Hard to believe it’s been so long, but it was over three years ago that I retired the original coffeemonk.com and replaced it with this blog. I started with the idea of a personal blog, kind of a free-form venue that ended up morphing into a choppy neo-current topic blog.

I’m no topic blogger. I don’t have it in me. Hell, I’m barely a blogger. Reviewing twelve intermittent years of bipolar posts drove that point home, considering that probably at least 60% of my posts had a passing mention of how long it had been since the previous post, or had impatient comments from friends weeks later urging me to put up a new post. Of course, that was in the heyday of personal blogging, when it was all personality blogs by people you’d never met talking about the mundane details of their lives. In my mid-to-late twenties, my life was as mundane as they come, and I was awash in the angst of my lost years with little interest in foisting most of it on the general public. (I foisted plenty, but most of the angst I kept to myself.)

And so, bipolar was a personal blog, born of that time—a personality blog, an entertainment blog, an angst blog. Coffeemonk.com, on the other hand, was to be a semi-pro blog of ideals and intellectualism. A place where I could disect a zen koan, outline a productivity routine, or give back to the web development community in the form of educational or authoritative missives. In some small measure, I accomplished that—there are a few posts here that consistently bring traffic to the site, despite its practical abandonment.

More recently, I’ve experimented with an outlet that is more raw than either coffeemonk or even bipolar allowed me to be, and found that those semi-secret expressions felt more honest and enjoyable than most of what I’ve done here in the past three years.

So, in light of that, and in honor of the new visual direction in which I’ve taken the site, it’s now my intention to return to the original plan of making this a personal blog. Aside from the “storytime” podcast/posts, and a possible personal podcast I’m contemplating, the days of topic blogging are behind me. With luck and a strong tailwind, what you’ll see here will be more free, honest, and raw.

Now, since I did just launch this redesign of the site, I should take one moment to point you toward the revamped about page (which repeats some of what I’ve said above), and to the new get acquainted page, which lists this site’s popular posts and some of my favorites from here and elsewhere. The archives page lists every post on this site and features a tag grid if you like that sort of thing. Comments on posts are disabled by default; however, if you post or (publically) share links to individual posts, they should (theoretically) get picked up and displayed by the comment system.

I should point out that this new design direction was inspired, in no small part, by Leo Babauta’s efforts over on http://zenhabits.net/. My main goal was to keep things clean and simple, to focus on the words, and to provide a common experience across platforms and devices. The new design is “responsive,” which was a fun experiment; I’ll let you all discover the little differences on your own.

Thanks for visiting, I hope you enjoy the new look and the new direction.