While sat at work this afternoon one of my colleagues asked if I had ever thought about resurrecting the ThoughtCafe website. I’m starting to wonder if there is some kind of conspiracy going on.
For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, once upon a time I built a website for amateur writers to post their writing, and comment on other’s efforts. It grew faster than all expectations and eventually turned into a bit of a headache - running a busy website is not the easiest of tasks.
Myself and my wife found that all of our time was being taken up with answering questions, resolving disputes, and doing various tasks like writing a monthly newsletter, sending greetings to new members and so on.
It is tempting to upload the code and run it once more, but it’s easy to also forget the hundreds of hours we spent promoting the existence of the site around the internet. Many people think they can just stick a “turnkey” website in place and the people will come. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting visitors to a site is hard, time consuming work.
Therefore (and I’m betting you can see this coming), I am not going to be resurrecting ThoughtCafe. As much fun as it was to build and run a writing website, I have taken a decision to take part in the internet for the forseeable future, and I intend to stick to it.