Fiend at Court Unplugged
Long time followers of the Fiend at Court will be aware that this site was originally created as an outlet for a daily goal I had established for myself to write a page a day about tennis. At the onset, I was concerned that it might be struggle to come up with enough ideas to fill a page each day. The training wheels phase of this project used a sequential walk through the Rules of Tennis as a daily prompt.
After the first six months I came to the realization that I was departing from the Rules of Tennis on a frequent and continual basis. There are many more topics that are satisfying and intellectually rewarding. On June 30, 2020, this site announced a planned and structured weekly schedule of topics. While there have been a couple of tweaks along the way, I have found that the rotation works well for me.
As I continue the march down memory lane of last year’s posts, it occurred to me that it was also appropriate to revisit the weekly rotation to see if any updates were needed. Ultimately, I determined that the current schedule is working well for me. In the process of examining that, however, I discovered that there is room for improvement for communicating the plan it to the site’s readership on a recurring basis.
In a half-assed minimalist attempt to improve upon that situation, I have created a new image that describes the weekly schedule. Visitors to the full site will see that new graphic at the top of the right sidebar. Mobile visitors will see it at the bottom of the scroll on each page. Email subscribers probably won’t see it at all, except for when I remember to embed it in the post. Someday I aspire to invest some time to improve my skills on the mechanics of actually operating a site.
On a somewhat related note, it was simultaneously exciting and frustrating when the daily traffic to Fiend at Court reached a high enough threshold to attract comment spammers. As I struggled to lock down the settings to eliminate that problem, I may have inadvertently locked out new comments all together. I’d like to open it back up a little bit, but I also don’t want to spend four hours a week deleting inappropriate comments with links to unrelated and sketchy websites.
In any case, I hope the new graphic makes it a little bit easier for this site’s readership to follow along. There is a method to the madness.
