The Beginning

And so I’ve finally created something semi-official. Hopefully I won’t look back on this post and wonder where I went wrong, as I’m doing now with the last site. It’s been only a few days less than a year since I posted the “first” blog entry on the last site (although I had put the site up using various content management systems for three or four months beforehand), which admittedly isn’t a lot of time to try and acquire a reader base.

I think the turning point with the old site—mlingojones.com—came when I realized that it was hard to understand when spoken, and the translation from hearing the name to typing in the domain name was a confusing one. It wasn’t until an associate mistyped the domain name as “lingojones.com” that I figured this out. I wanted a new domain name, a new online identity, which would come with the freedom to do something I’d wanted to for a while: launch a web design studio. I’d tried to do something like this on a more personal level with the old site, but had completely failed.

Ultimately, that was the problem with the old site. It was too personal. The persona I wanted to create was something like that of Dave Shea on mezzoblue: professional, but not totally removed. Unfortunately I fell into the same trap that doubtless many new bloggers do. Meta-entries (entries about the blog itself) comprised a large number of my posts, and the signal to noise ratio was low, which I now realize is possible even in a one-way method of communication.

Now I’m a year and a half wiser, both in terms of design skills and maturity (especially as far as blogging goes). I’ll try to keep my updates at least tangentially related to the general topic of the blog (web-related technologies and design) but I know I’ll probably end up branching out into other topics too. As long as the general direction of the content doesn’t revert to the same sort of juvenile commentary I was putting up before, I should be fine.

Let’s you and me both hope I can keep this up.