{"id":520,"date":"2009-03-12T10:31:40","date_gmt":"2009-03-12T17:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sarahdopp.com\/blog\/?p=520"},"modified":"2009-03-12T10:37:05","modified_gmt":"2009-03-12T17:37:05","slug":"consistently-inconsistent-is-consistence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/2009\/consistently-inconsistent-is-consistence\/","title":{"rendered":"Consistently Inconsistent is Consistence"},"content":{"rendered":"
Heads up, this content is 17 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.<\/div>

When I started Genderfork<\/a> a year and a half ago, I made a deal with myself: I would only attempt to keep it alive if I could keep maintenance work down to an hour or two, once or twice a month.\u00a0 Even that<\/em> would be a lot for me, but I figured I could commit to it for a few months and see what happened.<\/p>\n

WordPress has a nifty little feature that lets you determine in advance the date and time a blog post should go live.\u00a0 Flickr has a nifty little feature that lets you blog photos directly from a photographer’s photostream to a WordPress blog (as long as that photographer has given strangers permission to blog their photos).\u00a0 Some other brilliant creature in the world wrote a script<\/a> that turns Flickr-to-Wordpress blog posts into drafts instead of live posts.\u00a0 Between the three of these free gifts from the web, I was able to set up a photo-a-day website where I had legal permission to blog other people’s photos and could maintain it with, literally, 2-4 hours a month of work.\u00a0 I could ignore the entire project for weeks on end, even though it was still blogging daily.<\/p>\n

When I put it that way, it sounds a bit like I didn’t love the project, but the opposite is true.\u00a0 This was the only possible way the project could have survived.<\/strong>\u00a0 If it had required more than that from me, it would have gone the way of all my other unrequited time-consuming projects and ended up in a large long tupperware container under my bed.\u00a0 I’ve learned that once something goes into that bin of lost loves, it never comes out.<\/p>\n

The other day, as I was waddling back through San Francisco still carrying luggage from my impulsive trip to Portland, I ended up on a street car next to Emchy<\/a>, the founder of Queer Open Mic<\/a>.\u00a0 I excitedly told her that just this week, I had enlisted some more organizing help for the event, and now the project was much more self-sustaining.\u00a0 I buzzed about how our new venue, Modern Times Bookstore<\/a>, has a widely-read email list and calendar, and that they’ve been doing most of our marketing for us<\/em> without any effort on our part, and packing the show every time.<\/p>\n

Still bouncing, I went on to tell her that Genderfork<\/a> is now run by a team of ten volunteers<\/a>, and that the team manages the blog content themselves.\u00a0 All I need to do is some really high-level editing that only takes a few hours a month — I’m back to my original time commitment, only now the website now has four times as much content and an audience of thousands! \u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

She smiled and said, “You’re good at that.\u00a0 Making things big and awesome.”<\/p>\n

I chuckled.\u00a0 “No, I’m good at making things that can live without me.\u00a0 Whenever something needs me, it dies.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heads up, this content is 17 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.When I started Genderfork a year and a half ago, I made a deal with myself: I would only attempt to keep it alive if I could keep maintenance work down to an hour or two, once or twice a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-management","category-my_projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}