Well, that’s not entirely true: I had set up a theme called Agregado earlier this year because it was built on the premise of an inescapable fact:

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site’s disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

–Jeffrey Zeldman, The vanishing personal site

Agregado did something really compelling: tie in the disparate online identities we’ve created for ourselves and present them in one place that our friends could check. Unfortunately, that feature came with a cost: the design still assumed that I would be posting something up here on a fairly frequent basis.

If the Daily Newarker has taught me anything, it’s that blogging can be a thankless task.  Five years ago, having a blog seemed so much simpler: monetization was more wish fulfillment than concrete requirement.  Of course, five years ago, I was in my twenties with no kids and too much time on my hands.  Now, blogging has to have some sort of return for it to be worth something, or it feels like yelling into a (well indexed, searchable) well.

Social web services add a dimension of immediate feedback which, while notwithstanding their own pitfalls, introduce incentives other than getting paid to creating content for the web (just keep clicking on those ads).  And in their own zeal to get paid, they niche you into thirty different directions all while fracturing your digital identity.  Yes, it still is the Wild West out there.

While thinking about these things, I stumbled across Lifestream, which is the centerpiece of this new design.  With very little effort, this WordPress plugin provides a full menu of services from which you can import your content and activities and post them to the blog.  This is especially helpful for my wife and I, who both co-author the blog and have at least two Twitter accounts each — Lifestream feeds them all into the blog, and provides a daily digest of the result in a clean, readable format (a side benefit, by the way, to mitigate against proprietary lock-in for a particular service).

After peppering the blog with some Google ads, search, and analytics, I’m ready to do what I should have been doing: leverage a platform I created years ago as an underutilized asset.

Of course, our charming and lovely readers get to continue reading about our triumphs and failures…and maybe get a glimpse of our favorite Hulu programs in the process.

While I’ve yet to see a really great theme based on Sandbox, I really love the idea of it. Anyone know of a grid-based layout that might be based on that metatheme?

Update: oh, wow. I just discovered Wrath by Small Potato. It’s simple, it’s grid-based, it works on Sandbox. I just tweaked the design a bit to feature some of our nicer Flickr photos.

I’m still a bit dissatisfied with a few things here and there. In particular, those orange RSS icons look really goofy in a red theme. Also, two columns might be a bit overkill, so one of those might go away soon.

What do you think? Sound off, as usual, in the comments.

Another Update: I installed the “Smilies Themer plugin”:http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/smilies-themer/ to set up custom smilies. I had set these same smilies up on the site “way back in 2003″:http://kennsarah.net/2003/05/09/site-changes/, but it was never easy to keep them that way. Upgrading WordPress (or, back then, Movable Type) meant wiping out my smiley configuration. This plugin solves that problem — _love_ it.

It’s a love/hate thing I have about blogging: design is hard, and harder still to justify when you have to actually _tell_ people that you spent your Sunday afternoon “designing the blog” — looking at the ground, tracing your foot through the dirt. Admitting to having a vested interest in the online world (like having a MySpace or Facebook profile) is still embarrassing for those of us over 25. Well, those of us who are over 25 and aren’t making a dime at this, anyway.

My desire to troll my news reader every week for the purpose of reposting the links on my own site has started to seem downright insideous: sucking away valuable time that I should be _creating_ content, not regurgitating it. Even the word “content” is troublesome — as if it were this soulless ether that we just pump out for the purpose of consumption by the blogosphere. I think the word I really mean to use here is “stories.”

The web — and its predecessor, the “Bulletin Board System”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system — has always fascinated me in its ability to connect people through thoughts and ideas. I spent countless hours as a slacker teenager BBSing in front of MTV and arguing about the merits of…well, the “SysOp”:http://the-forgotten.org/ only knows what. But it gave me the opportunity to connect in a very real way with a community where thoughtful dialog was valued. We were telling our stories, whether they were actual stories, or debates, or artwork, or source code.

Six months, a year ago, I would have talked about what I think made Wonkette successful and makes Gawker successful, to a certain extent, and other blogs: A strong, defined personality with a sense of humor about themselves. An ability to filter news quickly and to recognize, you know, what is interesting to other people as well as interesting to themselves, and finding the balance between those things.

What I think is changing is that people have now become addicted to the rapid update. You know, the not just 12 times a day; 18 times a day, 24 times a day. And it’s almost physically impossible for one person to do that.

– ??Ana Marie Cox?? on David Pogue’s blog, “Wonkette’s Ingredients for a Successful Blog”:http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=102

When we were introduced to the Internet in the early nineties, the prospect of cheap, instant communication across vast distances was exhilarating. I found myself spending hours and hours in front of the ad supported, dial-up email from “Juno”:http://www.ebuddies.org/informed/computers/juno.html, writing friends all over the world. Those were thrilling, innocent times, before Wikipedia and Google and Digg and blogs. Before we realized that too much information can be a “bad thing”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload. Before we used words like “attention economy”:http://www.google.com/search?q=attention%20economy.

