I’ve been meaning to do something about the look n feel of this place for a while now. In my head I’ve known pretty much what I wanted but of course things are always easier in your head… I stumbled across this template after doing a bit of a search and found it refreshing. Even though this blog has been primarily text based through its 13 year history, over the past few years the way content is presented online has shifted dramatically. Obviously things are richer in multimedia and good sites make this kind of content quick and easy to access. This change has been brought about by the expansion of bandwidth and connectivity – “blogging” in 1997 wasn’t long after the days where a 64Kb front page and no heavier was a good design decision. Animated GIFs were epic. Having a webcam that gave people a window into your real life, albiet at a few frames per section, was a long way from chatroulette.

So, bringing images, audio and video to the fore was a priority when selecting a new design. Also, since the frequency of posts has been quite low for quite some time, I needed a way to keep things looking busy. Now with all these crazy boxes floating about, you’ll always have something to look at.

Does it mean a fundamental change in the way I do things here?  Heck no. But that’s not to say I haven’t been spending time thinking “What’s next, anyway?”. The other driver for this reboot was to ensure I didn’t lock away all my content on a closed platform. Not that I’ve got anything against FaceBook, in fact I seem to be in a minority of people who aren’t particularly bothered by this “privacy and copyright” thing. I don’t care that they target ads to me. When online advertising gets too much for me, I close the page. I do think choosing to use social media platforms to discuss and display aspects of your is a big decision and a lot of people don’t consider the implications. But it’s not a complicated deal and ultimately you retain your agency. You are in control, as they say.

The Blog Post Litmus Test i use:

  • If it’s about work, is the detail any more than what I would tell someone on meeting them at a party, pub etc?
  • Does it contain personal information about someone else? How much do they trust me?
  • Does it contain material copyrighted to anyone else, does it link to content that probably breaches copyright?
  • If i’m posting original content of my own, should I protect it further (than Australian copyright laws) by applying a Creative Commons license to it?

If you follow that, you’ll be right.

Anyhoo the whole point of that was to welcome you to this new iteration of buzzmoo.com. It’s too late, you’re already here.