Starting Fresh

Over the past year, I’ve made quite a few mistakes with my personal blog. The two big ones have been participating in Blog365, and Fusion.

Leaving Fusion

I can’t seem to engrave this thought into my mind: keep a personal blog, personal. With both Blog365 and Fusion, I’ve felt forced to write, both directly and indirectly.

The goal of Blog365 was to write a single post on your blog, every single day of the year. Obviously, I didn’t go through with this, after I decided to stop participating in mid-February.

Fusion is an advertising network that I helped launch, back at the beginning of November. As you may have noticed, I no longer have a Fusion advertisement on this personal blog of mine. When I had a Fusion ad on my blog, I felt more inclined to produce new content, when I didn’t really have anything I genuinely wanted to write about. That’s why you haven’t seen much new content lately around here. Of course, I didn’t need to produce more new content, I just felt it’d be better to produce new content, because of the original idea of Fusion.

The Fusion idea started off something along the lines of “up-and-coming bloggers should be rewarded for writing good [genuine] content.” When I didn’t have anything I genuinely wanted to write about, I decided that I would leave the Fusion network just a month after launch. There’s nothing wrong with the network — I just feel that I’m not producing enough good content to deserve a spot on the network.

My blog has completely left Fusion, but I’m still finishing off a few final details (ensuring the service is stable) before I stop working on Fusion on a regular-basis. Hopefully by the end of the year I’ll have everything done with Fusion, so that I can leave it in the hands of Michael Mistretta, and Chris Bowler.

Changes Around Here

From now on, chris24.ca is going to be a place for my ramblings, and other content I want to write that doesn’t fit anywhere else (content not suitable for twitter, or a new blog that I’m launching in 2009, and so on).

Since content won’t be added as often as it did earlier in the year, the new layout will show more of my social media presence instead of focusing only on blog posts. In addition, because I now have a Delicious section in my sidebar, I won’t be publishing anymore Linked List items, but you can subscribe to my Delicious feed if you’d like.

Overall, I think these changes are for the better. I’ll have less pressure to post boring content here, which will cause me to post genuine content, but less frequently. More importantly, though, I’ll have more time to spend on some new projects and more time to learn new things.