The Future of This Blog

September 23rd, 2008

Howdy everyone!

I am currently contemplating the direction of this particular blog, and I am halting posts until I make a decision. 

It has occurred to me that, in order to maintain a good audience, a blog needs to have a clear focus. While I may be interested in a great many things, I recognize that my readers may not be interested in the same things. This leads me to categorize what I enjoy posting about and perhaps split the posts between this blog, and a more personal blog I intend to put on buckwilson.me.

Things I enjoy posting : 

  • Opinions on User Interface design (I am, after all, a UI designer by trade)
  • Photoshop and design tutorials (I enjoy sharing what I know, although I am aware I am no expert in the subject)
  • JavaScript and jQuery tutorials
  • Opinions on starting / running a business (I have started and sold a company)
  • Personal marketing / personal brand building
  • UI / Design analysis of other sites / apps 
  • Opinions on random junk that I like (tech / web related)
  • Opinions on random junk in my life (non tech / web related)
  • Random, random musings to practice my writing ability

What I’ve decided to do is create a super-blog. That is, a blog with not only distinct categories, but separate pages (and, perhaps, colors / themes) for each topic. I’ve yet to figure out what the top-level “categories” will be, but the idea is to give them each their own RSS feed so those who don’t care about the other junk can simply ignore it.

I typically just use WordPress, but perhaps I’ll experiment something with a little more power such as Expression Engine. Managing multiple blogs on a single site seems difficult, but perhaps it’s as simple as restricting by category in the WordPress Loop. If anyone has any experience building customizing themes, let me know.

In addition to pulling information out into different blogs, I need to provide some sorely needed information about myself: contact information, projects I am working on, a brief “résumé”.

All of this will live on buckwilson.me. I’m not sure what I will do with keepthewebweird. Perhaps I will finally create the site I meant to create when I purchased the domain…

personal

Discuss this post

I’d say just keep on writing on what you’re interested in. All of the above interests me and that’s why I read your blog.

The only think you might want to do is write all your personal stuff in your other blog. I see a few developers do this, although I think in the future, WordPress will allow you to setup a blog in multiple locations and write to either of them with the same interface. I don’t know if they’ll actually do this, but so many people are migrating that way.

Best,

Mauvis

Mauvis said this on September 24th, 2008

Mauvis-

Thanks very much for the kind words! The new blog is well under way and I hope to mirror the content here straight over with no bumps.

I hope you had fun at the jQuery conference! I wish it weren’t so far away, otherwise I would have gone.

Buck said this on October 4th, 2008

I just found your blog and I wanted to encourage you to write about all of those topics. I really liked your screencast and I would love to see more especially about interface design, IA, and jQuery.

Andrej said this on October 14th, 2008

Thanks for the compliments, Andrej! I will do my best to keep the posts coming, and I really enjoy talking about interface and jQuery, so that works out for both of us :)

Buck said this on October 14th, 2008