtue of that fact, women we all thought were totally fucking wretched camgirls (but blonde) would rake it in.

One of the girls targeted by this conspiracy theory was Venus Sex Goddess (I don’t actually remember EXACTLY what her screen name was, but it was something like that). Blonde and unbelievably boring, or so we believed:

Many catty, struggling camgirls would try to figure out her secret by visiting her chatroom and there was Nothing Going ON there, so they reasoned that her success was a combination of 1) server placement favoritism, 2) her high per-minute prices, and 3) the allure of her blonde, unsmiling, snobbiness. Camgirl spies reported she booted people out of her chatroom for not entering paid chat within 15 seconds or for asking simple questions/trying to make small talk. Some girls PAID to view her, to try to ascertain her recipe for success, and came out of it mystified because she did nothing, apparently. No hardcore, not even any nudity — just sat there unresponsive and unsmiling. Seriously. THE WOMAN DID NOT SMILE! Maybe the girls didn’t spend enough time spying on her, I don’t know, but they posted stories that became legendary of Venus Sex Goddess’ complete lack of, well, sexiness, customer service, or anything worth paying for (in our expert, not-making-money opinions), yet for a camgirl era lasting for MONTHS or maybe even, like, a YEAR or some other inconceivable stretch of short-attention-span time, she repeatedly held the number one spot for earnings.

Anyway, I am no Venus Sex Goddess. Never was, never will be.

It’s been YEARS since I looked up the top-earners page — wasn’t even sure if they still had it — but I *just* checked as research for this post, and guess what? I AM LISTED AS A TOP CHATHOST! Yes, I am currently occupying the tenth position in the much-ignored category of “Marketing” which has absolutely nothing to do with making money on cam, it’s making money as a webmaster *promoting* the camsite.

I know how much money I made last week doing that and it is a really paltry sum, yet only nine chathosts managed to make more sales than I did. NINE. The really sad part is that making money promoting the site is about a gazillion times easier than making money fucking yourself on cam. And when I use the word “gazillion” in this context, it is NOT an exaggeration. I probably could have spent eight hours logged in as a camgirl and not made as much money as I did for some work I did three years ago that continues to pay off today. “Webmasters” who have penises and have never spent a day in their lives having a fucking clue what camgirls do would piss themselves laughing at the measly amount of money I made last week. The moral of the story? No matter how much money Venus Sex Goddess ever made in her whole fucking life as a camgirl, it will never hold a flickering CANDLE to the amount of money the top webmaster/promoters of camsites have made. I could write a book about the inequity of it, but the truth is that it’s kind of our own damned faults.

I don’t know what it is in our makeup, but when I look at that top ten chart, I suffer from that flaw that defies logic because while I *do* feel a surge of competitiveness, I don’t immediately think, “oooh! It would be so easy for me to be #1 in the marketing category!” No. I wonder longingly if *I* could ever hold a position among today’s Venus Sex Goddesses. If I just put my mind to it! Even if I never get on the “magic” server! What would it FEEL like to be so golden? It beats the hell out of me how that desire to earn a small amount of money as a whore continues to be more appealing than earning a large amount of money as a no-name nerd, but that seems to be the way most women operate.

Anyway, I have no idea where this newsletter originated claiming I was “the highest earning camgirl ever or something like that.” And it said I “made a big number that year or that month.” Maybe a case of mistaken identity? I don’t know, but now I kind of feel like the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz has been revealed. I’ve always related to that dude even though I’d never intentionally deceive someone, at least not without issuing a disclaimer first informing people that what they’re about to experience is pure fantasy. It’s thrilling to imagine my colleagues admiring my earning potential and to think of the name “TastyTrixie” being written in the annals of camgirl fame, but alas, I do not deserve a place there.

God I am having fucking camgirl withdrawals right now. But I simply can’t allow myself to sacrifice the BETTER money I make as a webmaster to the now-extremely-crappy and unreliable amount of money one MIGHT make camming. Not right now, anyway. Isn’t it fucking crazy that part of why I want to pay off our debts and make better money is so I can *afford* to be a camgirl again?

After eight years of hearing that my blog is most people’s (even some members’) favorite part of my site, I decided to make it Stop-Number-One when you hit TastyTrixie.com, totally integrating it into the free area of my site and making it the focus. Instead of trying to create a structure and design out of thin air for all of my content, I’m (finally) taking advantage of awesome Wordpress tools that are already out there so I can focus on things I really ENJOY doing, instead of busting my brain and ass making half-assed, unworkable, amateur designs.

I’m posting it up before it’s totally done because I’m afraid if I don’t get it up NOW, I won’t want to post any new entries in my old blog (which will stay up as archives so that links will stay active/won’t break/die).

Yes, I’m losing some of the uniqueness of my old homemade designs, but I’d rather have my work be organized and accessible. Also, I’m sick of porn industry people making fun of my wacky attempts at design (but not so wacky that people didn’t like them and other webgirls even COPIED them, like, almost exactly).

