What’s In A Name?
New Domain Name
What’s in a name? A question written by Shakespeare and uttered by his character, Romeo, centuries ago, but it still has psychological meaning today!
For me, there was a growing block with doing anything with my website. Eight years ago when I picked marktisdalephotography.com as my first domain, I was having a hard time coming up with a URL to use. My name was already taken as bizarre as that seems with a name as uncommon as mine and anything that occurred to me off the top of my head was equally in use. Just adding photography to my name seemed the most obvious route at the time. I can honestly say I didn’t put a lot of thought to it. It was just a hobby then.
Flash forward and the name increasingly bothered me for a host of reasons, not the least of which how long it was to type and that it seemed to have less and less bearing on what I do. Although a great deal of my artwork does still involves a camera, I have for some time gone in a more artistic direction and I really wanted a name for my art blog that reflected that. Had I not already chosen tisdaleart.com for my art shopping site, I might have gone that route, but in this case the name was used by me and I didn’t want to go the sub-domain route or stick it in a separate directory since the look and feel of the sites would never be the same. I spent far too much time in the past trying to get disparate websites that I was on to look alike. Not on my agenda anymore! Rather than fighting against it, viva la difference!
I kept hoping that the .art top level domain would come out soon and I could find a domain name that fit for me under the new TLD, but the wait for that was feeling glacial. Off and on, I racked my brain for a clever name. I considered something nonsensical and bringing my own meaning to the name, but nothing that seemed to fit in my mind was available. Maybe I’m not creative enough with names, but I finally found one that I’m happy with. It connects with my name and the subject matter and it feels right for some reason.
A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but I’m still glad to welcome you all to markonart.com, my new home.
Hopefully this new name will serve me at least as long as the old one did!
And In Other News
While I was trying to come up with a name and the motivation to really revive my site, I’m sure there are many things I should have written about. With luck, the highlights may come back to me to share along the way.
For the moment, I’ll lead off the round-up of accomplishments with the news that you can find my name on my local county government’s website! In fact, you’ll find my name along with some examples of my art depicting various local scenes! The site was recently redesigned and I’m hope you’ll take a hop through it and see some of my work while you’re there!
I’ve also recently revived my Facebook page after posting precious little to it in some time. Can’t say if my motivation was just that much better or if some changes Facebook have made actually benefited me or what, but there’s been a good bit of activity over there lately, so if you’re a regular Facebook user who is genuinely interested in what I’m sharing, do give my page a look-see.
I’d like to see your smiling face there!
Mailing List Changes
In the past, I had tried subdividing my mailing list into different groups. For instance, I hated to hit the people who were mainly interested in my art with posts that were mainly of interest to other artists, like my tips and tools articles. But after a year of offering those options on my sign-up list, I found relatively few people chose them. I’m not sure if that was a conscious decision or if the description took too much time to read, but those sorts of posts won’t be going to the mailing list as a result. It simplifies my life greatly to not have a separate mailing list for each type of interest! If you’re another artist who enjoyed those articles, be sure to either sign up to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter.  I’ll do my best to remember to share them there! Or just remember to pop around occasionally.
And for the moment I’m going to experiment with only sending brief snippets of my news to the mailing list on a periodic basis rather than whole articles immediately after they are published. It means less mail to you and you can pick and choose to read what looks interesting to you! Again, it simplifies my life but if there are people out there who wholeheartedly hate the new format, I do want to hear from you!
Thanks again for following my work as an artist. Your time and interest is greatly appreciated!
