After four years, I’ve changed the design of jaredwsmith.com. It now runs on the extremely elegant and nicely responsive Twenty Twelve theme released by the WordPress team a few weeks ago. I never thought of myself as a default theme kind of guy until my life become incredibly busy and a much-needed redesign got totally out of reach. Twenty Twelve is an outstanding theme and should do well here for a while. At some point I’ll graft a custom design back on but it’s not a high priority.
What is a high priority going forward is spending more time working with this blog given the precarious state of third-party social networks and data ownership/display rights. Take Twitter’s much-maligned policy changes as an example — Twitter is about to really limit the power of its service, chilling its ecosystem and everything that attracted me to Twitter as a platform in the first place. I’ll still use Twitter and invest some time into it, keeping in mind the caveats going forward as it tries to become a profitable business, but if they restrict clients too much more it’s going to be tough to hang in there. (And I firmly realize that my issues with Twitter are from the standpoint of a power user, but something needs to be said for content ownership and display rights.)
Facebook is a family-and-friends communication tool for pithy thoughts with familiar folks. (I do have subscriptions turned on but I’m not sure who would want to watch.) Again, not a place I want to invest much brain power.
I’d invest more heavily in Google+ if they would open up the write API to, well, anybody other than HootSuite. (Nothing personal against HootSuite, but I prefer native desktop clients.)
Since I have this WordPress blog, I see less utility in installing a tool such as StatusNet or a Tent protocol-capable server. The ability to federate them is the trump card in their favor, and perhaps that’s something I should investigate more closely as an integration into WordPress — it’s just a protocol, and WordPress’s flexibility is why it survived the downfall of mainstream blogging (and, quite honestly, has thrived at an unprecedented scale).
It’s damn good to be writing here again. I seriously regret not doing it more. This blog has missed out on arguably the most important stretch of my life, and that really sucks.
Here’s to new beginnings…
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