It’s funny how you manage to pick up interesting skills in the unlikeliest places. More so than any class, online course, or mentorship program, the website I created for the Glowing Fool is probably the biggest contributor to many of my most marketable skills today. It served as a very practical introduction into network administration which spawned my many homelab projects, as well as a return to form for much of my writing. But perhaps most useful of all is that this website has given me ample opportunity to learn a bit more on how to manage people.
My initial vision for the Glowing Fool website was two-fold. It was to serve as a source of information for anyone interested in the initiative. If someone was looking for an opportunity to play Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in Hong Kong, this website would serve as a beacon for those individuals to find us (and learn a little bit more about what we were doing). But the website also served the secondary purpose of being a repository of tips, tricks, and insights on how to play/run/enjoy D&D games. And this would come in the form of the various blog posts that have come to populate the website.
At first these blog posts were almost exclusively written by me. But there is strength in diversity, and I knew that if this blog was to be successful, it needed different voices, not just my own. So I went to work recruiting my friends to contribute content to the Glowing Fool. Thus, I went from being the sole writer for this blog, to it’s editor. And with it, a new host of challenges.
The Glowing Fool is not a business, it’s a passion project of mine, something I do on top of my professional career. So to my friends, writing for the website is not so much a job or obligation, as it is a personal favor to me (and perhaps an outlet for their own creative energy). So how do you “manage” this type of arrangement?
I’ve found that the most pleasant (and effective) experience getting my friends to contribute to the website, always involved these three things:
- Be clear about what you want.
- Where do they fit in the story?
- Set deadlines.
