Wonkie Blog

As you’ve probably noticed, Wonkie has been rather quiet over the last couple of months. Contrary to popular belief, Wonkie was not out meditating in the Himalayas, hoping that Julius Malema returns to the South African political scene, or that e-tolls in Gauteng are permanently suspended. Wonkie has, nonetheless, been quite busy.

Earlier this year, Wonkie decided to take a slight change in direction. For one, the older Wonkie website was developed piecemeal and while it served its core purpose, it was far from being an attractive, easily navigable website. Given that Wonkie now has over 15,000 email subscribers and 6,000 fans on Facebook, the Wonkie editors thought it was high time for a proper upgrade.

We have structured the website to have a more news-site feel. The home page will now display six of the most recent cartoon thumbnails, some of the most popular posts and pages on the site instead of just the latest cartoon and editorial. It is now also easier to share posts on social media with the floating Digg Digg bar on individual cartoon post pages. Readers will also now be able to respond directly to individual comments.

Secondly, another notable change is that there will be less of a focus on South African politics. While reading South African cartoons and chuckling at the endless stream of Julius Malema jokes is great, Wonkie thinks it would be more interesting to expand the selection of topics to include more relevant international, and social issues.

The idea is to provide alternative views and insights into popular topics, and to stimulate debate about them. These topics could range from freedom of the press and life coaching, to a more practical guide on how to start your business (all with Wonkie’s signature comic twist, naturally). Of course, this is not to say that regular readers will be completely starved of South Africa-related content – they certainly will not be. Viva South Africa lives on!

Please feel free to leave your comments on this post, including any suggestions of subjects you’d like to read more about. If you feel you have an alternative view of your own and would be interested to share it with the Wonkie community in a (max) 800 word guest post, then please get in touch with your ideas.

This year has certainly flown by and a lot has been going on with Wonkie staff all over the world. For starters, it was great to receive the Best Political blog in South Africa award for 2010 at the SA Blog Awards. It was even more satisfying for Wonkie that the email and feed subscribers increased to over a whopping 11,300 last month. Add that to the 4,200+ fans on facebook and that makes for quite a huge following for a blog. So thank you all for reading and commenting – Wonkie appreciates it!

Now Wonkie has received some feedback and a few suggestions for topics which should be covered going forward. Before Wonkie makes any changes though, it would be great if you would please let us know your thoughts by completing the quick poll below:

On another positive note, the winning caption entry for the last bird-eat-bird photo caption challenge is Lindani who gets a Wonkie T-Shirt! You can see the caption challenge and the winning entry by clicking the link below: