Skip the explanation, just go to the tutorials.

I’ve noticed a big jump in subscribers lately, so I wanted to do a quick recap of what’s been going on. I’ve been posting a lot about changes and stuff that many of you might not be understanding, and there’s been quite a bit of chaos lately. I thought it would help if I’d give a bit of an intro, plus recap the 2010 events. And maybe give a clue of what’s going to happen in 2011. (Eek! 2011 already!)

Basically it all started in 2006. Having a ’spare’ site that was used for a theatre newsletter until the end of ‘06, I wanted to get the most out of my annual payment for it. I decided to set up a blog, detailing my puppet builds. You can even see the first ever blog post still. Over time, it occured to me that no one on the net, outside two people (Gary Friedman and Hilary Talbot), really talked about puppetry in Australia. I had recently complained at Arts Hub - an arts website popular in Oz - at how finding out about puppetry here was difficult. Despite being told by many pupppeteers who read the article, that puppetry was indeed in existence, none of them really seemed to have a handle on the use and influence the net could bring. Anyway, I decided to write up a couple of FAQs on puppetry. My most popular one at the time was where to buy puppets in Australia.

Also at the time, I really didn’t know what kind of puppetry I wanted to do. It had pretty much been a hobby up until 2008, when I started to take it a bit more seriously. But I also didn’t have a style, genre, or type of puppet. I did a bit of everything: mainly because I was learning the basics of puppetry from books and experimentation.

But early 2008 I did a workshop at the UNIMA festival, two masterclasses with Richard Bradshaw. He’s probably THE best known shadow puppeteer. I discovered I liked shadow puppets, and when I got home I tried making my own.

Since 2006 and 2008, two things have happened: the FAQ part of the site got increasingly more detailed and popular; and I got to liking shadow puppets even more. In fact, the popularity of the ‘Learn Online’ or FAQ page surprised me - it really was just a way to increase hits to my site. Free publicity via content. It wasn’t out of the goodness of my heart I was posting stuff. I just wanted the google love. There are all sorts of websites around talking about puppetry; but the Australian bent made it unique and has become a resource that even the well-known Australian puppeteers are referring to. (OPEN, a new emailed newsletter, references my site. UNIMA Australia, years after my joining as a member, now has me to run its website. And Gary Friedman once called me the best known puppeteer on the net. - Though he does like a bit of hyperbole )

Fast forward to the end of 2009 and I had been getting frustrated by a few things. Workshops that I’d been trying to hold were falling apart due to lack of numbers. I kept being asked to make things I either wasn’t capable of or had no interest in. Commissions were enquired about but never followed up by the person making the enquiry. I was increasingly interested in building shadow puppets, and increasingly dis-interested in every other kind of puppet. And the website seemed to be serving two masters: my own products, and the wiki-style content that provided me with so much free publicity but made me seem like a jack-of-all-trades and willing to make anything.

Something had to be done.

Did I have to just stop posting content, or take it all down? Could I keep up with the constant pace of new content? Could I pay for my ever-increasing and astronomical web hosting bills? Should I stop trying to sell shadow puppets? I thought about it quite a bit, had some input, thought about it some more, and finally made a decision. I already had www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au to present info for my - failed - workshops. So it was decided to move everything from the Learn Online/FAQ page to this new domain name, creating a separate and independent location for the exponential info. School of Puppetry (SOP) would be a puppetry resource: Puppets in Melbourne (PIM) would remain my promotional site for my own products (shadow puppets).

Mid this year, I began the task of creating new web designs, migrating content over, and doing a lot of research to ensure that both sites serve their purposes better. I’ve learned a lot actually, and the new PIM web design reflects a sharper understanding. Indeed, before I would have called myself a hacker, someone who knows bits and pieces of code, but can’t design. Now I think I could probably call it designing. (I was recently flattered by an actual web/graphic designer, who said the about page is one of the best she’s seen)

So that’s where we are now: migrating content and worrying about how to sell my shadow puppets. SOP, with its patterns and other things, will ’sell’ itself. Along with the plans already detailed in the ‘decision’ post above, I have many ideas to increase the passive income of the site with more patterns and - hopefully - ad placements.

PIM is however, where the plans get murky. I’ve recently had a discussion with some puppeteers over at Puppets and Stuff about how best to sell my shadow puppet patterns. They suggest, and I agree, that they would sell better if packaged up into a book instead of individually. Obviously, to do this is going to take some time: hence the ‘coming soon’ images on my newly-designed product page.

2011 is likely going to be more of the same: migrating content, creating new, pushing patterns, and building more shadow puppets to sell. Already I can see some redesign coming for SOP, as I notice some problems in it that I couldn’t have foreseen before. The rest of it has nothing to do with either site: it has to do with finding some money to continue paying for both. The chaos of migration means less income from patterns and other things, which I expected. I did however, have a strange notion that migration could be done in a couple of months. Tsk, silly me

Still, things are looking better than they did at the start of the year, and I’m extremely happy with how things are going. A big thanks to my reader, Rob, who inspired so much thought about how to get things on the right track. And thanks to every single person who’s read, participated, downloaded, or visited in the past several years. This journey wouldn’t have happened at all without you.