I know I’ve been a bit quiet over the past few weeks, since the whole plagiarism thing. Part of it has been to do with dealing with the various related tasks; but the other part has been due to putting some progress between my laziness/lack of interest and some fairly important admin tasks. I’ve been - as always - battling the incoming email pile, which I am happy to say had some good news which I’ll be posting in October when I’m back on School of Puppetry duty.

Whilst on that subject, two things to note: SOP has seen a significant increase in hits, despite me not updating the site for a couple of weeks. Interestingly, this smooths out my usual weekend drop in stats which correlates with my weekend drop in posts. This encourages me because I had an aim when I started migrating content that SOP would only be updated once or twice a week, and I was worried that stats would take a dive. However, this shows me that at the very least I can improve stats without necessarily adding more content.

The second issue is that the break has allowed me some serious thought on the progress of SOP. While reading all the eHow articles on puppetry, I realised just how little info there is aimed at the professional puppeteer. To that end, I’m developing ideas on pay-per-download booklets on various topics that are more for the advanced person: ie. copyrights, funding, scriptwriting, etc. You’ll find a poll where you can vote/add suggestions on the SOP Facebook page.

But back to Puppets in Melbourne: I had hoped to have a few things done by this point. I had been working on some developments for the new puppet designs, but got heavily sidetracked by the plagiarism stuff. I’d solved the issue of magnetics for the decoration/puppets, but got snagged trying to order a sample because their online shopping cart system borked at using paypal. The good news though is that if what I order works the way I think it will, it should be a relatively cheap and simple solution for making plastic puppets magnetic without worrying about glues. The same concept should also work for making the puppets attach to suction cups for window decorations.

The other thing that I’d been working on is some ideas for market/stall layout designs, since that will influence what I’ll need to be planning for in the future. I’ve made a couple of miniature set designs but am still working my way through the third design which is the most complicated, but also the one I’m most likely going to use.

In the meantime, I finished up something a bit random. I had been making a template for a blog - mainly for fun - and finished it this week. It’s a parallax web design, with pretty moving stars. And it’s for b2evolution, a blog platform that I use. I’ve made it available for free (paying the kindness forward, since b2evo stuff is all free and over the years gotten an enormous amount of help from fellow users), and if you’re interested in using it for Blogger, or whatever, let me know and I’ll convert it for you; it’s extremely easy to convert and it’d be good to see it get some use. It’s my hope that on that page I’ll add some “portfolio” snapshots of my own web designs and Pockets Full of Fun. It’d be interesting to do a retrospective of all the different designs I’ve gone through over the years on this site…

The progress I’ve made is good, but not very easy to showcase on a blog, since it’s mostly administrative. But it’s nice to take a break from writing for a bit.