Blogging

Seems wrong that two of my recent blog posts have been about folks in the blogosphere that have passed on – but sometimes that’s the lot of life.

Last night, Brainhell, a blogger in California, passed away at home from complications related to ALS.

I first read his blog back in November or so when I was googling for something else. He had been diagnosed with ALS nearly four years prior to when I had started reading his blog – and he had been blogging about his medical issues even prior to that.

His blog as always honest, entirely authentic, and sometimes difficult to read. But he provided an open and candid view into a horrible disease – and did so with courage. His final words, according to his sister, were “It was fun….”

I’ll miss him.

I’ve never been happy with the design of this blog – until now.

For the first five years of this blog, I was using Movable Type as the blog software that powered bryanstrawser.com. Once upon a time, I coded a custom template but it was so standards non-compliant it wasn’t even funny. A later attempt to hire a professional designer yielded a design that I was really less than fond of. So it was back to templates for me.

After leaving the blog world for over a year, I relaunched on Memorial Day 2007 using Automattic’s WordPress. I wound up rotating through some different templates before giving up and contacting my good friend Matt Craven to get a design put together on the blog.

Matt, being as smart as he is, turned to Chris Jennings, an up-and-coming designer that had worked on blogs like Tim Ferris, the author of The Four Hour Work Week, along with many others.

The result is this uber-cool design that you see before you.

The Picture

The picture of me in the header is from my vacation to Bar Harbor, Maine in October 2003. It’s one of my favorite pictures of myself. The picture was taken on the eastern coast of Bar Harbor early on an October morning as the fog was just beginning to burn off… I wrote more about that vacation here, here, and here.

The Quote

For a very long time, Richard Bach has been one of my favorite authors. Two friends of mine from high school gave me the book Illusions in my junior year.. and it had a profound impact on me. The book has remained one of my favorites ever since…

The quote is but one of the sayings from The Master’s Handbook that Bach’s character is given in the book..

The Design

Through Matt, I gave Chris little guidance other than some links to blog designs that I liked alot.. the credit for the creativity, inspiration, and end result is entirely due to his abilities as a designer. I couldn’t be h

Chris also made a slick archives page that is fairly unique in it’s layout and architecture.

For the first time, I wrote a solid About Page – one that I’m pleased with for the time being anyways.

As my career has grown, I’ve also been fortunate enough to be able to speak at some various conferences and the like – where permitted, links to those are on the new presentations page.

Final Thoughts

All said, I’m very happy with this design. I finally feel like the blog has been brought forward to today’s technology with WordPress and with a design that pops… I’m looking forward to blogging on a more regular basis!

4 years

2440 posts

539 comments

104 trackbacks

Been a fun ride so far.

I’ve been a long-time reader of Ernie the Attorney. He posted earlier this week that he was staying in New Orleans due to being unable to get out of town.

My thoughts are with him and the others in New Orleans this morning — looking forward to his next post showing that he is safe and sound…

I write this blog for myself – not for anyone else – and therefore choose to write about what interests me, when it interests me..

Actor Wil Wheaton has a great post up about his own encounter with trying to keep his blogging “real” and stay focused on what he’s doing in the rest of his life.

It’s a great perspective on blogging and life balance….