I’m trying to find a middle ground between making my social share buttons prominent enough to encourage visitors to use them, but not so obnoxiously in your face that it makes you want to bash the monitor in and send me death threats. Check the sharing bar on the left side and scroll up and down, you’ll see it floats with the content (for those reading this by email or newsfeed you’ll have to visit my site to see it.)

Does it look acceptable to you? BTW, it’s exactly how Mashable.com has theirs setup as well, but not sure I really dig it for this site. I’ll give it a few days though and see what people say.

My goodness.

I think I crawled into the dungeon that was my blog a few weeks ago, and I’m only now stumbling out into the real world again.

When I came back from Texas the first thing that happened was that I promptly got ill no more than 3 hours after I got off the plane, then started projectile vomiting while my head spun 360 degrees the next morning. Needless to say that alone put me out of commission for a few days. I finally got better just in time to go back to work again, where I was faced with a workload that was backlogged oddly enough, for exactly the length of time that I’ve been gone. Hmmmmmm…

Then we started doing training for the new system that we’ll using soon, nicknamed Charlie Foxtrot, which right there tells you all you need to know about what’s coming. Just how bad is this system you ask? You ever seen the movie Terminator, where the computer Skynet becomes self-aware at 2:14AM, and the world promptly goes straight to hell shortly afterward?

This is worse.

On top of that, my blog kept going down in flames, so I kept trading emails with support, who assured me the server was fine and that basically my blog sucked. I had to believe it, because the code driving my site was already 3 years old and bloated to begin with. My home page alone made 372 connections every time it loaded. It was time for a major change, a change I really couldn’t put off any longer.

After doing extensive research on themes for WordPress, so many that my eyes started glazing over after viewing a gaboolion demos, I finally settled on a theme framework called Headway, which is about as close to a WYSIWYG theme builder as you’ll ever find on the WordPress platform. The next few weeks involved a lot of banging my head against solid objects, tearing my hair out and excessive bouts of crying. I had to re-learn CSS, learn about the use of “hooks,” learn about PHP functions and other alien terminology that almost made me say sod all and sign up for a Blogger account. I persevered though, dropping the plugins that were bloating my site, restructuring the layouts and slowly putting together a completely revamped backend and frontend.

Alas however, I am sad to say my smileys are no more. :-( The plugin that drove the display of all my smileys was simply creating too much of a bottleneck for my site, so after nearly 5 years of making toothy grins to all my visitors and readers, it was finally time to let them go.

On the upside though, I’ve managed to lay in a tumblelog within my regular blogging, something I’ve always wanted to do, but just didn’t know quite how I wanted to set it up until now. For those of you who don’t know what a tumblelog is, it’s basically a quick and dirty way to microblog content to your site, usually in the form of photos, videos, audio, and text snippets that are shorter than a normal blog post, but not normally short enough to fit within Twitter. I always felt like my blogging was stunted by the feeling that I had to write something a bit lengthy for it to be considered blogworthy, and that feeling often precluded me from posting quick thoughts or content relating to an experience I had while traveling. Sometimes Twitter did the trick. Oftentimes however, I needed something a little more.

It forced me to do some soul searching and re-evaluate my approach to blogging, and as a result I made even more dramatic changes to my blog’s taxonomies. My category names have been changed to be more descriptive and easier to understand, and I drastically reduced the amount of tags I was using in posts, from about 5,000 tags to now about 400. I read somewhere that you really don’t need more than 3-5 tags per post, and yet somehow I had gotten the idea over the years that the more tags I used, the merrier. That’s why some posts of mine would have nigh on 30 tags to them. I just didn’t know better.

It got to the point where I dreaded blogging at times simply because I didn’t want to put up with wracking my brain for appropriate tags to use on my posts. Stupid. That I no longer have to emphasize them so much comes as a huge relief to me.

In addition, I’ve also laid down the groundwork for a fictional sub-blog that I’ll be writing soon. It won’t overtly appear like it’s fictional (that’s part of the fun), but it will be entirely the work of my imagination, as I seek to resurrect a character I’ve once written about in the past, a man who will once again go forth and vex humanity beyond reason, much to me (and hopefully my readers) delight.

