New Layout

Happy new year to all. The new layout is not too terribly new, but it is exciting, at least for me: I know just enough about blogging to have gotten thoroughly confused, numerous times, trying to change the layout of this blog. But finally I’ve done it, and I have what I wanted: the main page of this site is now a simple note about me, and the blog is not front-row center anymore. I want to keep going with the blog—my recent, dramatic fall-off to the contrary—but I was getting increasingly uneasy with the disconnect between what was going up there and the reason that I originally started this site.

In a nutshell, I hoped this site would serve as an online portfolio to which I could direct potential clients, and where people looking for a freelance writer in Pittsburgh might eventually find themselves. It is that, of course, but it’s also often a blog where I re-cap the latest Philadelphia Eagles game, or discuss how bad M. Night Shymalan’s last movie was. Maybe “unprofessional” doesn’t fairly describe it, but I wouldn’t call it “professional” exactly, either. Basically, any time I’ve provided the link in a freelancing context, I’ve hoped that the person visiting my page would look only at the “Non-fiction” or “Ghostwriting” pages and leave the blog alone. It got to the point where I thought that if I wanted to keep this site going, I might just have to scrub the existing blog archives and restrict my subsequent blogging to 10 ways to maximize SEO efficiency, the art and science of proper comma usage, the challenges of crafting a good white paper for a client, and a bunch of other topics I know I’d find really tedious to read on a blog. (Actually, maybe not the comma thing, if I’m being honest. There are days I might read that.)

Tucking the blog away here will hopefully allow me to keep a balance between being professional but also having fun writing about the things I’ve so far written about. My “problem” (let’s call it a “first-world problem” of the highest order), after all, stemmed from having too much fun with the blog, writing about marathon training, the maintenance guy who hosts telephone conferences from the toilet, and the comedy I enjoy, rather than producing fussy considerations of the ins and outs of being a writer. Being a writer, to me, means engaging with the world.