Can you believe I haven’t written anything on this site in a year?!

Hello? where is everyone?

So I’m betting that anyone who ever used to read this site have since moved on to greener pastures (this site is currently classified as a desert by the EPA.) This isn’t a big deal as I didn’t have that many readers anyways. Even before last year this site was in the midst of an identity crisis and I was under the impression that this was a bad thing. I had been writing posts that ranged from being very small and impersonal (links essentially) to medium sized posts that had the beginnings of meat (just about all of this—except for 3 months that are only in HTML—is still available on thepast.chrisdrackett.com.) I decided that in order to gain readership and or credibility I needed to actually create content instead of just linking to other peoples. Another thing I needed to do—and, in retrospect, this is probably only partially true—was create an innovative website design to house this new content.

ah how naive the year-ago-chris was… To think, even as an experienced designer and all, that the design could be more important that the content. (or did I think at all… don’t answer that.)

The biggest thing that I learned over the last year of not writing or posting anything at all is that if you don’t have any content, its not worth spending time on the design. My mistake is pretty obviously as I look back now; around the 24th of January, 2006 (ah, the good ol’ days) I decided to start “chrisdrackett.com 4.0” from scratch. To me, it was clear that the design and the code needed to be rewritten from the ground up. Lots of stuff had been sitting around from before I really knew what I was doing, and I had a lot of ideas for cleaning up my information design and general site layout. So with redoing my site a go, I made a mistake, a mistake that would cost me a year of my (blogging) life: I decided to start with a clean information slate (no content.. at all.)

Between the 24th (the last post you will find on the aforementioned thepast) and the 29th (when the “I’ll be done in a week or so” page went life and proceeded to sit for 52) I worked many a sleepless night redoing the chrisdrackett.com “back-end” and writing about 4 pretty lame “test posts” (you’ll probably never see these again, as if you saw them at all..) When it came to apply the design to my spankin’ new back-end—something I am still truly impressed with, and won’t make many changes to—I ran into a problem: the new site focused on connecting all my writing together in some innovative ways, but I only had 4 entries to work with (this essentially made the site unusable, much as a social networking site would be without people.)

The need for tons of content before designing was overwhelming, as was designing a content centric site without content.

Catch-22.

I shut down and spent my free time on something much more productive: life and videogames (70/30.. I swear.) Over the last year I’ve tried multiple times to jump start my poor dead site, but to no avail. While the last year has definitely not been spent writing, I have spent extensive time on the design. I bet you would think that after a year of designing a site that was 90% done a year ago, I would be done by now. However, as you can tell by the lack of any design at all (you are looking at a messily RSS feed) that I’m still not done.

Yesterday—as I realized that it was about to be a year since I’ve written anything here—I decided that from now on my focus is going to be on content. Content is king.

I figure that as a designer, content without formating will soon drive me crazy (as will navigating this site with anymore than 15 entries without a design… 

Ok, its almost not the 29th anymore. Time to post and go to bed…