Man, is it good to be done with this. I’ve got a new design for the site, and it’s already getting mixed reviews (who cares, I like it). I’ve also given up on writing my own content management system and embraced the five-minute installation that comes with WordPress. That means five minutes of installation and five weeks of migration; I’m a perfectionist, and it means it took forever to get the site design right. But the biggest change, for me, is that a lot of the content on this site is not managed by this site.

These days, our digital personae are the aggregate of events that happen on the sites we use. I am what I write, but I am also what I digg, what I tag, and even what my friends tag. So I’ve tried to simplify the site by pulling others into the mix. I use Flickr to manage my photos, so I don’t have to build my own photo albums. I use Delicious to manage my bookmarks, and I use SimplePie to list them on the sidebar. I don’t have a resume page anymore, but you can see my LinkedIn profile. I even tried building something like a lifestream, before I realized someone else had done it already. (Then I lost interest.)

The biggest problem I had with the old site was that I couldn’t keep it all up-to-date. So with most of the “extras” delegated out to third-party sites, I’m hoping it won’t take so much effort to keep the content from growing stale. And with a new system that makes remote editing a lot easier, I’m hoping to find more time for actually writing.