If your life has many different facets, then shouldn’t any blog you run reflect that? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

For a business-type blog direction is important.  You want your visitors to know what to expect, not just from your blog, but from your business.  However, I feel that the sky’s the limit when it comes to personal blogs.  They are there solely to provide an outlet to your personality — a place for you to spout off share information and ideas.

That isn’t to say that your personal blog should be an unorganized jumble that is completely incoherent and impossible to follow.  There does need to be some level of organization and some level of direction for each of the organizational areas so as to provide your visitors with some reason to return.

I feel as if I’ve failed at this with My Humble Abode.  For that, I am sorry.  I honestly have spent more time thinking about other aspects of my life (such as my budding photography endeavor) than I have on what I wanted from this site.

That will change.  I have spent the last couple days redesigning the look of the site to give it a more personal touch and to visually “brighten” it up.  I felt that the old look of it, and honestly several previous versions I recently stumbled upon in my backups, was dark, drab, and dreary.

If you have comments on the new appearance, please leave them in the comments for this post (or send ‘em to me via the contact page) and I’ll take them into consideration.

As for the organization and content, well… that’s going to undergo some changes in the coming few days.  I’m going to try to reduce the number of post categories and number of tags used as well as to try and make them more useful.  Actually, I might just wind up consolidating the categories and tags and just using one or the other.  The rants and drivel will, probably, go as well, since I’m trying to make this a more positive and informative site.  Sure, I’ll still have opinions, but I’m going to do my best at presenting them in a better manner.

Sure, letting the folks over at WordPress maintain the underlying code-base would be a nice thing.  Sure, it might make it easier for people to log in to leave comments or read “member only” material (both of which I used to have on this site*).  But it takes away freedom from me by their limitations they have imposed — particularly the lack of plugins bit.

Wasn’t the whole point of WordPress to allow third party developers to extend the base software?  (No, really, I’m asking.  I think it was, but I’m not sure.)  So… using a limited base install of the software (what used to be known as “cripple-ware” before the web became big) just isn’t for me.  If it is for you, more power to ya.

* I had originally intended to expand the number of posts in the “Member Only” area that I had on this site, but I’ve learned a couple of things.  One:  Very few people actually honestly care about what I have to say.  Two:  Those few people who do visit my site are of similar types as myself and don’t want to have to register on a bazillion different sites — even if they know the person.  Hell… I hate it when I have to register on some site just to download a Joomla component or plugin.  Wait.  I hated it when I had to register on wordpress.org in order to report a bug on a plugin.  But I did.  Why?  It’s a fact of life.  Yet, I can understand when someone doesn’t want to register on here — after all, I don’t post all that much — so I’ve removed the “Member Access” plugin I was using and removed the (albeit unintentionally turned on) restriction to comments to only those registered users.

I’ll keep monitoring this, but I’m beginning to feel hopeful that the problem (infection) is over.

Perhaps that machine whose hard drive crashed on me (fatal non-recoverable hardware failure) had somehow become infected even with having anti-virus software on it. I’ll probably never really know, but it got pretty frustrating since all of my sites were affected. Even those sites that were on brand new domains and didn’t have any links to them anywhere and only had a few hour old default installation of some blog or CMS package on them.

I’ve been tweeting quite a bit (I think a few friends are getting annoyed with the number of updates) for a while and that’s been filling the “need to type”, but I’ll try and update this blog now that I’ve got it back up and running again.