The content queue page is live!

Okaaaay. So, what’s that? you ask.

I’ve been putting in a lot of time and effort considering which audience(s) I want to target for The Pigpen. The result, in alpha order:

• business,
• creativity,
• leather,
• metal,
• along with some other targets that will have a smaller presence.

The overall intent will be knowledge sharing, with some hands-on tutorials, industry news, tours, artist/maker spotlights, and other such things mixed in.

DISCLAIMER: I am by no means an expert at any of these things. My strengths lie in researching, gathering, organizing, and documenting. Hopefully, one or more persons other than myself will find the sharing of this information useful!

I gave a lot of thought to how I want to structure the content, and how to queue and schedule topics, and how to present them in a cohesive manner. I even considered, and actually created, a half-dozen or so YouTube sub-channels so that each sub-channel could be dedicated to it’s particular nichey-niche.

Then I slept on it, poorly, and the next day ruthlessly deleted those sub-channels. It’s no fun having nightmares featuring such things.

I realized I just don’t have the motivation to try to juggle and maintain a multitude of YouTube channels. And if I had separate YouTube channels, wouldn’t that then really translate backward to then “needing” separate websites and other social media channels? That’s just too overwhelming to even think about, so I won’t.

Instead, methinks a little potential chaos never hurt anyone, right? Right?

Anyhoot, I’ve elected to let them co-exist in the Pigpen even though the leather people might not be interested in the metal topics, etc. However, I do think some things translate from one category to another, e.g.:

• tooling in leather is much like stamping in metal,
• metal chasing and repousse concepts lend themselves well to leather 3D efforts,
• hydraulic presses can be used for either endeavor,
• ceramics and metal clay share many techniques,
• creative and business topics are medium-agnostic,
• and so on and so forth).

Also, learning about something done in one medium might inspire creativity in another medium. Or spawn thoughts of mixed media projects.  So, I’ve decided to add each topic to a maker-targeted playlist as I add them to YouTube, categorize them appropriately on this website, and name them accordingly on other social channels.

It feels weird to have been doing all this planning and yet have only one YouTube video up so far, along with past website blogs that I know will need revamping as I do their companion videos.  Regardless, I ignored the urge to just jump in and make a post/video combination just to have another one done. I sat my butt in a chair to capture what I want to cover for each target audience, which resulted in a (seemingly, to me, loooooong) list of topics to cover. I spent time categorizing, sorting, and figuring out how to put them into some sort of logical order for publication. I think I ended up with something workable, and can now move on to researching what, exactly, to share about each topic.

This might take some time. Eventually, I’ll start publishing regularly here and on YouTube, and posting on other social media. Right now I have over 100 topics planned (and many more rattling around in my brain that I just haven’t captured to the list yet). If I were to do one a week, that’s two years — YEARS — of content. I do plan to try to cover the first handful or two of them in the next few months, stay tuned!

In the meantime, feel free to view the content queue.

And, bonus, if you think of something you’d like to see but don’t see it already listed, feel free to drop a topic suggestion.