A new beginning

This post is the first post I’m publishing on Be An Original on the new domain. It marks the beginning of a new phase of this blog. A new phase with a slightly different name and focus. It also marks the end of a transition phase, in which both a mental transition and a technical transition took place.

Dropping the how-to

This blog used to be “How to be an Original”, but from now on it’ll be known under the name “be an original“. And while that’s only a small change in the name, it does make a lot of difference in the meaning.

I grew to dislike the “how-to” name, because I associate how-to’s with tutorials, with step-by-step guides for getting from A to B. And that was not what I wanted to achieve with my blog. So I dropped the how-to in order to get a title that’s an appeal to people. Be an original!

It’s an appeal to wake up, and live your life consciously. To stop just getting along, to stop sheepwalking, and to start experiencing life. And it’s in the spirit of that appeal that I want to write, on all the aspects that are associated with it.

So that’s the start of the new phase of this blog.

New domain and beans

One of the things that was also bothering me was the previous domain. It was located at a subdomain of lodewijkvdb.com.

When I first started blogging I used Guy Kawasaki’s blog as the model for my own blog, and he had his name as the domain and the blog as a subdomain (and a “how-to” title as well…). So following his example, I created something similar.

And although that formula can be quite successful, I wanted to have my blog on a separate domain. So now it’s located at beanoriginal.net. And it feels great

With that domain name however, you can’t ignore the “bean” in there. So I used beans in the design and in the categories. Check out the archives to learn what categories there are and why they’ve gotten that particular name.

Technical transition

Moving the blog was quite a challenging task to be honest, but I managed to redirect virtually all links from the old blog to the new blog. So if you linked to me before: your link will not be broken (and thank you!).

The RSS feed is another story, because besides moving domain I also moved the feed from FeedBurner to FeedBlitz. To be honest, both are up and running now and everybody should get this post, one way or the other. I do urge you to update your feed address to:

http://feeds.beanoriginal.net/beanoriginal

Email subscribers will be transferred to FeedBlitz as well. You’ll get a notification mail with a link to FeedBlitz, where you need to reconfirm your subscription.

I do expect some technical glitches to come up over the coming week or so. They always do.

New beginnings

A new beginning with a new name at a new domain at the start of a new year. What a great start of the year! I hope your year will be great as well, and I’m looking forward to seeing you around again.

Posted in 15 bean soup on Thu 2010.01.07