Lars-Christian.com|This is me at the intarwebs.

Or just hopeless, hell if I know.

It is with great pleasure I can announce that the new and (hopefully) very improved version of my blog has launched. Although technically it has been publicly available for a day now as I was working on it, but it’s always nice to make a spectacle about these things, I think.

As you can obviously tell there’s a lot of changes. The design has been completely redone. I scratched the theme that I had based all the previous iterations of the blog for the past two years on, and found a completely different theme to base the new design on. The concept for behind the new design was done quite a while back, but seeing how I don’t have the ability to code a design from scratch, I needed to find a suitable theme that matched my “visions” on to base the new theme on. When I finally did, it didn’t take many hours for me to adapt the graphics and finish it up.

Structural change

In addition to the cosmetical change, the blog has also been drastically restructured. It’s no longer a blog in the traditional sense, as the frontpage now features my lifestream instead of the latest blog posts, and I am very excited about this change. I have been wanting to do something like this for a long while, as I have always felt that my personal blog should be more than just the odd post I make here every now and then. I was therefore very excited when I discovered this plugin called RSS Stream (through this post over at ReadWriteWeb) that would let me turn my WordPress blog into a “hub” of all my online activities.

This way my blog can finally represent my online personality, and whenever I’m asked the question “who are you?” I can simply answer with a link to my blog, as I believe the sum of my online activities gives a fairly accurate answer.

I also feel this adds a lot of value and helps justify the existence of the blog, because we all know I haven’t been very good at posting frequently here. With the relaunched version however, anyone who is wondering what I am up to can simply stop by here and get a good idea. Of course this change makes the blog much more personal, but I hope that it doesn’t necessarily turn people off from diving into the contents of the blog.

With the relaunch I feel much more motivated to actually post here and keep the blog alive, and hopefully this time it won’t die like a simple spark in the dark like it has many times before. It also inspires me to be more active at the various web services my lifestream pulls its updates from, so I really think this is a win-win situation for myself and the blog.

Right now the lifestream on the frontpage pulls updates from my profiles at the following sites:

• Twitter - I’m quite active here, and I hope to be even more active in the future.
• Pownce - Haven’t been very active lately, but I have a decent amount of friends, and I like the service so hopefully I’ll be able to use it more frequently from now on.
• Digg - At best I think my activity could be described as “semi-inactive”. I visit it a lot, I just haven’t been digging and submitting lately.
• Delicious - Not active at all in the past couple of months. Will give it another chance however.
• Flickr - Semi-active. I love the service, I just need to be better at uploading and sharing my photos.
• Silent Sound Waves - The music blog I am about to “officially” launch. Will be posting at least a few times per week, hopfully even more.

The latest posts from this blog also shows up in the lifestream, but that’s it for now. Ideally I would also like to include posts I make at the two forums I frequent, but from what I can tell vBulletin doesn’t create an RSS feed for each member, so that isn’t doable at the moment at least.

The long road to perfection

I would love some feedback on how you feel about the new version of my blog. Some will probably like it, and some won’t, but what I am interested in is what you like and don’t like. The design is still very much a work in progress however, and I have a lot of modifying left to do with the elements inside the content areas before I’m anywhere near pleased with how it looks, but I at least feel that I am headed in the right direction with what I have so far.

This is my 100th blog post here at Lars-Christian.com. I decided to delete that maintenance message I posted a couple of days ago, and instead celebrate my 100th blog post the proper way with a big announcement like this. Feel free to congratulate me on being the persistant little blogger!

I’ve decided to put the planned blog redesign on hold for a little while. After graphically finishing up the draft for the new design I realized there was no way what-so-ever I would be able to code it myself from scratch. This left me with two options, hire a coder or scratch the design. Needless to say, I went for the latter.

