June 12, 2013

Get Organized

Yes, I do this every year it seems.

I realized that my blog was a mess. It was trying to do several things that blogs just don’t do well, even with Wordpress. It was a portfolio, a tumblog, and a place for all sorts of topics. In all, it was not a good example for someone who teaches writing for digital media. I had to make a change.

The first step: get my portfolio somewhere else. I considered Behance, but that’s geared more toward the creative community, not educators. I like what they’re doing, but it was not for me. It seemed Tumblr offered the best solution. With an elegant theme, “Surface” from Themecloud, I transferred all of my items from Wordpress. Now I have a separate, elegant place to highlight my career milestones. I’m still considering a cool domain name for it, but drlucas.com was taken. Grumble.

Next, all the random ramblings I’ve done over the years had to go. A blog needs to be focused around my expertise. I didn’t want to ditch all of the posts I’d made, so I’m transferring them to this site. It’s really hard to be Tumblr for this sort of thing: a collection of stuff that interests me, but that I’m not an expert in. This is a place for fun.

As of this post, I’m still making this transition. I posted a lot of random junk over the years. I might also try to get my other Tumblr account posts here, too. However, it seems like there’s no elegant way to accomplish that, yet. Also, I’m not done with the theme here, yet. I’d like to be able to include Disqus, so I’ll keep looking for a theme that can incorporate that comment system.

Finally, get the blog focused with a new theme made for reading. I’m pretty fickle when it comes to themes, and I tend to like WooThemes quite a bit. I use their “Canvas” theme for LitMUSE and grlucas.com, but I wanted something different for my blog. They recently released “On Topic,” and it seems to be pretty much what I want.

Gone are all the distractions from the blog. “Clean, neat, and focused” is my new blog mantra. I’ll be articulating this idea on an upcoming blog post.

I’m also thinking about ditching my “About” and “Contact” page and just pointing both to my About.me page.

OK, now maybe I can get to that article I’m supposed to be writing.