If you blog, and you’re aiming to do it better, or even to make money at it, Performancing is a new blog with lots of good help and advice.

I found it when it was linked to by one of their contributors – Darren at ProBlogger – another site you should be reading to keep up to date on all things bloggy.

I’ve just finished reading through their archives, and already found lots of useful ideas and tips for PigPog.

Gizmodo says they’ve been around a while, but they’ve only just become affordable – robotic guitar tuners. If the whole “robotic” thing sounds really cool, the reality might be a bit disapointing – it’s just a tuner than you clip over the tuning peg – it turns it itself until the string is in tune.

Neat idea, depends how it works in practice.

Seriously – plush toys – made to resemble (represent?) pee and poo

It’s now only a week and a half to go until we’re running a market stall at a local Christmas Market, trying to sell our own art.

We’ve been busy making things, and we’re starting to feel a bit more prepared now than we have been, but it’s still a bit of an unnerving prospect.

So what have we got so far?

Well, we’ve got quite a few cards, of a couple of different types. Sam has made some individually hand-made cards, with ink blots. Each one is different, with one of three jokes on them…

I’ve done some printed photo cards – some with a caption, some without…

Sam’s also done some original watercolours…

…and some acrylic paintings on canvas…

I’ve printed some photos…

…and Sam put one in a frame…

We took a trip to the other Christmas market that runs at the same place (Rufford Country Park in Nottinghamshire) at the weekend, to see what it’s like, and get some idea what the stalls are like, and we think we’ve got about enough stuff to fill a stall. The stalls have rooves to them, so we should stay reasonably dry if it rains, but we’re outdoors, so it could be a bit chilly.

We do get a power socket, so we might be able to rig up my tablet as a sort of live display stand thing – maybe put together a bit of a presentation to keep running in the background.

So. What do we still have to do?

• We’ve made some rough stabs at pricing things up, but we need to finalise that.
• We need to work out how we’re going to lay out the stall, and what we’re going to use as stands/boxes/whatever to display the stuff we’re selling. And how we’re going to label and price things.
• We need to make quite a bit more stuff yet.
• We need to put together some sort of promotional leaflets for the site (this thing here).
• We need to get some sort of float together so we can give people change, if anyone does decide to buy something from us.
• Remind everyone we know in the area to turn up – and bring money
• We need bags to put the cards in, so people can get them home and store them without getting them grubby.

Plenty left to do in the next few days, then. It’s a good job I don’t have a job any more.

We popped in to Rufford at the weekend, to see the market that was there two weeks before the one we’re running a stall at. Took a few pics whilst we where there…

We didn’t follow the sign to find out why there’s ‘animal graves’ there, but apparantly there are.

I liked the shadows the railings were casting here.

This tree is in the middle of the car park – really glowing in the sunshine.

This stone fella stands holding his stone apple on the way into the gardens. There always seems to be bird food on the top of the apple stalk – not sure if someone likes birds, or doesn’t like apples.

I think if I was going to have an expensive fountain pen, it wouldn’t have Homer Simpson on it. If, however, I ever change my mind about that, this is the one…

• Product Page

It’s a drawing of Homer Simpson, but in the style of Leonardo Da Vinci.

(Thanks to Cory at Boing Boing.)

Angela Booth offers some advice on how to start making your writing pay…

Tuck your creative self away, and haul your inner marketer out of the closet. Divorce yourself from your work as much as you can. Grit your teeth, and flail yourself with a whip if necessary, but send your work out. Then forget it. Your first marketing efforts may be torture. That’s OK. You don’t have to enjoy marketing, you just have to do it. * Read the full article

I think I’ll skip on the whole “flail yourself with a whip” part, actually. The only place I write at the moment is right here on PigPog, but it’s something that I’ll be giving some thought to. If I can get paid for writing articles for anywhere else, it could be a good addition to our income.

Writing for your own site can be good for the long-term payoff – you can be making small amounts of money from the ads on those pages for many years to come, so as time goes by, it should add up. The initial payout is zero, though, so you need a way to live whilst the long-term happens.

‘Cyber Lizard’ has told Pencil Revolution that he’s taking part in NaNoWriMo – writing a 50,000 word first draft for a novel – but he’s doing the whole thing handwritten in pencil…

• Article on Pencil Revolution

He’s also shared his thoughts on the various pencils he’s tried whilst doing this. Not sure if we can get the California Republic Palominos in this country, but they seem to be going down well everywhere at the moment.

After saying right here, just a couple of days ago, that the fiddling with the ads should be all over, I’ve been fiddling with the ads again today. It turned out that the changes made hadn’t left us with a decent click-through rate at all, so we weren’t bringing much money in – less than before, and probably not even enough to cover the hosting of the site. Anyway, I’ve made more changes today, taking it much closer to how it was before we moved to Drupal. It was working well then, so hopefully it will work well now.

The result is a little Chitika banner at the top of the content pages, and an AdSense rectangle on the left. There’s also the same pair of Chitika and AdSense banners further down as before. Although the rectangle intrudes further into the content on the left, it’s also narrower than the combination that was there before, so the layout of the page doesn’t seem to be hurt as much as it was, so we’ll keep an eye on things and see how it goes.

Whilst doing this, I’ve also put code in place to withold the ads depending on the roles a user has, which means if someone is in the ‘Subscriber’ role, they don’t see any ads. Not sure quite how we’ll use this yet, or even if we’ll use it, but it means we have the option of letting people pay a subscription to get PigPog with no ads. Possibly $10 a year to remove the ads, but we need to think about this. If you’ve got any thoughts on it, do let us know.

Last Update: Added link to examples at RozWorks

What is it?

The Graphitint is a versatile new range of water soluble graphite Pencils from Derwent.

Versatile? Explain.

When used dry, they’re a collection of subtly-toned graphite pencils suitable for sketching. Add water and the subtle tones spring to life in vibrant watercolour.

How do they compare to watercolour pencils or Aquatone sticks?

When using Derwent Aquatone sticks or watercolour pencils dry, the results are rough and inconsistent, just as you’d expect from drawing with Watercolours that have been adapted to be used as pencils. Graphitints, however, are pencils first and watercolours second which makes them easier to work with dry.

As a watercolour, it holds up nicely against the Aquatone sticks and watercolour pencils, and it’s possible to work with both dry and wet in the same piece, handy for adding definition in watercolours of buildings and such like.

Are they suitable for beginners?

Well, I’m a beginner myself, and I find them easy and fun to use. Can’t wait to get stuck in on a project with them. I’ll post the results here when I have something worth showing off!

Wet ‘n’ Dry

For an idea of what they look like both wet and dry, we scribbled with a few different ones and splashed some water around with a Pentel Watercolour Brush. Click the pic to see it in Flickr with any comments. Once there, use the ‘All Sizes’ button above the pic to see the full size version.

Since the colours when wet are fairly different from the colours when dry, you’ll need a bit of experimenting to get used to the results. It means you get a much wider range of colours and effects available from the same set of pencils than you would with other watercolour pencils.

Examples

• RozWorks Graphitint Journal Samples – an assortment of examples of use wet and dry, all by Roz.
• Stephen Ormerod has started using them. At the moment, there’s an example picture at the bottom of his home page that’s slightly more impressive than our test scribbles.