Most importantly, I can feel proud to promote my site and blog again. For years now everything here has been outdated and it felt too depressing and large for me to fix it (especially not wanting to throw time and energy into something that would quickly become outdated and have to do it all over again). I didn’t even *want* people to come to my site, it looked so outdated and confusing with old pictures misrepresenting my current age and body type, old text misrepresenting my girlfriend and our relationship, etc. As a result, I have less traffic and not enough signups (people who pay to see the porn in my members-only area). Now I can get happy about inviting people to come here again. AND spend more time blogging instead of worrying about how stupid my blog LOOKED.

To Do:

• My links are messed up & I still need to add a lot more of them, more widgets, etc.
• TONS more pages to write/add/pornify & convert from old site stuff
• make a new free video sample
• Fix the template so people can comment on PAGES in addition to posts.

Concerns:

• Will my site look generic and fake now? Too much like other blogs?
• Will I feel pressure to always make the most recent post AWESOME since it’s the first impression people will have, and a) not post enough for fear of not being AWESOME enough, b) veer away from posting anything mundane and/or “too” honest/”negative” about things, and/or c) wind up being too fakey/hyper-pornographic in an ultimately counterproductive attempt to reel in sales?
• Wordpress is great and all, but it does introduce a lot more complexity, headaches & needs for babysitting.
• Will people looking for porn who are accustomed to a certain “tour” design for personality sites GET that this IS also a porn site? Or will they just be like, “oh, blog, generic, nothing naked to see here . . . nothing more to get beyond this boring, unoriginal template and all of these annoying WORDS”?
• -OR- will people think, “awesome! another free porn blog where everything is free free free and all I do is skim through it for the free free free pussy pics stolen from other sites that I totally don’t care about and have no intention of supporting!”? In other words, have all the free porn blogs shaped people’s responses to seeing a sex blog so that they view it in a totally depersonalized, ENTIRELY freeloading pic-trader way? Will they think I’m just some hobbyist webmaster/blogger dude/chick sitting here distributing a bunch of free shit?
• Is it too overwhelming? Too bright? Too RED?
• Is it loading too slow because there are too many dynamic elements?
• Do I really want Twitter fucking my whole layout & load time up when it’s crapped out?
• What about nudity on the front page? If I hide the pornyiest stuff behind cuts (where you have to click for “more”) and on clearly-labeled pages, will it be TOO hidden for people with urgent jacking needs and again they just won’t get that there’s more going on here than billions of words?

Awesome things:

• blends in well with my members-only area
• the search function actually WORKS
• Recognizable, USEFUL navigational structure: good for visitors and VERY GOOD for my brain – a huge relief; it’s like finally having a closet with hangers and drawers and shelves when all I had before was a giant box on the floor to throw my clothes into. Structure is what my brain needs to have the freedom to be creative without so much chaos.
• I don’t need to completely revamp everything whenever I want to add something new
• lots of other boring (on the outside) things like many easy ways to customize shit, use cool plugins, better search engine optimization, “cuts” (if I have a long post I can hide some behind the “more” link), etc.
• switching to wordpress and really figuring out how to make the most of it (especially now that it’s come so far) makes all of our other smaller porn & special interest blog projects more doable AND makes part of our revamps of SpyOnUs.com and Trixie.com more manageable.
• I can stop fretting about having to redesign my site – I’m so glad it’s not hanging over my head anymore like a giant ominous sandbag of timesuck inevitably ending in mediocre results
• it should stand the test of time / be functional and good-looking for a few years, I hope
• in the process of looking for make-do free wordpress templates I found this fairly-rad software, Artisteer, to make our own (which is what I used to create this theme).

Need/hope to fix:

• embedded videos in old posts aren’t showing up
• tags & categories are all fucked up (and most REALLY old posts don’t have them at all, nor do they all have titles)
• old comments are here and visible if you click on the post pages, but they’re not indicated in the footer’s comment count
• not entirely sure ALL of my old posts came over; need to check on that
• some formatting is messed up on old posts (pics not centered, blockquotes look fucked up . . . not a big deal, but it would be nice to fix it)
• need to add a plugin to help filter out spam comments
• I need to finally make sure I understand how to set up cron jobs so I can have posts queued up to post automatically.

Eventually:

• I’d like to have someone customize a layout that’s more original / exclusive . . . unless, of course, this works so well there’s no need to

This redesign is about four years overdue and I would LOVE to sit here and gripe about more technical matters that my fellow bloggers and webwhores could relate to, but I’m trying not to continue whining about how MOTHERFUCKING TIME CONSUMING AND BORING AND FRUSTRATING this process has been. Oops. Oh wait, AND SO NOT SEXY!!! Instead I’m going to enjoy being fifty steps closer to being happy with my site and celebrate having a plan and tools for revamping the rest of our outdated sites. I am also inches from promising myself to never fully rely only on ourselves to design anything important AGAIN. I like coming up with SOME ideas, but we don’t have the time or know-how to do EVERYTHING. I am really desperate to have more time to fuck and actually MAKE content instead of working on the boring cosmetic issues of how we present and organize and promote it.

So! What do you think?