As you can obviously tell there’s a lot of changes. The design has been completely redone. I scratched the theme that I had based all the previous iterations of the blog for the past two years on, and found a completely different theme to base the new design on. The concept for behind the new design was done quite a while back, but seeing how I don’t have the ability to code a design from scratch, I needed to find a suitable theme that matched my “visions” on to base the new theme on. When I finally did, it didn’t take many hours for me to adapt the graphics and finish it up.

Structural change

In addition to the cosmetical change, the blog has also been drastically restructured. It’s no longer a blog in the traditional sense, as the frontpage now features my lifestream instead of the latest blog posts, and I am very excited about this change. I have been wanting to do something like this for a long while, as I have always felt that my personal blog should be more than just the odd post I make here every now and then. I was therefore very excited when I discovered this plugin called RSS Stream (through this post over at ReadWriteWeb) that would let me turn my WordPress blog into a “hub” of all my online activities.

This way my blog can finally represent my online personality, and whenever I’m asked the question “who are you?” I can simply answer with a link to my blog, as I believe the sum of my online activities gives a fairly accurate answer.

I also feel this adds a lot of value and helps justify the existence of the blog, because we all know I haven’t been very good at posting frequently here. With the relaunched version however, anyone who is wondering what I am up to can simply stop by here and get a good idea. Of course this change makes the blog much more personal, but I hope that it doesn’t necessarily turn people off from diving into the contents of the blog.

With the relaunch I feel much more motivated to actually post here and keep the blog alive, and hopefully this time it won’t die like a simple spark in the dark like it has many times before. It also inspires me to be more active at the various web services my lifestream pulls its updates from, so I really think this is a win-win situation for myself and the blog.

Right now the lifestream on the frontpage pulls updates from my profiles at the following sites:

• Twitter - I’m quite active here, and I hope to be even more active in the future.
• Pownce - Haven’t been very active lately, but I have a decent amount of friends, and I like the service so hopefully I’ll be able to use it more frequently from now on.
• Digg - At best I think my activity could be described as “semi-inactive”. I visit it a lot, I just haven’t been digging and submitting lately.
• Delicious - Not active at all in the past couple of months. Will give it another chance however.
• Flickr - Semi-active. I love the service, I just need to be better at uploading and sharing my photos.
• Silent Sound Waves - The music blog I am about to “officially” launch. Will be posting at least a few times per week, hopfully even more.

The latest posts from this blog also shows up in the lifestream, but that’s it for now. Ideally I would also like to include posts I make at the two forums I frequent, but from what I can tell vBulletin doesn’t create an RSS feed for each member, so that isn’t doable at the moment at least.

The long road to perfection

I would love some feedback on how you feel about the new version of my blog. Some will probably like it, and some won’t, but what I am interested in is what you like and don’t like. The design is still very much a work in progress however, and I have a lot of modifying left to do with the elements inside the content areas before I’m anywhere near pleased with how it looks, but I at least feel that I am headed in the right direction with what I have so far.

This is my 100th blog post here at Lars-Christian.com. I decided to delete that maintenance message I posted a couple of days ago, and instead celebrate my 100th blog post the proper way with a big announcement like this. Feel free to congratulate me on being the persistant little blogger!

It’s a music blog, so everything will obviously be centered around music, and more specifically the music that I for some reason feel like writing about. Hopefully I will be able to post on this blog daily (ambitious for me, I know), and I plan on having some specific columns that each will have a new entry once a week:

• Tributes : Articles about artists who have been influential, or just making good music that didn’t influence all that much, for a long time, or is no longer around. This will hopefully give some attention to the music of artists who might have been forgotten.
• “New Artists” : Not really sure what this will actually be called, but the purpose of it is to share new talent, unsigned or just not very recognized, with the readers. Column name suggestions are welcome!

After spending some time on the fence without doing much online except the occasional tweet I went out and just started a new blog, which is called Silent Sound Waves. If the name didn’t reveal it for you, the blog is about music, and this is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while.

The domain was actually registered quite a few months back, but my original plans for it fell through the cracks and I decided to put it off for a while. As you can read more about in the first post, the initial plans for the site were much bigger, but this time around I decided to put the ambitions of world domination away and go for something as simple as a traditional blog.

Summer however is quite a busy time for me, as it is these months of no school I spend working and saving up money for the hard year as a student which is to come. As a result, the next month or so there will just be infrequent and unscheduled new posts at the blog in order to fill it up with content. This is because I believe it is preferable to give the potential readers some idea of what they can expect once I start to promote the blog in the middle of August.

If you are interested in music, mainly in the genres of rock / punk / pop and variations of these, feel free to check out my new blog and subscribe, as I would love some feedback on what I write about, even before I start to seriously promote it. Right now I am for instance working on a monster post of a report from a music festival I attended last weekend, and it will be a good example of what’s to come in the future from me over at Silent Sound Saves, along with news, reviews and a whole bunch of other opinionated posts.

