If you haven't been here in awhile (that should be 99.5% of you, I'm guessing), you might notice that I've turned this site upside-down and shaken it like Michael Jackson handing babies out of a hotel window. It was time. I was due.

This time last year, I set an ambitious goal of writing 50 blog posts in 2008. I wrote 7. The last one I wrote was in August. That's four months between blog posts. The real shame of it is it doesn't reflect my online life, which is spread across no less than 4 social networks I use daily. Engaging in those communities takes my time away from here, leaving this site to become a placeholder for one forgotten aspect of my life: writing. One could show up here and assume I fell off the face of the earth sometime after August of 2008.

So, with all of that in mind, I decided to go Apollo 13 on this site and take drastic measures in order to bring it back down to earth.

The Changes

• Removed the blog listing from the front page. From now on, the latest post will be teased on the front page. But since I don't write as much, it can't have the whole page. I do aspire to write more in 2009, but acknowledging the obvious, I realized if the site is primarily focused on an act I only perform 7 times in 365 days, it's going to look dusty and old most of the time.
• Added links to most of the online communities I belong to. I know that list is long. I'm not active on more than 4 of those sites on a daily basis. But I've realized that I have friends (in real-life or online) on all of them. You may use one of them or all of them. Friend me up on any of them you choose. The goal for me is to allow people who find me interesting to find me in the context they prefer. You don't have to come to me, instead we meet in our favorite community.
• Aggregating the other stuff here. For the online content I create most often, I've collected a short list of the recent items I've added to those sites here.

That's it. I could go on about how I painstakingly chose a new font for the header (Optima Pro Demi Bold). Or, how I had a colorful design comp and abandoned it for the minimalist look of grays and white. But it seems rather trite to use what has become a rare event to tell you how awesome it is that my tweets are now on the home page. That said, the site is somewhat rough around the edges, so bear with me. I consider all redesigns on this site to be an iterative process (read: search and archives will come back, I promise).

Part of Something Bigger

This redesign is the first accomplished goal of a process I've initiated called acknowledging the obvious. I wasn't writing blog posts frequently enough to warrant blog posts being the center piece of my website. I acknowledged that and redesigned the site to accommodate things I do more often. I'm not sad about it and I'm not going to beat myself up for not writing more. I'm just adapting to the obvious. The process has been quite liberating because I used to avoid doing anything here because I wasn't writing. Now, I can relax because casual visitors will at least be able to see that I'm not dead and they can find me in other places if they wish.

In acknowledging the obvious, I plan to remove some mental barriers I've had toward accomplishing some long term goals in 2009. I do plan to write about those barriers here (but as you've no doubt come to understand, don't hold your breath :-). For me, the year 2008 was simply to surreal of a year to not record somewhere.