I’ve grown to despise meta discussions (blogs about blogging, podcasts about podcasting), but sometimes they can’t easily be avoided. This is one of those times. My apologies in advance.
If you’re a regular visitor to my website, no – your eyes aren’t playing crazy tricks on you. The site does look completely different. I’m now using the WordPress publishing tool and the amazing Thematic theme framework to manage this blog – a job that had been done using Movable Type since I launched this little project way back in late 2003.
Besides the obvious design change of the site, does this matter to you? No, probably not. I’m hoping the change in software tools will remove a few mental barriers preventing me from writing more often, and that finding and reading my content will be as easy as possible for you.
If you’re subscribed to this blog, you’ve likely seen my last 10 entries reappear in your news reader. Sorry about that. It was a side effect of the change that I hoped to avoid, but couldn’t. Once you mark the entries as read, you should only see the new stuff from then on.
Finding Focus
Two social networks have had a bigger impact on my blogging than anything else: Twitter and Facebook. Twitter letting me fire off a quick thought on a topic I previously may have written an entire blog post about, and Facebook making it trivially easy to share links to articles and videos with my friends. Since these sites reduce the sharing friction to practically zero, it means I end up using them a lot more. As a side effect, it also means I also means I posting here less. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Use the best tool for the task, I always say.
My real concern for this blog has always been who my ideal reader is. Family? Friends? Random Google searchers? Me? The answer to this important question significantly guides the direction of my writing, which is probably why I’ve tried hard not to think about it. The time has come to ponder this, however.
Thanks for Reading
I want to say a big thanks for being a reader. There’s a lot of good content out there on the internets, so it’s humbling that you took the time to read mine.
One reply on “State of the Blog”
Hi Jason,
Thanks for linking to my blog post. I think your move to WordPress is a good one, although I have nothing much to compare it with since I started with WordPress and haven’t tried other platforms. I like WordPress because of the ease of use, availability of support and loads of themes to choose from. I hope you are happy with this change!