Teach me to be AWESOME: How to write a DIY tutorial
At the Empire, we love to see how you do all the amazing things you do. Reader DIY submissions show us so much! We can all learn to cook vegan bacon cheeseburgers, turn coffee tables into chalkboard canvases, and make our own wax seals from buttons. Our DIY archives have a big bright rainbow of how-to-DIY posts, but many of us are hungry, like some kind of craft-zombies, for MOAR BRAINS… err…. MOAR DIYs!
Here’s the trick: sometimes we need just a bit of help teaching each other how to do the awesome things we do ourselves. Framing the steps into a process we can repeat with huge success is easy if we all put our teacher hats on. Here’s a great outline for teaching us all how to be YOUR kind of awesome – how to write a DIY tutorial.
Why the Offbeat Empire usually ignores current events
At least once a month, some sort of big “hard news” story will intersect with an Offbeat Empire site, and I’ll get emails about it. Mark Zuckerberg gets married. A terrible school shooting happens. A state will have a marriage equality vote or ruling. And most often, the Offbeat Empire sites will ignore it. Not always, of course. I did a quick post about Mark Zuckerberg’s wedding because I liked the message it sent about a wealthy couple making the choice for a simple wedding. We did a brief post on Offbeat Families about the Newtown, CT shootings because several readers begged us to.
But for the most part we don’t touch hard news stories, and here are a few of the reasons why…
2012 Reader Survey: the first-glance overview
Our 2012 reader survey closed late last night, and it looks like about 3200 of you responded. Before I get into anything else, let me just say THANK YOU to each and every one of you who took a few minutes to take the survey. Since all the Offbeat Empire sites are very much community-driven, it’s important to me to make sure I have a solid feel of who y’all are and what you’re looking for. We can’t always provide it, but I like to know!
Obviously, there’s a huge amount of data to sit with and consider, but I did want to share some of the overview demographics revealed by the survey.
Clicks don’t lie: people gravitate toward drama (and who am I to deny them?)
I wrote yesterday about the process of realizing that a community management tool I’d established in 2008 for the Offbeat Bride Tribe was no longer relevant to my community’s current needs. In a nutshell: my current community doesn’t need high-drama posts filtered. But more importantly, they don’t WANT them filtered out.
You know why? Because on a certain level, we all gravitate toward difficult emotions. As one Offbeat Bride Tribe member said…