Blasts From The Past

Yesterday in his terrific blog, fellow Minnesota illustrator Cedric Hohnstadt reposted an older article he had placed on his blog some time ago. The explanation for this “reprint” was that his blog’s traffic had increased dramatically recently, and most readers would not have seen this post… and presumably many others as well.

That got me thinking… I often get e-mails or questions pertaining to topics I have already discussed or posted about, and it occurred to me that Cedric’s observation about increased traffic and newer visitors was probably the reason. One bad thing about posting something every day is that the MAD Blog Archives are already huge and very hard to try and go through to look for things of interest.

Rather than repost past articles, I thought I’d take a minute to point out some of the features of the blog that allow newer readers to better find artciles and posts that might interest them. There are several way to do that, all on the “blogroll” on the right hand side of the main blog page… Let’s start at the top:

Try a Search!

WordPress has a good search engine and entering keywords will bring up a list of blog posts with the keywords you are looking for in them. If you are looking for something specific like “inking” or “advertising art” this can quickly narrow down your choices. I use it myself when I need to refer back to an earlier post for some reason. Just be warned that searching for something like “caricature” or “MAD” will net you a ton of results. This works better the more specific you are.

Some Useful “Pages”…

“Pages” are independent, permanent web pages within the wordpress blog that can be created for almost any purpose. There is list of the MAD Blog’s pages near the top of the blogroll. Here’ a list of the mosy useful ones:

• FAQ– Everyone’s got them. These are abbreviated answers to some of the questions that get asked… you guessed it… FREQUENTLY. Stuff like what kind of materials I use, how to learn to draw caricature, how to break into MAD and others are here. I need to add a few more soon.
• MAD Blog Archives– Usefully organized by month and year. If you know roughly what month some post was made, you can find it here. Unwieldy for browsing but better than nothing.
• Posts People Ask About– This is one I recently updated with some of the posts that either got a lot of hits and reaction, or ones that people often link to or ask about. If you are new to the blog this is the best place to start.
• Recommended Art Books– Should be a FAQ but I dedicated an entire page for it.
• Tutorials– Any and all tutorials will be found here, including my inking and full digital color ones.

Check out “Categories”…

I just did some additional organizing here, trying to help specify the results of each link. The categories are pretty self explanatory, but it’s convenient to be able to peruse all the “Sketch O’The Week” posts if you are interested in that, or all the “Sunday Mailbag” question and answer posts, etc. New categories I just added include “Freelancing”, which contains posts about and advice in freelancing as a career and “Surf’s Up Dept.”, which is a collection of my goofy links about odd news stories, cartooning and silly videos. “Tutorials” is here as well… and check out “Wall of Shame” to see some of the caricature art I have gotten signed by the subjects.

Enjoy at your leisure. Back to the deadlines… I am even too busy to watch the season premiere of LOST I recorded last night.