Summer Music Break: K'Naan: "Waving Flag" at the Canada Day Celebration in Ottawa, Canada, July 2009

Quest is like one of those aliens in a science fiction move, transforming itself to become bigger and more menacing to the establishment than before. The Internet puts the power of publishing in your hands, and you don't realize at first how extensive that power is. Eventually, at least if you are a perfectionist like me, you make full use of the power of publishing on the Internet. You transform what you do on the Internet as many times as necessary to get it right, to get it close to perfect.

But the downside of this is that there is a very large amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to over time develop general and specific plans and designs that are truly the best, and to make sure all of the changes fit together and make sense in the final site plans. We are talking about many, many hundreds of hours of work that go into site planning and design. Unfortunately, this reduces the time available for actual (in this case basketball) content.

We are hoping and expecting that early-mid 2009 will be considered in the future to be when Quest came together so to speak, when, in other words, it finally was set up in general and in detail to be the best it can be.

To go with all of the many other things already changed and/or accomplished this year, we are currently putting many of the changes together in a new "What we Produce User Guide Article" which will be out sometime this week, probably by Wednesday. This is where the rubber meets the road so to speak: in this article, all of the overall editorial and site planning gets reflected in terms of a specific content plan.

We truly expect that the March-July 2009 transformations of Quest will finally produce an editorial plan and a site overall that will stand the test of time. In other words, we DO NOT expect to be having to divert a lot of time away from basketball to things like the site design, the overall editorial plan, and other site plans in the coming years. Similarly, the new traffic plan requires a sharp reduction in time spent in various activities that are supposed to increase traffic but do not in fact do so.

All of the time reductions in site design and traffic development go to basketball content starting almost immediately. All in all, the percentage breakdown (of the total time available) will change from roughly 45% basketball content and 55% site design and traffic work, as it had to be in the first 30 months to, from now on, roughly 80% basketball content and 20% site design and traffic work.

Many sites die because the owners can't decide on a plan or don't think they need a plan or don't spend the many hours necessary to do the necessary specific designing and planning. This is especially so since much of this work is, by default, annoying trial and error. By contrast, Quest is putting in the long hours, is doing the necessary drudge work, and so is developing a strong foundation for a great basketball site that will stand the test of time.

The Webmaster for this site was not even really a webmaster at all when this site started about 27 months ago, but he is now definitely a professional who possibly may be over skilled now, considering how much trouble Microsoft Internet Explorer has with the Home Page, laugh out loud.

Remember, we are like that alien that keeps getting bigger in the movie. We promise not to eat you alive though unless you make us really, really angry.

While work continues behind the scenes, let's celebrate Canada Day. The audio track for the following Canada Day in Ottawa in July 2009 is Somali-Canadian singer K'Naan singing "Waving Flag," a song about peace and hope.

As the song in this video says, when Quest gets older, it will most definitely be stronger, thanks to development of an almost perfect plan. True dat.



K'NAAN LIVE IN STUDIO


K'NAAN LIVE IN A CLUB


K'NAAN VIDEO JUKEBOX

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