Strange’s Second Life Blog

Anybody who really knows me knows that I’m a really honest person. Though I may kid around at times and be sarcastic at other times, I don’t lie about things that I’m thinking. I’ll give honest opinions if I’m asked. I’ll keep things private if I’m asked to, as well.

This post is really about the work that I’ve done at SL Reports and a decision I’ve made. This is the first announcement, and the link to this will be given directly to those who need to know. I’m announcing it publicly so that everybody knows, though.

In early June of this year, I was hired to do a web site redesign for them. It was not a super difficult site to redesign, but moving the site from one platform to another was the hardest thing about it. Even with that, some of the archives were not transferred to the new platform. Since SL Reports is a “news” site, the more current articles were more important than the archives. New content was added quickly and the past articles became less and less of a priority.

It’s been about five months since I did the redesign of the site. Since then, I’ve become more and more involved in working on it by adding features, tweaking templates, deleting spam comments, adding a mobile version, and a couple months ago, I was hired as the General Manager. Since taking over the GM position, I changed a lot of the way the contact information was delivered for the site, so that the CEO (Xavier Mohr) saw less of it. Essentially, that’s what I was hired for… to take some of the workload off of him. Rather than everybody contacting him, they would “have to go through me, first”.

I also ran a highly responsive campaign to get more writers, covering a variety of different topics, for the site. Within the four day campaign, 23 interested writers responded. Only a handful of them have actually written anything, but what they have written has been some pretty good stuff. An in-world group for SL Reports Writers was created and all of the people that responded during the campaign were added to the group. The group is used to send notices of events and other things that need to be covered, in-world.

While I don’t write much content on SL Reports, myself, I do spend quite a bit of time on the site, behind the scenes. Recently, Xavier has begun posting more and more financial articles, as well. He’s much more connected to the “financial world” than I will ever be, so I am thankful that he’s as active as he is.

Getting to the point of this post (believe it or not, this is going somewhere), I just want to say that while SL Reports has been a huge part of my Second Life for the past six months, I think the time has come for me to say goodbye.

Though I have half-kiddingly mentioned this intention to Xavier Mohr, the fact is, I was only “half” kidding. Xavier has been a great person to work with and has become a great friend, something that I hope will not change after my departure.

The one thing that set this decision of mine in motion was a post by Xavier on November 17th at SLCapEx, though. I realize that SL Reports is owned by Arbitrage Wise and that any decisions about major changes would have to go through him, before being implemented. Part of the November 17th post said:

“Arb and I discussed last week hiring a contractor to do a web template redesign or seeking a “prefab” upscale web template to purchase, so I would like to see if we really are going to go through with this or hold off… and how much, if anything, said projects will cost us… before issuing further dividends. I am assuming this would be a big expense if contracted out, but nothing is final right now. I am still looking into some existing more economical template options as well.”

This was the first time that I had heard about another template redesign being discussed. Xavier and I discussed this a few days after the notice was posted, and I was shown a couple templates that were being considered. They were very impressive templates, by the way. Since I was not contacted before this notice was posted, I felt as though I was not being considered for the job of redesigning the template. Maybe those feelings were wrong, but if this was discussed, I would think that it would have been brought up to me, beforehand.

Like I said, that post just set the wheels in motion for this decision. It is not the entire reason for the decision. There are other RL reasons that have also brought me to this decision. One of them is that I need to focus more time and attention to another web site that has very big potential for income.

Even though I am stepping away from SL Reports, I will continue to host the site for the same monthly fee, if desired, for as long as it is needed. I will continue with my current position until December 1, 2007 (again, if desired), and will help with anything I can to insure a smooth transition, during that time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Posted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.