Faint Praise: Alex Hillman, Karl Martino encourage folks to read here

Recently, I’ve had a couple big compliments on my writing here. Independents Hall co-founder Alex Hillman gave a nod on Twitter, encouraging his followers to follow my work in a similar way Comcast developer and Philly Future blogger Karl Martino did last summer.

Thanks to you both.

 

My Life To Do List got a face life; you really might not care and that’s OK

The online documentation of my pursuit of accomplishing items on a Life To Do List that I made as a kid has moved to a subdomain of this site, at list.christopherwink.com. I first brought it online earlier this year and have since updated it.

It gives me more flexibility, control and organization. I have no expectations or desire for that blog to be any regularly updated place, but rather a true chronicle of meaningful experiences. If you find that at all interesting for whatever reason, there is an RSS feed here and an email blast here.

A few good recent examples might be my post on attending the competitive eating Wing Bowl and being part of the Mummers Day and a review of backpacking Alaska. I have only posted four times so far in 2011, and I figure that’ll be about average.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about it too much, as this here will remain my focus of professional work.

The old WordPress.com that I first shared in 2008 is now dead, though the experiment with distinctions between personal and private seems to be alive.

This is just about the last online piece of my January resolution to update my archives, which also included shifting over my college thesis to thesis.christopherwink.com and getting online my work from Japan. Those are just for archiving purposes, as those projects are finished.

Philadelphia Republican Party: a new home for my senior thesis

Back in July 2008, I finally got around to updating a WordPress.com I had been using to track the work I was doing on my undergraduate honors thesis researching the future of the beleaguered Philadelphia Republican Party.

Two and a half years later, in looking to get a jump start on a 2011 resolution of ordering my online presence, I have abandoned the WordPress.com and brought that blog, its research and my final research paper to a subdomain here.

THESIS.christopherwink.com

I won’t be updating it. Rather, I just wanted a more stable, professional and suitable location to some dated work of which I am still proud and, believe it or not, I still get emails from people closer to what I covered than I certainly am.

Give it a look (perhaps most specifically the research paper from May 2008) and let me know what you think.

My 10 Most trafficked posts of 2010

You can learn a lot by looking at what you’ve done over a year.

So, while I try to get better at making goals and sticking to them, I have an eye to my work here, because this has always been a place for experimentation and learning, where I develop my thoughts, my writing and my style.

So, like I did last year and the year before, I’ve looked at the 15 most trafficked posts I’ve written here.

Looking at the list I think there are two specific lessons to be learned:

  • Original Reporting rocks — It’s just what I saw in Technically Philly’s roundup of top stories. In this list of 10, seven featured first-issue original reporting, two offered insider commentary and one offered a strong opinion. No aggregation, summaries or general perspective made it to the list, though I do all those kinds of posts too and those kind of posts dominated my 2008 list and had more influence on my 2009 list.
  • Time matters — This site gets a relatively low-level of traffic (the top post on this list received fewer than 500 hits this year), so the sheer amount of time a post is up is magnified. With bigger traffic sites, the first week of traffic can largely overcome a long tail. However in my case, just one of the 10 posts was created in the last four months, and I don’t think that’s due to lack of relatively meaningful content. So, with lower traffic sites, the longer a post is up has a greater impact on its overall traffic than with higher traffic sites.

That said, here are the posts. Draw your own conclusions:

10. Newsworks: WHYY online news brand launching means a lot to these legacies — Nov. 22

Find the other nine below.

Continue reading My 10 Most trafficked posts of 2010

Story Shuffle 4: SNOW audio is live

Earlier this month, my friend Brian James Kirk hosted the fourth Story Shuffle, with a theme of SNOW.

Now, the audio from all 11 stories are up. Listen to mine here or find the others here.

My story was on attending a local high school basketball game where I grew up as an excited middle schooler. As a promise to myself, I prepared notes for my story the first time. I was interested to see if I felt it improved my storytelling, which was ultimately my goal in starting the event series.

So, I dashed down 10 bullet points a few hours before the event, gave it a once over and took to telling the story fresh and un-aided later.

One thing I learned in the ‘research’ phase was that the high school gymnasium of my childhood is named for a former coach and ‘the father of wrestling in New Jersey.’

In addition to the RSS feed, you can follow Story Shuffle on Twitter and Facebook.

Disclaimer: transparency on a journalist Web site

I have a disclaimer page on this Web site now.

Last week I wrote about my writing a letter on behalf of a mentor of mine. He is leaving my alma mater Temple University after being pressured out. This is a subject about which I have a personal investment.

All journalists should use their personal Web sites as a place to be as transparent as possible about just such an example of potential bias.

Continue reading Disclaimer: transparency on a journalist Web site

My Services: Hire me to tell your story

The cover of a book I published with Blurb. Hire me to do something similar for your family.

Hire me to tell your story.

For a birthday, anniversary, wedding or another special event, let me tell your story. I will interview you or your family and compile a commemorative profile, just as it might appear in a newspaper or magazine. If you choose, it can be printed and framed in a variety of styles to your preference. I also could use a publishing service to create a book in a style of your choosing.

Continue reading My Services: Hire me to tell your story

Blavatar, banner for ChristopherWink.com

Mark this off the list of simple things I wanted to get done for this site.

I made the above banner, though I don’t have plans for using it as a header. Rather, it’ll serve its purpose as a focus when I need one, in places like on my blogging experience page. Something that no site in the world needs but will get action if it exists.

Continue reading Blavatar, banner for ChristopherWink.com