I admit it; Tough Pigs isn’t all that. It’s got huge, unwieldy slabs of text, and not a lot of pictures. There’s a ton of little articles scattered around, and it’s not always clear where everything is. The news pages get updated whenever I get around to it, which isn’t very often.
But I can still hold my head up, because I have a website and you don’t.
(I know that for sure, because people who have their own websites are too busy to read other people’s.)
In My Week with Muppets Online, Kynan issued a challenge for Muppet fans to make more cool little Muppet sites. He pointed out that other fandoms have really vibrant fansite ecologies — and I know that some of my own minor enthusiasms, like Doctor Who and The Sims, have way more fansites than the Muppets do. Good sites, bad sites, list sites, picture sites, sites that do nothing but steal from other sites. But there’s more, and more is alive and exciting and fun.
Now, there’s a good historical reason why there hasn’t been a Muppet web explosion, which is that web fandom got centralized very early on. Phil Chapman created Muppet Central four years ago, and he was kind of the gold-rush pioneer who stepped out on his own and claimed all the territory he could get his hands on. You need pioneers like that to get the wagon trains moving, but the problem is that once the land gets settled, the guy in charge still wants you to buy everything from the company store.
Muppet Central has staked a claim to so much — News! Reviews! A message board! Episode guides! — that it still acts like a black hole in the Muppet fan galaxy, sucking all the heat and light into itself. Unfortunately, like a black hole, it sucks in a lot of energy and doesn’t give back much. And that, I think, sets a bad precedent.
I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last year with friends who are working on Muppet sites, but the sites never really get off the ground… and every single time, the problem is Ambition. They always think that in order to launch a fansite, it has to be a huge, comprehensive Goliath of a site, and it ends up being too big of a project to handle. They’re taking their cues from the Muppet Central behemoth — and, I admit, I did too when I started Tough Pigs. But making a huge, I-wanna-do-everything site is big, and hard, and people get bored and give up.
Ambition is the website-killer. So bear with an old-timer as he pulls up a chair and gives you young whippersnappers some advice on how to avoid the ambition trap.
First off, think small. We’ve already got big colossal fansites, but there’s lots of tiny Muppet enthuiasms that don’t have sites yet.
Also, I think it helps to think modular — to structure your site so that you can post a little bit at a time. When I show friends Tough Pigs for the first time, they always ask, “How much time did it take to write all that?” The real answer is nine months and counting, but that makes it sound more daunting than it really is. In reality, it’s a little here and a little there, and gradually, that adds up to a whole site. I’m always working on some little piece — a My Week entry, a Journal article, a couple paragraphs for a news update — but I never have to sit down and bang out eight hours of work all at once.
Part of what keeps the whole thing fresh for me is that each little chunk gets posted as soon as I write it, so I get good energy from people who are reading it as I go along. If I waited until it was All Finished before I posted any of it, I’d probably get frustrated, and I’d never finish anything.
Here’s another piece of advice that I learned from my MuppetZine days — never promise anything in advance. I always think it’s silly when fansites make big announcements of something that’s coming months away; they’re just setting themselves up for the Horror of the Looming Deadline. Muppet Central is notorious for this — big plans for the collectibles index that finally debuted three years later, the announcement that Jim Hill would start writing a column in March — oops, we mean April — oops, we mean never. Kermitage.com is also falling victim to The Big Deadline. They said they’d launch in late spring, and then life got in the way. I say this with love; I’ve been there myself. But I expect that that “Late Spring” thing is hanging over their heads to such an extent that it’s got to be hard to get up the energy to work on it at all.
I fell into that trap myself, towards the end of MuppetZine — in fact, my next-to-last issue has a chirpy little “Coming Soon!” box where I announced my big plans for the next two issues. Then life happened — I got a job, I got distracted — and the promises of that “Coming Soon” box eventually got to be too much for me, and I gave the whole thing up.
These days, I try not to promise anything unless I’ve already got it in my hand. If I do start a big ambitious project, like the My Week with the Muppet Show series, I announce in advance that I’m probably not going to bother finishing it.
And hey, here’s another good thing about posting something half-finished — then people will feel sorry for you, and they’ll send you free stuff. It totally works. At the beginning of this month, I started my Gorch Anthology, and included a note apologizing for the fact that I was still missing one episode. Within a week, I got e-mails from two different people offering me a tape of that episode. Muppet fans are friendly, and we like showing off — so if you ask for help, either on your site, or on the message boards and newsgroups, you’ll probably find somebody who’s willing to share their stuff.
If you want some inspiration, Kynan posted a list of his fantasy fan sites, and here’s some of mine:
— A Muppet Christmas specials site.
— An Ernie and Bert site, with transcripts and screenshots of E&B sketches.
— There’s a lot of unclaimed territory in the Jim Henson’s Early Years area, collecting info on Sam and Friends, Rowlf, Henson commercials, or variety show appearances.
— A Muppet book illustrator site, with scans and bibliographies.
— A Muppet Sigma collection site.
— A Muppet Nitpickers site that documents all the floating heads and loose eyeballs, and points out Muppet Show continuity mistakes.
— A Jerry Nelson fansite. (I know, Kynan mentioned this too, but it’s really pretty amazing that there isn’t a Jerry Nelson fansite yet. What’s wrong with us?)
— And here’s a list of characters that deserve obsessive tributes: Grover, Oscar the Grouch, Junior Gorg, Pigs in Space, Roosevelt Franklin, the Amazing Mumford, Sam the Eagle, Tutter, Rugby Tiger, Animal, Rosita, Statler and Waldorf, Emmet Otter, the Muppet Monsters, and Skeeter.
So, that’s my argument: Don’t try so hard. Resist ambition. The software has gotten so easy to use these days that any idiot can make a website, and most of them do. You can too. Be lazy and whimsical. Don’t worry about whether it’s finished yet. Just post it.
Don’t worry, you’ll find the time. It’s the first day of summer. Go fly a site.
