As you already know, I’ve been separating out my various blogs onto their own sites. So, what is to become of my home here at DriftingFocus.com?

Taking a page from various large web presences, I’ve decied to rename DriftingFocus to the DriftingFocus Network. Not only does it more accurately reflect my reality online, but I also thought I’d poke a bit of fun at myself and the blogosphere at the same time.

I have too full of a life to fit it all into one blog, but at the same time, I’ve been blogging for ten years; most of that time has been under the nom de plume of “DriftingFocus”. Having the DriftingFocus Network is the best way for me to maintain that branding while still allowing each blog of mine to have a unique look and identity. It also makes sense with my decision to use subdomains instead of fully unique domains.

After its transformation, Driftingfocus.com will act mostly as a landing page and information center. It will contain links to my DriftingFocus Network blogs, my resume, portfolio, and more. It will also be home to Living Life Frame by Frame, my personal blog.

I’ll be making the changes over the next few weeks, so please stay tuned!

After travel, reenacting has always been my most popular subject here at DriftingFocus, and I am glad that it will finally have a home of its own. I have something of a backlog of material that I’ve been waiting for the relaunch to post, so keep an eye on the blog over the next few weeks and if you’re interested in keeping up with my historical exploits, please change your links and subscriptions to:

Historically Speaking: The Life and Times of a Historical Reenactor

Last night, as I was walking back to the Metro with Chris of Packed Suitcase after the joint year-end party for the DC Travel Tweetup/Travel Massive, my reasons for once again moving things around on my site were reinforced for me. I mentioned to Chris that I was once again reorganizing my blogs, and when she said “Again?!?”, I explained to her that my reorganization last year was for the purpose of better branding, and that I had in fact made the problem worse.

Proving my point, I mentioned that I’m having trouble coming up with a tagline for my travel blog, Traveling Tomboy. She asked me if it was going to be a new blog, and I said that no, it’s the same one, and that I have been using that name for a year now, for my travel blog. She had no idea. Frankly, neither does anyone else, it seems.

It should come as no surprise that design plays a huge part in branding, and this is partly where last year’s idea failed. I put all my blogs into one space, but they all look the same, and so people have still been associating them together, as one blog, thus making my separations rather moot. The individual blogs had no branding of their own, only inheriting that of the core DriftingFocus site itself.

While I do still want there to be some commonalities between the various blogs, right now the differences are too subtle, and the distinctions are meaningless. I’m hoping that the restructuring will show the blogs for what they are: different facets of a very active life.

So, that’s why everything is changing again.

I am doing this sale for two reasons: First of all, I don’t make a lot of money with my regular work, so having some extra cash flow around the holidays is always helpful. Secondly, I am a bit believer in art being accessible to people, and if I can make art ownership easier by having a sale, then that makes me happy too.

You can find the photos here:

1. I’ve started taking Parkour classes at one of the 12 gyms in the world that teaches it. Every class thoroughly kicks my ass, but I can already tell that I’m getting stronger. Parkour focuses on functional fitness and strength training, which is the direction I’ve always felt is best when it comes to exercise-related stuff. Plus, I get to spend my evenings jumping on stuff, cllmbing on stuff, and generally pretending to be a ninja, which is pretty damn awesome. Marc is probably going to start coming with me in January, which will be fun, as it will be something for us to do together as a couple.

2. Marc and I are taking a quick trip up to New England this weekend. We’re leaving tomorrow afternoon and returning next Tuesday night and will be visiting western Massachusetts and Vermont. I haven’t seen some of my best college friends in four years, and it’s about damn time. So, we’ll be starting off in the Pioneer Valley, where I went to college, and then will be spending a couple days exploring southern Vermont. Marc and I have toyed with the idea of moving to Vermont, and while I’m familiar with the area, Marc has never been there, so I want to give him a bit of a feel for the state.

3. I’m going to be going home to Houston, TX for a few weeks over the Christmas holidays. One advantage of doing teaching work is that you don’t have to worry about taking off time during the winter holidays, and I fully plan on taking advantage of that. While I’m home, we’re going to take the family plane for a day trip up to Bentonville, Arkansas to see the brand new Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, and we may take a day trip over to New Orleans as well. One of the advantages of having a family plane is that it makes quick trips like this quite easy!

4. Marc and I have been working with a group of Georgetown University students who are doing a documentary on reenactors and the culture of the hobby, with a focus on motivations and the connections that reenactors have to history. It’s a pretty cool project. They talked with me for a good 3 hours about 6 weeks ago, and then about 3 weeks ago, they interviewed both Marc and I on camera, and also filmed us as we talked a bit about some of our equipment. They want to accompany us to an event in January and also to film us as we prepare for an event. It’s pretty fun, though it’s weird for me to be on the other side of the camera for once!

5. Work is coming along quickly on the new sites, and I’m already near launch for the redone Historically Speaking site. Next will be Traveling Tomboy, followed by my photography blog, then my personal blog, and then, finally, a redo of my landing page. The work is tedious, but because it’s broken up blog by blog, it is much more manageable than trying to redo my entire site at once.

6. I’ve been subbing for a high school art teacher all week, which has been pretty awesome. I mostly just sit back because there are two student teachers who are in training and who run the class. I occasionally advise students on their work, or help kids who are doing stuff in Photoshop and so it’s nice to be able to actually help the students with something I know, for once. It’s also cool because the kids are much better behaved than my average students, and the teacher has set up an audio jack that goes to the classroom speakers, so I get to play music for my students. It helps the kids relax and it creates a very “chill” environment that tends to smooth over the rough edges that many of my students have. I wish I could play music in all of the classes I sub for.

Life is definitely pretty good right now. I’m getting more subbing work, I’ve gotten a couple offers for design work, I’ve gotten some photography work, I’ve gotten my blogging situation worked out, and I’m about to take some trips. I am holding off on blogging here much because I don’t want to have additional content to import over to my new blog locations, but I should have them up and running soon, with great new content, so keep your eyes peeled for announcements!

There have always been a few things that bothered me about my current theme. It takes forever to load, each post requires theme-specific shortcodes and significant customization, it has bad SEO, it doesn’t play well with most statistics plugins, and most of all, it’s hard to distinguish between the various blogs I have here. So, I’m switching to a theme I’ve owned for the last few years, but have only ever used with clients: Headway

Here are some changes that you will see coming to DriftingFocus over the next few weeks and months:

Each blog will have its own completely different look. Layouts may be somewhat similar between some blogs, but there will definitely no longer be any mistaking which blog you’re currently reading. Unless you look up at the address bar, you may as well think you’ve gone to a completely different site, instead of one of my sub-sites here.

View from the Sidecar is getting a new name: Exhaust & Exhaustion. Marc and I will be getting Nadezda back in late December/early January, and you will start to see a lot more posts about our exploits.

My front page here will be more like a portal. There will be links to my blogs here and to my other web presences. News will be displayed. Blog posts will be displayed as well, but they will be much less of the focus than they are now.

There will be a new, completely photography-dedicated blog. Whether I will keep the name of my old photo blog, Always An Adventure, or choose something new remains to be seen. This blog will be a place for photo-heavy posts, as well as posts about photography technique and processing tips.

Over the next few weeks, you may get a lot of errors on this site, or see a maintenance screen instead of what you were looking for. For that, I apologize. However, when it’s all said and done, I think that it will be for the best.