See you there! Or here, if you’re not interested in a bigger dose of me than what you already get here at my personal blog

Seeing how this will be more a personal blog than anything else, I don’t see any reason for me to spend money on it with absolutely no expected return (I’m a business student after all!). Instead I’ll be looking for a nice free WP theme to base the new design on, as I’m quite capable of modifying designs codewise, as opposed to coding them from the ground and up. If you have any suggestions feel free to throw them at me - I’m hoping to find a theme that makes it easy to display things like my latest Tweets and Flickr photos.

And while we’re on the subject of Twitter, are you following me yet? I feel somewhat lonely over there, even though I have a few followers none of them seem to be interested in conversation. If you are, just follow me and send a tweet at me, and I’ll make sure to follow you back! I’ll be cleaning up my list of people I’m following too, so that I can filter out the noise from people I don’t really know as well.

Lastly, exams are over for me again, which always makes for a good period of fun and relaxation. I have been getting into the “internet” mode, which should mean more activity from me. Of course this also means more time for blog related things, so hopefully I’ll be able to get a new design up in not too long. As soon as I find a good theme to use as a base, it shouldn’t take me more than a day or two to get things ready. Need to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress as well.

Once I finish up the design, I’m going to find someone who can code the design for me from scratch, so that I can get it looking exactly like I imagine it. With this design also comes a signficant shift in focus at this blog. Instead of being a half-assed attempt at covering a specific niche, which I admittedly don’t want to write about at the moment, I am going to cover a brand new niche; me!

Profound, I know. But to elaborate, I have decided that, since this blog has my name attatched to it after all, I will try to make it reflect my online persona. The blog part will be expanded to the extent that I can write about pretty much everything I feel like talking about. With the new design I will also try to aggregate some of my “off-blog” activities online as well as I can.

All of this will hopefully make it really easy for me to answer a single question: “Who are you?” - “Just take a look at my blog, Lars-Christian.com to see what I’m all about“.

Understandably this will most likely result in those 100 something people currently subscribing to my blog hitting the unsubscribe button, but to be honest, I don’t care. I won’t maintain this blog to make a profit, or gain as many subscribers as possible. Instead I’ll be doing it mostly for fun and relief. It’s nice to have somewhere to vent your thoughts, I think, and that’s what I’ll do.

Don’t get me wrong though, I won’t just be posting pictures of my cats and dogs (I don’t have any cats or dogs, nor do I want any of them!), and I’ll probably still be offering my unique insight on everything online business, marketing and so forth. I just won’t be tied down to that topic exclusively.

We’ll see how it all works out eventually. I’m kinda excited to get the new design up and start playing with my online persona again!

I’m excited to see if the editor now finally works properly in Safari as well!

Update: A wee bit busy these days with a term paper, so I haven’t really had much time to play with WP 2.5. I haven’t even upgraded the site I post at most frequently yet, but hopefully I’ll get that done sometime next week so that I can finally start exploring the full potential of it.

I’m really loving the admin interface however. It makes the old back-end seem so 2001. The colours are also extremely inviting, and they even make me want to redesign this very blog. Of course, if I am to do that, I should probably start posting more regularly, because there’s not much point in spending time on it.

Right now I’m really at a sort of a crossroads in regards to what I want to do online. I think I’ve mostly scrapped the ideas I’ve had since the new year, but that’s not to say I’m not going to start something. I just need to figure out what, which seems to be extremely difficult for me.

As I mentioned, I’m also in the thinking box regarding which direction I will take this blog. I have been thinking about a more personal direction again, but it really depends on what I will start up on the side.

Inspiration and suggestions are more than welcome! Feel free to leave me a comment, or even send me an email or contact me in any other way if you feel that you have something to say.

Note: Hurray, the spell checker actually works again. That should certainly come in handy

As always when these things are revealed to the public, there are mixed reactions from the community around the site in question. Some are saying that Small Potato will be lucky to get in excess of $20,000 for the site, while others are cheering for potential buyers to hit the BIN-button and splash the $65,000 it would require.

Seeing how I am your self-declared friendly blogosphere expert on the art of buying and selling websites of all and any kind, I am going to share a few of my own opinions on this with you.

According to the auction description, WPDesigner.com has around 2,500 - 3,000 unique visitors every day, as well as a substantial amount of pageviews for each visitor. Small Potato only makes around $900 per month from the site. According to “traditional thinking”, the site would probably be valued somewhere between $10,500 - $21,000 (12 - 24 months of revenue).

Could it possibly be worth more? Yes, and I will be kind enough to list the three most important reasons for you.

