New version of the blog is up!

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!