I’m highly suspect of the attention economy — the idea that your attention, your thoughts themselves, will be monetized and commodified, and that even attention itself can become a sort of currency for the exchange of goods. I’ve found that many places on the web are steadily heading in this direction, creating a culture that is becoming numb to all but the most immediate and easy-to-digest information, lacking depth and insight. Digg has just launched “Swarm”:http://labs.digg.com/swarm/, web app that lets you watch news stories break and gain attention in real time. I find it to be both brilliant and terrifying, but this is the future: the web will continue to demand more and more of our attention as we learn to process information at an ever-increasing pace. And, by “process”, I mean just about anything other than “think deeply about.”

It is a wonder of the world, the Web. I have facts at hand by the thousands about everything from the different kinds of government to the names of the stars of television shows I’ve never even seen. I’m smarter, then, with my computer on, but not much deeper. I worry that my knowledge of the world is actually growing shallower, in fact, because for every idea there are a dozen articles and Wikipedia entries to read that allow me to avoid thinking for myself.

– ??Paul Ford??, “Followup/Distraction”:http://www.ftrain.com/Followup.html

All this to say that I’m starting to wonder about the process of my contributions to the echo chamber. These On the Radar linkdumps have kept me well informed, but less thoughtful, always providing an easy escape from the mild discomfort of rerouting a few synapses. If this blog is to really convey something meaningful about our story, I think I’d like to devote time to writing more thoughtfully, rather than collecting the detritus of a thousand other bloggers.

Sunday at the Village Church where Sam gave a 60-minute presentation on the capital-e End times and I gave a 4-minute presentation about our “web presence”:http://villagechurchnyc.com/. Got some feedback and an offer of some help from “Josh Clayton”:http://typefield.com/ to post some photography on the site. I can’t wait to kick around some ideas with him.

Napped for a few hours, which subsequently means I haven’t been able to sleep yet, so, of course, it’s time for a site redesign. “Fickle”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/12/22/facelift/, I know, but while discussing our site design with Tom on Saturday — okay, after wildly gesturing and lip-reading over the booming techno — he reminded me of our initial design before the conversion to WordPress. It looked “something like this”:http://kennsarah.net/archives1/2005/01/09/would_you_buy_a_500_mac/index.php but featured a big, fun photo at the top of the page that I periodically updated. Tom and I agreed that the idea was still good, so the gears began to turn.

During my geek-out session on Saturday, I discovered the “plaintxtBlog”:http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/plaintxtblog/, a clever minimalist theme with a penchant for typography. After installing and playing with it, I was sold: I took the new theme and did some hacking to pull in the latest photo from Flickr from our account tagged with the word “featured”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/tags/featured/. All I have to do to update the photo is upload it to Flickr and tag it and it’s automatically resized and shows up on the site — which feels really maintainable.

There are some things I miss about the other design, and I’m not totally happy with everything with the new design, but I think this design has got some potential. What do you think?

I think it’s been a successful experiment so far: blog postings are up to eight per month rather than one per month, and I think people are sticking around because of it. However, the time commitment, at least for the On the Radar blogs, is still a bit costly. My process for collecting links goes something like this:

# *Early in the week:* set up a draft On the Radar blog entry
# *Throughout the week:* find an interesting link, cut ‘n’ paste it into the draft (maybe with formatting and comments, maybe not)
# *Friday:* add in all the commentary and formatting I didn’t do through the week, name the entry and post it

That last step can take a good couple hours, depending on how lax I was through the week. The other day, though, I stumbled over a feature in WordPress that might help. I was messing around with the datestamp of a blog entry on the Everything Newark blog and rediscovered the “future posting” feature. From the “WordPress codex”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts.

All posts dated in the future will not appear on the site until that time has passed. If you wish to write posts that will automatically appear on your schedule, set the date and time here.

I’d forgotten that setting a future timestamp will actually keep that blog out of view until that time passes. It occurred to me that, when I start a new On the Radar entry, I could just set the datestamp for Friday and Publish so, regardless of how finished or unfinished it is, that blog will be posted on this site on that date. It’s really more of a positive reinforcement than anything: when I realize that a blog entry will show up automatically on the site on Friday, I might be more prone to be more thorough with Step 2 and save myself a bit of time at the end of the week.

I just set the datestamp for this week’s entry for Friday. Let’s see how this goes. While we’re on the subject — what do you think of the format? Are you digging it? Sick of links? What do you do to keep you blog fresh?

Nothing new there, except for the “once promised”:http://www.kennsarah.net/2005/02/09/getting-laid-off-more-time-to-blog/ car “photos”:http://www.kennsarah.net/photos/mazda-3/. I’m also using the default template with Gallery. *Really* boring, I know, but I’m intentionally not budgeting time to tweak the blog with a custom design. This is mostly because it will become a big black hole which will suck the few hours of free time out of my life, but also because there are “perfectly good templates”:http://www.alexking.org/software/wordpress/style_browser.php out there — maybe one day I’ll go nuts and actually use one.