Making blogs more — something…

Now that I have a couple of weeks away from the office for the holidays (yippee! yahoo! Yowza! yay!) one of my hopes for the time is to actually finish up the blog redesign I started a while back, and had to freeze due to lack of time and spare brain cells.

So I found John Porcaro’s piece on how to make business blogs more personal very well timed (I also strongly recommend you read down into the entries he points to).

Not that I need to inject more personality into this blog — sometimes I think I’m almost at the please stop sharing point already — but I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what I’m trying to accomplish and structure things so that the blog fits those things properly and helps communicate that to both of my readers…

Right now, this blog is a hodgepodge of stuff. There’s an aspect of me talking about me, there’s a part where I discuss things that are of interest to me (not the same thing), it acts as a bit of a linkblog, sometimes of things I want to bring notice to, sometimes links to things involving Mama Fruit Company, there are technical aspects, and there are political and rhetorical postings, and finally, my marketing/customer-focus oriented stuff.

And coming next year, I have a couple of new open source projects I plan on kicking off (in a pay-forward mode, basically), and they’ll need a breeding ground for discussion and evolution.

So I’m wondering what to do here. I’ve decided that the new projects (which are related) will live out on their own, not tied in here, probably with a blog for project writings and a wiki for community discussion.

But the rest? I haven’t completely decided. An easy structure would be to split the personal aspect from the linking aspect from the technical pieces and put them all ito their own blogs, but I’d rather not start making arbitrary distinctions like that, when (as my last couple of iterations have proven) this stuff will mutate over time.

So I’m leaning towards a single blog, with an over-arching RSS feed, and then create sub-feeds for people who only want some specific aspect of that, then build a topic setup that ties into those sub-feeds. I know the photoblog dies, to be replaced with links into gallery (nice idea, I just didn’t like the structure).

But I’m open to suggestion, and I expect the redesign will actually be a first phase as I iterate towards what I really want. All I know is — halfway done, I like it a lot better than what I currently have. I just need another 10-12 hours to finish it and put a coat of paint on it…

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