Quick Update on My Blog Design and Format

First of all, I’ll say right off, I’m not a big fan of blogging about blogging, but sometimes I do it just to organize things out in my own mind as well, that’s what this is then. I hear it all the time, if I get a better, newer, and more fresh looking design, I’ll blog more, but that rarely happens. It’s like waiting to do something until the circumstances are just right in your mind, and often times, they never will be. That said, I do think there is a hint of truth to those statements, so over the weekend, after (literally) years of searching, I found one of my favorite customizable WordPress.com designs called Portfolio. So I wanted to make three quick points below today about my world of blogging.

A Little About the Versatility of WordPress as a Platform

WordPress is such an extremely versatile platform. Over the course of 10+ years now, this site has developed into far more than a blog to me, and much of that has to do with the ability that WordPress.com and WordPress.org (there is a difference, see also WordPress Self Hosted vs WordPress.com Hosted Blog Pros Cons :: Review), gives its users. As I have said many times over the years, your blog can be far more than just a place to type a few sentences, you can do that on Facebook. I really have such a narrow view on digital world design and organization, much of which I actually owe to my son and his design abilities, that nothing really ever quite fit my perfect balance of minimalist design, good typography, ability to showcase photography and writing, and so on, but this finally comes close.

A Little About Blog Purpose and Site Organization

Over time, I have begun to heavily filter what I placed on my blog, and what I write on my blog, much to my own dismay. To keep this creative avenue alive in my mind, I actually went to a few anonymous blogs, which as of now, I have combined and imported into this blog, with the intention of continuing those posts alive over here, even if they are trivial, unpolished thought, or just a photo with some comments. These other two sites were specifically for unpolished writing and photos. The writing site was writing only, no photos, and was called Religitic Writing at Religitic.com, which can now be found here under the Religitic tag. The other was photos with only a caption, or a short story, and those are now located in my Gallery and Stories section.

With this new design, I have created a front “home page,” which is a landing page for some featured posts. The rest should be self explanatory by following the menu at the top, but I have a “blog” link now that takes you to the chronological list of posts on my site. I redesigned and updated the About Page and some other organizational things, which hopefully will make navigation cleaner.

A Little About My Intentions Moving Ahead

Throughout the time I have spent on my site I have tried to keep a consistent collection of content, or to remain true to my personal mission statement if you like, and my focus will continue to be for that end. I started this overhaul to my blog earlier in the year (sorry to my RSS readers who are constantly being bombarded with old post updates), and I now see it will probably take the rest of the year to complete. Because content is king, and always has been, that will be the other focus on the future of this site. This means I really hope to continue posting new stories, gallery items, and text only content on various topics that are a little less filtered.

I recently told someone that they really can’t personally create a blog or website anymore where the content was duplicated in another place, or worse yet, just repeat and repeat the same message yourself. So if you can’t be successful in creating content someone else hasn’t already created how can you create anything unique? The answer if you. You are the only you God created, and you are unique in the entire universe. So the only content that is truly unique, is content of your very own, content from your own life, your learning, and of course your own experiences (because they are always different than someone else). And that is what I intend to continue to do here on this site. Create unique original content from what I call life.

If you have a blog, send it my way, I love to read blogs that are personal, unique, and provide some type of value to the world by self expression in life.