Seeing how this will be more a personal blog than anything else, I don’t see any reason for me to spend money on it with absolutely no expected return (I’m a business student after all!). Instead I’ll be looking for a nice free WP theme to base the new design on, as I’m quite capable of modifying designs codewise, as opposed to coding them from the ground and up. If you have any suggestions feel free to throw them at me - I’m hoping to find a theme that makes it easy to display things like my latest Tweets and Flickr photos.

And while we’re on the subject of Twitter, are you following me yet? I feel somewhat lonely over there, even though I have a few followers none of them seem to be interested in conversation. If you are, just follow me and send a tweet at me, and I’ll make sure to follow you back! I’ll be cleaning up my list of people I’m following too, so that I can filter out the noise from people I don’t really know as well.

Lastly, exams are over for me again, which always makes for a good period of fun and relaxation. I have been getting into the “internet” mode, which should mean more activity from me. Of course this also means more time for blog related things, so hopefully I’ll be able to get a new design up in not too long. As soon as I find a good theme to use as a base, it shouldn’t take me more than a day or two to get things ready. Need to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress as well.

What’s that image right there on the left? Well I’m happy to say that’s a little preview of the new design I’m working on for this blog. I’ve been growing increasingly tired of the current design, which is partly why I haven’t posted a whole lot lately. And this time I have decided to take a big step, and completely redo the entire blog.

Once I finish up the design, I’m going to find someone who can code the design for me from scratch, so that I can get it looking exactly like I imagine it. With this design also comes a signficant shift in focus at this blog. Instead of being a half-assed attempt at covering a specific niche, which I admittedly don’t want to write about at the moment, I am going to cover a brand new niche; me!

Profound, I know. But to elaborate, I have decided that, since this blog has my name attatched to it after all, I will try to make it reflect my online persona. The blog part will be expanded to the extent that I can write about pretty much everything I feel like talking about. With the new design I will also try to aggregate some of my “off-blog” activities online as well as I can.

All of this will hopefully make it really easy for me to answer a single question: “Who are you?” - “Just take a look at my blog, Lars-Christian.com to see what I’m all about“.

Understandably this will most likely result in those 100 something people currently subscribing to my blog hitting the unsubscribe button, but to be honest, I don’t care. I won’t maintain this blog to make a profit, or gain as many subscribers as possible. Instead I’ll be doing it mostly for fun and relief. It’s nice to have somewhere to vent your thoughts, I think, and that’s what I’ll do.

Don’t get me wrong though, I won’t just be posting pictures of my cats and dogs (I don’t have any cats or dogs, nor do I want any of them!), and I’ll probably still be offering my unique insight on everything online business, marketing and so forth. I just won’t be tied down to that topic exclusively.

We’ll see how it all works out eventually. I’m kinda excited to get the new design up and start playing with my online persona again!

I just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.5, and I have to take some time to familiarize myself with the brand new back-end. I will come back soon with some impressions as soon as I get the hang of this.

I’m excited to see if the editor now finally works properly in Safari as well!

Update: A wee bit busy these days with a term paper, so I haven’t really had much time to play with WP 2.5. I haven’t even upgraded the site I post at most frequently yet, but hopefully I’ll get that done sometime next week so that I can finally start exploring the full potential of it.

I’m really loving the admin interface however. It makes the old back-end seem so 2001. The colours are also extremely inviting, and they even make me want to redesign this very blog. Of course, if I am to do that, I should probably start posting more regularly, because there’s not much point in spending time on it.

Right now I’m really at a sort of a crossroads in regards to what I want to do online. I think I’ve mostly scrapped the ideas I’ve had since the new year, but that’s not to say I’m not going to start something. I just need to figure out what, which seems to be extremely difficult for me.

As I mentioned, I’m also in the thinking box regarding which direction I will take this blog. I have been thinking about a more personal direction again, but it really depends on what I will start up on the side.

Inspiration and suggestions are more than welcome! Feel free to leave me a comment, or even send me an email or contact me in any other way if you feel that you have something to say.

Note: Hurray, the spell checker actually works again. That should certainly come in handy