During this change, I decided that I would re-focus my other site, meaning I would ignore all of the expert advice: it would still be user-friendly, but my focus would be on writing, not traffic. No lists, no emphasis on social media, and no linking to the same thing everyone else is. It’s working out well; I’m receiving more positive feedback and am enjoying doing it.

At the same time, I decided to make this blog the anti-blog. I turned off comments, I use tags that only make sense to me, my categories are kind of confusing, and I am not in any way focused into an identifiable niche.

And, I have gone back on my word. I wrote early on in this blog that I was going to be an All-Windows or All-Google guy. I felt that Microsoft took other peoples great ideas, made them less great, but also made them cheaper and easier to use. Then I got a Vista machine.

Vista is as annoying as everyone says it is. I get random re-boots, unpredictable screen savers, and very little backwards compatibility. The day before CJ was born, Sally bought me a new MacBook as a poke present and I haven’t looked back. I switched my hosting from Windows to Linux, installed WordPress and have never been happier with my whole computer situation.

The difference is simple: My Mac is stable, and established Linux programs are well-supported and inexpensive. These were things I tried to debunk in my earlier post, but I didn’t even convince myself.

After comfortably breaking every rule for this blog, I could not have been happier. If it meant I was the only one who ever read it, that’s fine. The only thing left to do was to discover my obsession.

Merlin Mann has several sites, but he is most well-known for 43Folders, a blog about personal productivity. The subject is something I actually find a little loathsome, only because I know people who are into this sort of thing and they spend more time refining their “system” than actually accomplishing anything. (This is a common problem, acknowledged by most productivity gurus.)

Earlier this year, I stumbled across his site accidentally, while looking for an index card wallet. (I have used 3×5 cards for note taking since high-school, and was looking for a different way to carry them.) Mann is the creator, or at least coiner, of the Hipster PDA, a stack of 3×5 cards held together with a binder clip.

Though I decided against the binder clip, I continued reading his site. When I found him, he seemed to be going through a transitional period. Fewer of his posts were about productivity, and he started to write more freely outside of this niche. I liked it enough to add him to my Feed Reader.

Then, at about the same time I was having reservations about blogging, he took a radically different approach. On his personal blog, he posted something titled simply, better.

Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content.

These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical.

It is his polemic against the state of blogging. He is tired of first-draft opinions and an infinitude of links to the same old things. He wants things to change, and he’s starting with himself. Writing of his own endeavors, he says,

All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better. Better, better.

Shockingly, he then began to smelt the golden calf: he changed the focus of his website, a website that was a large portion of his family’s income. In a retrospective post titled 4 Years he admits his role in creating a web that he dislikes.

By 2007, an increasingly large number of mornings would find me staring, dead-eyed, at del.icio.us or Digg or reddit, feeling queasy as I wondered what possible role, how ever small, my stupid blog might have had in helping inspire 1,000 hucksters to try their hand at half-assing a living from pretending to help strangers — while providing their quarry an unapologetically infinite source of pointless procrastination in the bargain.

He talks about the change he wants in his post Gears Shifting,

…if you share my feeling that real “productivity” means a lot more than index cards, lists of links, and endless, free bus rides for bored tourists, I think you’ll enjoy and benefit from the change.

And, finally, he sums it all up, in Time, Attention, and Creative Work:

I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work….

This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about — but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud….

I want you to visit here, get what you need, then get the hell back to work.

Now I was listening. A blogger who was actually telling me to leave his site? On his personal blog, he posted a talk he did at some blogger conference, called How to Blog. Where all of those other how-to experts tell you how to do the easiest things, Mann addressed the hardest part: writing something worth reading. He writes

Here’s everything I know about blogging in one slide: Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect. Edit everything, skip shortcuts, and try not to be a dick. Get better.

Everything else is unimportant or easily learned.

After reading this, I realized evenlake needed to change. I turned off comments, stopped caring about traffic, and resolved to post more often. And I started to define my obsession. That was the difficult part.

I mentioned in my last post that I was changing strategy here. This site has always been, and will continue to be, about my effort to complete the list of things I want to do. It has always been personal; I’ve never tried to publicize it, and I’ve never written for anyone except myself. I’ve used it as a development site for my other blog and as an experimental notebook for writing.

My other site has a focus, a very narrow niche. While building that site, I studied what I was supposed to do in order to have a successful blog: Create top-ten lists. Add pictures. Break the text into digestible snippets. Use meta-tags. Don’t use too many meta-tags. Use tags that are meaningful to the reader. Top-ten lists are hackneyed; create top-seven lists. Use post titles that allow people to know what you are saying without making them read the actual post.

While I didn’t follow much of this advice, what I found was that these expert tips are creating a homogenous blogosphere. Go to most any blog and you’re likely to see something like “Top 12 Ways to Let your Hair Down,” with a semi-professional generic photo of a smiling woman exuberantly taking her hair out of a ponytail, and 12 sentences broken into 12 numbered paragraphs, each with their own bold heading.

The vast majority of these blogs are excruciatingly boring. It feels like people have just started copying the easy parts of the expert advice (formatting, SEO, networking), and have completely ignored the hardest part: writing something worth reading.

I was getting a little disillusioned about what these experts tell you it takes to have a successful blog, thinking that if I wanted anything I wrote to actually be read, I would have to start doing exactly what everyone else was doing. Why bother? Why add to the clutter? If I was going to write about something, wouldn’t it make sense not to write exactly the same thing everyone else is writing?

Then, somehow, I started reading Merlin Mann.

I am doing some pretty serious changes to this site, so bear with me. I’ve upgraded the WordPress version, updated the theme files so they are much easier to keep current with WP.

I’m also revising my strategy here, beyond just technical details. I’ve started using WP tag functionality, so I’ve restructured the categories, and added a tag for each item on the list. On the About page I’ve listed any item I’ve written on, and linked it to its tag.

The sidebar will be changing to include only those sites where I think there is an individual with a voice. I’ve already removed one, as that site became less about the writing and more about soliciting reader comments, and thus was turning into the equivalent of a BBS or forums site.

More about why I’m doing this later, but for now, expect there to be changes, including a little less irregular posting.