At the time of this post, RigCast is a hobby authored and maintained by one person, myself. Many friends and family provide gear for me to test, test gear themselves, and even give me feedback for write-ups and R3s, but as of today, I am the only one with RigCast authoring & administration credentials.
I have been receiving some comments lately asking what has happened to RigCast, since I haven’t published any new content since October 2012. This is a report to let everyone know that the spirit of RigCast, while visibly dormant, is alive and well. RigCast has never been about a post count, making money (our two ads only exist to help recoup website costs), or getting good analytics numbers. RigCast simply exists for me to share quality gear and experiences with like-minded individuals, because I like gear and I like (most) people.
The further RigCast progressed over the years, the more I didn’t like the direction. Some of my most popular posts are long, time-consuming, and arduous to read, and even more so to create. The R3 review (research, receipt, review) that initially founded RigCast, while a solid concept, is not very sustainable for a single person to author when there are so many products and experiences to share. Each R3 can take several days to properly write, aside from the weeks or months of testing. Additionally, because my testing is thorough and time-consuming, by the time the R3 is published the product may be out-of-date, updated, or no longer produced all together. What good does writing long reports about old or non-existent products do you or me?
In short, RigCast is a huge time commitment to curate on my own. Lately, I have been selling a house, building a new house, prepping for my first out-of-state move, planning my wedding, training/attending GoRuck and Tough Mudder, and still going through the paces with my full-time job and search and rescue. I’m running at full capacity and getting attacked from every angle, and sadly RigCast has been a casualty of it all. However, through all of it RigCast has been on my mind.
Throughout this hiatus, there have been products I wanted to review, events I wanted to cover, and news I wanted to share. Despite not having any time for RigCasting, I have been constantly thinking about how to improve it. I have decided that in order to keep RigCast alive, it needs to be reformed to be a more sustainable product for me to write and a more consistent product for you to reference. What does this mean? I’m not quite sure yet. But I can tell you that the R3 review is most likely retired and that the popular product comparison tables will be more prominent. It also means covering more than just products. It’s the small on-the-fly posts that make a blog or journal like this dynamic and fun, so I hope to add more of my day-to-day life to RigCast while keeping all the content relevant to the RigCast spirit. There are many changes that need to happen in order to make this hobby of mine a less time-consuming and more-efficient fun-machine, and I appreciate your patience during this transition period in RigCast and my life.
-BMart