Refresh

For the past couple months I've had posts percolating in my mind, but severely lacked the motivation to actually get on my blog and write them. Some of this is because I traveled to Alberta and BC in June/July and since returning to Maine have only had one weekend at home. But most of it is because of the asthetics (or lack thereof...) of my blog.

I am an extremely visual person. When my home or work space is messy, cluttered, or otherwise unappealing I am so much less likely to enjoy living or working there, and will try to avoid the areas that give me mental unrest. This is true of both the real world and the virtual one. For a while now I've been wanting to update and refresh my blog. I've tried out all kinds of different templates and backgrounds, but none were quite what I was looking for. So, frustrated by my lack of success, I gave up trying for the time being and just pushed the blog refresh to the back of my mind.

Then last week my Mum asked me if I could do a bit of work on her personal blog to take out old, unused links and get it looking a bit more up-to-date. I told her I would think a bit and try to come up with something that fit her personality, her photography, and would kind of coordinate visually with her professional photography blog. I looked around the Internet for some new template ideas and came up with a few.

This morning I woke up early and decided to take the plunge. Suddenly inspired, I tackled my blog first. After trying quite a few of the new templates, I decided that I really did like my old tried and true favourite Blogger template the best. So I set my blog back to that and looked for a nice, subtle background image to base my redesign around. In the past I've tried to use a spring-green theme for my blog, a colour both energizing and rejuvenating, but recently I've noticed that most of the blogs I find the most visually attractive incorporate a lot of white, which makes for a bright and fresh look. I happened to find a link to BackgroundsLab.com that I saved a while ago, and while perusing there found a set of backgrounds tagged 'subtle patterns,' exactly the sort I was looking for. After trying a few, I settled on this subtle floral pattern. Clean, bright, fresh, with just a tad of cheery whimsy. Just a few adjustments to the blog template's colour scheme and I was thoroughly in love with the new design!

I quickly moved to my Mum's blog, hoping that my inspiration would hold. After trying out just a few new templates, I found one that met all my criteria, then customized it to look and feel Glenda-like. Now, with the two blogs fully refreshed and back in good functioning form, I am having a hard time keeping myself from switching back and forth between the two just to admire them. :) Ahhhh, it's like a breath of fresh air entered our little spaces of the Internet and revitalized them!

I still have a few things I want to tweak on my blog, namely the name and URL. For the past couple years I have settled with The Write Life as the name, but every time I see it, I feel a little bit guilty. I know that "write" is a play on words, but when I read it on my blog header, I feel like I'm backhandedly saying that my life is the only right one. This is not at all what I believe, nor what I want to portray on my blog, so I'll be working on coming up with a better blog name and a matching URL. Since I have a portfolio website that incorporates my own name in the URL, and I want my personal blog and my work life separate, I would like to use something a little more private for this space. I still have some work to do, but at least, finally, it's coming together!

Rebranding

This blog was whipped up quickly in a frenzy of blog-mania among my friends during my first year at Southern Adventist University. In hindsight, the title I came up with five years ago - Everything from EH to ZED - has been quite appropriate. Since its creation, this blog has mostly just been a place for me to record random thoughts and happenings in my life. An interesting news story that caught my attention, a few pictures from a trip, a rant on something going on that I didn't agree with. All sorts of miscellaneous things, just about anything and everything you could think of, have been posted on here.

For the past two years this blog has been largely neglected and probably mostly forgotten by those who used to read it. It's my oldest blog, but has the least views of my four blogs. Now that my mission stints are over, at least for the time being, I have plans to revive this blog and use it as my primary blog again. But the random title and haphazard previous posting are bothering me. I want this blog to mean something. To show who I really am. To inspire, both myself and others. I want this blog to have a purpose.

So I'm thinking about rebranding it. Giving it a title that has a meaning (and maybe a new URL to go with it). Giving it colours and a design that flow together well, that inspire me when I decide to post a new blog. Giving it more purposeful and focused attention. If, the next time you come back here, you find this blog with a new name, a new design, and fresh updated colours, know that you're coming back to a new creation. I hope you'll enjoy it. I hope I can make it all that I envision it to be. But most of all, I hope you'll come back. Because a blog isn't much of a blog without its faithful readers. And I'm not much of a blogger without your support.

Return and rejuvenation

For the last two years, I've been using this blog as a periodic dumping place for random news stories and causes I happen to come across. This past year I've been blogging about my experiences as a student missionary in Tanzania on another blog, Writing to Serve. The year before, my Creative Writing professor required his students to make a new blog specifically for creative writing. Throughout the school year, our assignment was to blog at least three sentences every day of the semester. I used that blog, Creative Endeavour, primarily to document my daily life throughout my senior year of university.

So for two years this blog as been put on the back burner. But now that I'm finished university and back from Tanzania I need to start using my original blog again. I'm sure the poor little thing has been feeling terribly lonely and I certainly don't want to continue ignoring it. So enjoy the new posts on here. I'll try to keep it more updated than it has been in a long, long time. Meanwhile, I'll do my best to post periodic creative pieces on Creative Endeavour whenever I have the chance, or the inspiration.