Blog Me Cash

Kingsley Willis currently works as a digital artist for Summit, a multimedia research lab in the Stanford School of Medicine. There he is heavily involved in teaching, web design, video editing, 3D design and animation, as well as print design.

His passions are deeply rooted in film. From an early age, he aspired to be a film director. Desiring to learn every aspect of production from lighting, shooting, editing, special effects and directing, he decided to major in Art History at Stanford University (class of 2001) to learn film theory and teach himself the practical and technical aspects of film by working at the student television studio and directing numerous short films both live action and computer generated.

I asked Kingsley to tell us something about his blog.

My blog started out as a personal holding tank for best practices, inspiration, tools, and tutorials related to film, visual effects, animation, games, and web design.

I wanted to remember how to do certain techniques, as well as review and bookmark helpful resources. As I continued, I realized it was also a helpful resource for others doing similar work. I had been blogging privately since March 2005 by sending myself emails with links, images, and other useful notes. I never looked at those emails again and they are only on my computer at work. So, on November 15th, 2005, I decided to launch a public version of these notes.

Since the launch I have had more than 100,000 page loads. My blog averaged 148 unique visitors per day in 2006. Today, I’m averaging 276 page loads. That said, most of the traffic is new visitors. However, there have been fewer returning visitors than I would like. Also, the users do not tend to stay very long on one page on average. I do try to write short posts, so that maybe a factor. In the beginning I got a lot of spam both through comments and trackbacks, so I turned them both off. I started requiring users to register, and starting September 4th, 2006 I now have 27 commentors registered. My goal is to build a community that shares information freely. I would like more page loads, sure, but also more returning visitors who comment.

I use Moveable Type blogging software to quickly create posts. My favorite feature is the “quickpost” feature which allows to save a bookmark to a script. When clicked, it copies whatever text you have highlighted on a particular page, and opens a new window with the text and the link to the page you were on. Other than that, I actually like Google’s Blogger from a maintenance standpoint. Moveable Type features a few too many oddly named templates to maintain and update. However, it gives you ultimate control over the look and feel, which I like.