To those of you who don’t know me, allow me to state up front that I am probably not the droid you are looking for.

Those of you who do know me may be asking, “So why the new digs, yo? What happened to etherfarm?” Let’s begin by just agreeing to forget about that “yo” you just used, then let me put to rest any laments you may have for the demise of my former site. Just like a phoenix that got old, began soiling itself, went into hiding, realized it had merely eaten a bad burrito then took a few Immodiums before resuming its majestic flights, Etherfarm will be reborn at some point as both a company and website dedicated to my creative pursuits. More on that some other time.

The 4.7 humans who have followed me through the years on etherfarm.com know that it has languished for quite some time.

When I shut it down a few days ago, most image links were broken and the site didn’t work well on some devices. My infrequent posts to etherfarm were not due to a lack of things to say. I didn’t post to etherfarm because it was a huge pain in the ass. A long time ago, I coded an incarnation of Etherfarm more-or-less from scratch on the ExpressionEngine platform, with all sorts of nifty PHP and generated navigation and CSS and styles for this, that, and the other. And when I first did it, it was a glorious testament to my fascination and expertise with meaningless minutiae. At some point I tried to simplify things by moving off ExpressionEngine to WordPress, but to retain Etherfarm’s historical content with some degree of integrity, I had to carry over some of those protocols. And as I blogged less often (due to family and work), I found myself having to relearn all of those custom post mechanics every time I posted. Even simple posts became a burden. I completely gave up on posting any meaningful photography. Then completely gave up on posting.

So here I am, starting fresh—no custom PHP, no crazy stylesheet gymnastics, no burdens from past online lives. Just a WordPress template that works well for both short and long-form posts and that handles both photography and text reasonably well. I may transpose select content from Etherfarm over time, but replaying Etherfarm’s greatest hits is in no way a goal for this site. The goal is to have a junction in these here Intertubes to which I can post easily and without fuss in order to make it more likely that I will post at a higher frequency. Because no one can deny that what the world needs most right now is more blog posts.

As a designer, breaking things down to make them better is itself something I both enjoy and can’t help but do. Streamlining my internet presence, both in terms of operational and cognitive overhead, is part of that. I dropped FaceBook last year; Twitter and Flickr are next and possibly Instagram. All of these come with a cost—in this case a self-imposed exile from communities I for the most part value. But I’ve been pondering these moves for some time and a variety of circumstances, including a recent trip to Cuba, reinforce for me that these are moves in the right direction: forward.

So let’s get going.