Well, it’s been about a year and it has been a fun ride. On the personal side, I have gotten a lot of readers and work out of this blog. It was imagined as sort of online resume, a way to show my skills, build a professional reputation, and to attract clients. I also wanted to help people learn how to build an online writing career. I enjoyed the recursive irony of building my own online career by teaching people how to build their own, and genuinely enjoyed helping people find the resources and learn the skills they needed to get started. I have gotten some great feedback and some awesome comments, as well, which have led to me making new friends, learning new skills, and gaining new resources. All in all, it’s been a very good year.
On my birthday every year I like to reflect on what I have done, what I want to do, where I am going, and where I want to be. So I have decided to do the same thing for my blog and online “brand”. We have reached a time of change.
Upcoming Changes:
- I am switching hosts, which means the blog will have some downtime soon. Barring unforeseen problems, it shouldn’t be more than an hour or two and no posts or links should be affected. I am not new to this, so I am not expecting any issues, however the bizarre is a part of life (my life, anyway) so disaster could occur.
- I am going to be changing themes (again). I have decided that for my purposes the Thesis theme is probably the best way to go, but I may decide to go with another premium theme. I simply need the support of a premium theme provider and not to be spending amazing amounts of time fixing other people’s CSS and PHP. As a freelancer, my time is money in a very linear way; any time I can cut out of doing the back-end is more time devoted to actually producing things that pay the bills.
- Change in focus – Looking back over a year of posts, I am all over the place. I am going to abandon the single “writing for new media” focus and expand my subjects. Writing is still going to be a focus, as will social media, but for the new topics you are just going to have to wait and see.
Call for Input
I am also considering some other changes that I want to ask my readers for their feedback on.
- Change in Domains – I am considering revamping under a different name. Originally the idea was to use my IRL nickname as my branding, and that has worked well enough. But I have never particularly liked it, and I am considering simply putting everything together on NealJansons.com or getting a better domain more focused on what I actually write about. Any suggestions? Do you think putting this blog on my personal domain would be a bad or good idea?
- Topics – As I said above, I am opening up my niche a bit and would love to get some ideas on what you would like to see me cover.
- While I do get a lot of positive feedback here and have yet to get a negative comment, I would also like to know if I am offering you much of real value here? Should I retire thePuckWrites and do something else?
- Ideas for Other Blogs – While, as some of you know, I also run the Social Media Philosophy Project and Social Media Superheroes, these are attempts at social blogs and they are aimed at specific people. I am well aware that the philosophical implications of social technologies are simply not interesting to most people. My degrees are in philosophy and I was a TA…I know exactly how quickly philosophical interest wanes when we get beyond the “wow, man, things might, like, not really be real, man”, Matrix-level philosophy. I also know that not everyone shares my desire to use social technologies as superpowers to aid and protect humanity (some of you might even find the notion silly). That’s fine. But I also have other interests and love to write. So if you like my writing and think I should start blogging on something else, make some suggestions.
Thank you all!
Thanks for a great year! I have met some amazing people, been a part of some amazing things, and I look forward to everything the next year may bring. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your patience, friendship, and interest; stick around, hopefully things will get even better.
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I didn't know you had a blog. Why were you hiding it all this time? I’m kidding, of course. I'm happy you’re moving it, do you know where? As for the name change, I think it's a coin toss on that one. It might be time to use your real name if you’re trying to parley this into other profession endeavors. Finally, you would like input on what you should write about. I don't have a clue, but if I were to write a blog, I would focus on the new area of Social Web TV. It‘s growing fast with little coverage. Congratulation on your first year, and I hope the next one is just as satisfying for you
I'm gonna be moving it over to BlueHost. I already moved
http://nealjansons.com and http://socialmediasuperheroes.com there and they
are awesome. The only issue about using my name domain is that it is not
niched at all. thePuckWrites at least has writes in it and my well-known
handle. On the other hand, fewer and fewer services use usernames for much
and we see each other's real names more, so more and more people are calling
me Neal anyway. I was thinking somthing new, reasonably niched in name.
Still not sure. Social Web TV is an interesting topic, but I don't know if I
am the right guy for covering that. Thanks for the suggestions, though.
I will ignore the comment about not knowing I had a blog. This time.
:p