New Digs

I HAVE MOVED TO
http://nicholsonrecords.com/paul

Please redirect your links!

Exactly three years ago today I made my first post on my first real blog. I'd had several different iterations of personal and business web pages with various forms of personal writing, but my Blogger blog was the first real, dedicated, regular outlet I had tried. Worked pretty well too. I actually kept up a post-a-day schedule for nearly a year. After a while that dwindled to a post a week or so. Then Twitter came along and suddenly all those thoughts I had during the day that used to combine into a post every night were suddenly being instantly shared with my friends 140 characters at a time. This was especially true for any and all Predators related stuff after Garrett and I made ReTweetBot. My game blogs and rants about coaches were (for the most part) going out to the @PredFans group instead of my blog. (I have to say, i think Twitter honestly did good things for my communication skills - forced me to be much more concise and allowed me to communicate more frequently with friends). Then of course, along came Ian and then a new job (and Rock Band...) and what little spare time I had was being completely sucked up.

But a few times lately I've been getting the urge to write more and more. I also began to recognize how cathartic it was for me to express myself - even if it was about hockey, much less something else. And so much the better when anyone actually reads it (especially considering my writing is nowhere near what Christy's is) though that's almost beside the point.

Getting some distance from my blog also helped me realize what an absolute mess it had become. So many widgets and cute little things added to sidebars. Trackers and flickr badges... oh the clutter. I was very proud of my hacked 3 column layout, but it just went against everything I ever tell my clients about design. It was embarrassing. So I resolved to give the blog a face-lift before bothering to write much more. Trick was I didn't have the time or patience to code my own layout and I couldn't find any templates that looked good enough. I wanted something "different" whatever that meant. But couldn't even find a template worth modding.

Then I found this one.

With the 'magazine style' layout and simple design it was exactly the breath of fresh air I was looking for. The front page columns juxtaposed with the full page post view also provide a good reminder to let the content be flexible and not format it for any one presentation - very important since such a large percentage of people view content through RSS on a myriad of devices and feed readers these days. Of course moving to WordPress also provided me a plethora of plug-ins and other options - like static pages (see my About and Blogroll pages as examples). Simple little things I never had on Blogger because it didn't support them. All of these combined for a much more user-friendly (and SEO friendly) blog.

So here it is. Hopefully this, combined with a WordPress app for my Android phone and a renewed desire to get back into photo taking, will get me blogging more. We'll see. I've said this before ya know.