When I first relaunched Some Random Dude, which feels like eons ago, I made the big promise that I was going to release everything I made as open source. That idea is still very important to me, but it has literally been years and I still haven’t released a fully-completed release. I could go on for paragraphs on the significantly understandable reasons why that has happened, but neither you nor I care. What is important to note was that I wanted to release something that people would find useful and easy to use. This essentially put me in the corner of making two themes – one for my personal use and one for public use. This was a nightmare. So, a year or so ago, I toned it down and made my own site less code-bloaty in the hope that it would finally get me to the point where i could proudly release the theme. Well, that didn’t work either. The truth is, I just can’t make a theme that I can use and a separate theme that you can use. This by no means has deterred me from releasing my theme, I am just going down a different route with significantly less resistance. Read On…

A big part of my morning is going through Google Reader. It is perhaps the most intense period of information consumption that I go through. If my trend statistics are accurate, I go through an average of 400 posts a day — at an almost alarming rate. This daily ritual is the center of my process for updating this blog. This all happens within about a 30 minute window. At the moment, I have 298 RSS feeds that I am subscribed to. I wondered what my list would look like if I had to limit it to just twenty. I took about 10-15 minutes to dwell on the subject enough to compile something that looked promising. Read On…

I have a lot of opinions on how websites, specifically blogs, should work. If you talk to my friends/colleagues, they would likely complain at how much I talk about it. Oddly, I rarely, if ever write about these thoughts on this blog. More to the point, I rarely write about anything. So that is going to change. I am committing to writing what I hope to be quality content on a variety of subjects, one of which being how I think one should grow a website/blog. In the process, I am going to see if my theories hash out. If I am right, awesome. If not, well, there will be plenty of opportunities for you to tell me how and why I got it all wrong. Read On…

For the past year on this blog, I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the design and development of this blog. In many ways, the new direction of the blog was an amazing success. The blog has been updated literally thousands of times with all different kinds of content. The decentralized manner of publishing turned my everyday routines into a form of blogging. However, during same year, I have written a grand total of 18 actual long-form articles. Of those 18, perhaps 10 were no related to the theme development or why I was not actually writing. I knew quickly after the redesign that I missed the mark in a few ways – in one way or another, I have been working on fixing those issues. I believe that those are behind me now with this current revision. This theme has been released in a more generic form which fulfills the promise I made just about one year ago to this day. Which leads me to my next “project”. I want to turn this blog around in a big way. I am aiming to get some serious readership and some serious conversations back on this site. I want to go about doing this in a fairly naive/idealogical manner and I am planning to write extensively about it.
Read On…

Wonderful work and content at Cynosura. via ffffound