• Extremely targeted base of visitors. This means that you pretty much know exactly what your visitors are looking for, and this makes the job of determining how to make money much easier.
• Huge (and I mean HUGE) growing potential. WPDesigner is already one of the most recognized brands in the WordPress scene, and it is the perfect place to start if you want to build the unofficial WordPress source. There are so many ways this site can be expanded and so much information that would propell it to a monster of a website in no time.
• Untapped sources of revenue. Small Potato has pretty much made no effort at all to turn a profit from the site, and this is also probably why he will look back with regret on the sale a year or two from now when it is turning a yearly profit well above what he sold it for.

Combine these three points, and you will see that this website is a potential goldmine. But it is not for everyone however. The site is very much a work in progress as it stands right now, and thus not a site you can just purchase and sit back and watch the money stream right back in to your pocket.

I would say that anyone who is considering purchasing this site should have a clear vision of which direction they want to take it, and how they want to capitalize on its potential. And it will take work, a lot of work, probably much more work than one man is capable of doing, and such you would be in need of additional capital to hire one or more persons to help you out.

Personally I envision turning it into a full fledged community based around what Small Potato has build so far. Keep developing and releasing themes, free and “premium” (although I would probably restructure the $5 theme club), but expand in other areas. On top of that, spew out high quality tutorials and guides on everything WordPress, but in laymans terms, to seriously rival WordPress.com and its plethora of extremely useful but sometimes disorganized and hard-to-grasp information. And of top of that, as I said, focus on building a more visible and constant community, because it’s all about community these days.

But enough of my own daydreams, the point here is that for the right person(s), this site has the potential to become something truly special, and I would go as far as to say that it is well worth the Buy-It-Now pricetag. I’m not sure if it will sell for that much, because people / investors are generally not very interested in paying for potential as it often involves risk.

Already in my previous post I mentioned some of my plans for this year. As of right now, there have been some small changes. The project I had originally planned to get started as soon as possible has been scratched, and I am now working on something completely different instead.

I have more or less worked out all the technical stuff, and all that remains is really just to fill it up with content, which is quite a daunting task actually. There’s not much motivation to be found in the fact that the content you are working on won’t be seen by anybody for quite a while.

I think I have found a solution though. This time, I am working on a topic I really have a passion for. My own personal preference is the single most important factor for this project, and what the content will revolve around. I have only tried it once before, and it turned out really well that time, so I decided to give it a go once more.

To be honest, this new project is less about trying to generate revenue online, and more about exploring and nurturing my own interests. Yet I still believe there is a large group of potential readers out there, and it will be interesting to see if I will be able to “tap into the market” at all.

Now I apologize if I have been a little too cryptic in this post, but I assume that by the next time I post here, I will be able to reveal a lot more about this new little venture of mine.

So I just thought I’d share a couple of pictures of what it looks like on someone who’s not a professionally styled and photographed model!

- -

I hope you can excuse the low quality. I simply used my iSight to capture the shots. The hoodie has a nice fit, and is quite thin in the fabric, which can be both a good and a bad thing. I like it when I go running though. Now I am officially a geek and a WordPress fan

In other WordPress news, I’ll be upgrading the blog and my other installations of WordPress tonight. I am also working on the design for a new project of mine, which I hope to reveal some more details about in the not too distant future. Stay tuned!

Breaking news from Hollywood is that Heath Ledger, actor famous from his role in Brokeback Mountain and many others, has been found dead in his appartment. Another tragic incident where the pressure of public expectation seems to have driven one more into the unknown.

Right now as a reader of my blog you are probably wondering why I am mentioning this, as it is highly irrelevant to the topics of which I normally focus on. The answer is twofold. First of all I really liked Ledger as an actor. He gave us some excellent performances in movies such as The Patriot, The Four Feathers and others.

But as the headline says, this really is about his latest work, the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight. I have previously explored some marketing techniques used in promoting The Dark Knight, and I simply wanted to point out how unforeseen things like these can affect our work.

Now if it was up to me, this movie would be pulled out of respect for Ledger and his close ones. Unfortunately, and this is the flipside of capitalism, we live in a world ruled by money, and that is unlikely to be the case. The most likely scenario is that this movie will be remembered as the last performance of someone who was dragged out of our world well before his time. Due to the nature of Ledger’s role, I won’t be surprised if this movie in a couple of years stands as somewhat of a cult symbol in rememberance of him.

I for one will still go see the movie, most likely with many others who never actually planned to. And I also still look forward to seeing Ledger’s intepretation of The Joker. I’m still convinced it will be awesome, and knowing myself, I will probably remember it just that much better because of what happened today.

In closing I would just like to extend my condolences to all of those who knew and cared about Heath Ledger. I didn’t, but he did seem like a great guy from what I could tell. Rest in peace.