Eventually, it will be three blogs in one. My prose will change dramatically as a result, indeed, just by virtue of no longer using emoticons it’s changed already. But for the first time in a long time, I’m excited. I actually have the desire to write again, and this time with virtually none of the roadblocks that’s stopped me before. It’s like getting a new lease on life.

In the meantime, let me know what you think of the new layout. I’m anxious to get some feedback, and any reports of quirky behavior or bugs you might be seeing as a result the new design.

Thanks for sticking with me as I continue to evolve my blogging. At long last I can finally go to bed again before 4AM. :-)

Oh, and by the way, during all this, my host guy emails me and says “my bad,” turns out the server was having problems after all, and that my blog had nothing to do with it. There’s going to be a flaming paper bag burning outside his door this weekend.

I haven’t written anything in a while, partly because nobody reads my crap anymore, and partly because I can’t really figure out how I can write anything of substance on a daily basis. Yet if I’m to succeed in turning my writing into a career, I’ll have to find a way, somehow.

The reason I’m making this my goal now is because I read a study that the more popular a blog was, the more content it dished out on a regular basis. The average seemed to be about one post a day before the numbers start to level out, so I guess that should be my objective: one post a day. It doesn’t have to be epic obviously, but it should be engaging enough to attract the reader into coming back for more. If only I lived the kind of lifestyle that could draw the audience in and help develop a community around my crazy adventures, but I don’t. At least not now.

Instead, I work the most mind numbingly boring job in existence, a government job that saddles me with absolutely vacuous drone work and groups me in with shriveled up seahags, most of who have the mental acuity of a brain damaged snail. It’s a miracle that I can still manage to find my way home after ten years of this insanity.

Coupled with the fact that I have no social life, and thus my life is void of any drama (which is both good and bad), I haven’t been able to come up with much in the way of blogging fodder.

Most professional bloggers though simply resort to writing bland, forgettable content and follow a specific format. For one, they use bullet points to emphasize certain points under the assumption that their readers are complete morons. And they’ll often title their posts with phrases like “29 Ways to Travel Light” or “18 Tips to help You Save Money during your stay at Disney World.” Why? Because that’s what the experts tell them all to do. It’s a writing structure that makes it easier for readers to scan your content before they click away to read something else. Most users online have a limited attention span, so bloggers are instructed to present their content in such a way to make it easy and quick to read. It’s the nature of the Internet, and honestly, there’s really nothing inherently wrong with taking this approach.

Except the fact that 100 million other aspiring bloggers all do the same thing.

See, I can’t write like that. My writing only seems to hit its stride when I focus more on telling a story rather than informing the audience on the virtues of not forgetting to pack your underwear when you’re taking a trip somewhere. Unfortunately, my writing style is not a consistent money maker, so I can either adapt and be like everyone else, or go my own way and be poor.

And yes, as stupid as it sounds, I would rather be different than be rich. That’s just how I roll. It’s why I buck social norms and do virtually the opposite of what everyone else does. When most people take their vacations in the summer, I take it in the winter so I can avoid the crowds. People go up, I go down. They go to Disney World, I go to Bob and Mike’s Funsie-Fun Amusement Park, when the kids are still in school.

I’m an off-season kind of guy, and I like it that way.

Oh my goodness, finally this week released its vice like claws on me and I can focus my energy on something other than trying to keep my righteous bongos from getting smacked around and spanked at work.

I’m in the process of doing a mild revamp of my blog and pushing the focus of this blog in a new direction, so you may see some things out of place for a few days until I finally smooth over the rough edges. Mostly what I’m doing though is finding a way to keep my blog razor fast while still keeping most of my shiny toys on it, such as polls, a ratings system, comment editing, my superawesomerrific lifestream and other cool, like, stuff.

All that of course seriously deteriorated the performance of my blog, and with that comes lost traffic and a drop in my search engine rankings unless I take action to fix it. So what I’ll be doing is slowly re-implement or disable some of my most crucial features until I find a nice balance between load times and the slim shady plugins I like to use here. Hopefully by the end of April I’ll be all finished.

So why am I paying more attention to this now? Well a friend of mind got it into my head that maybe, just maybe, I should start treating my site like a business now, so henceforth I should do business-y type stuff that will help me gain more business from others and improve my business credentials so I can finally go about the business of getting into my own business and being self employed some day.

I think that almost made sense, didn’t it? :-D