2005 State of the Website

With the arrival of the New Year also comes another year's anniversary for Flayrah.com. We've been publishing for four straight years now, and in that time have posted 1,992 stories, with 3,820 comments between them. Not bad for a website that's done little direct advertising. I'm pretty happy with what I've been able to do with Flayrah.

Those of you who've been watching the site for a while now have probably noticed the rather dramatic dropoff in story posting in recent months, though. That is completely my fault. I've been around furry fandom since 1997; a fairly considerable length time for me. In that time, I've run the gamut of fandom activities from publishing paper and electronic fanzines, to running a convention artshow, to chairing a convention, as well as trying to keep this website going.

Burnout hit me pretty hard last year. I had retired as convention chairman of Midwest FurFest and after that intense two year experience really didn't want much to do with furries. Flayrah suffered as a result. I've gotten some of my enthusiasm back, but I'm still left with a website that needs quite a bit of attention.

The underlying code needs to be updated, which seems to be a perpetual problem. It doesn't help that every year I remember less and less of the Unix I learned while I was in college, not to mention the rapidly evolving world of web design, something I was only mildly competant in to begin with.

The second problem is one of content. I made a rather foolish decision some time ago, after a rather trivial event, and turned off editor access to the couple of people I did have approving articles. That was a mistake, and I'm sorry I did it. What I've learned since then is that I just don't have the time to troll the newsgroups and websites looking for interesting fandom news, anymore. At the same time, what I think is unusually good information is often not what other people think good, and vice versa.

So what do I want to do with the site? I don't know. My credit card is about to get dinged for another year's hosting, so I guess I'm in until at least '06. Readership has dipped somewhat in the last month or two, likely due to the dearth of new stories, but it had pretty much reached a rather low plateau. At least when compared to sites like Furnation and FurBid. I'd like to consider possibly getting an executive editor in place to handle more content creation than I've been able to do, and possibly one or two story editors for creating the day to day stories and managing the user-submitted stories. If you're interested, email me (email link is on the left in the menu), and tell me what you'd like to see in Flayrah over the coming year.

In any case, thanks to all of you for reading. I wouldn't be doing it otherwise.