Stupidfresh

Greetings Stupidfresh family and friends, and welcome to the 300th post of Stupidfresh.com! As some of you are already aware, I've got some exciting news to share with you in regards to the site. I'm packing up and moving my website to:

This is my brand new website that will carry on the traditions started here on Stupidfresh, and will be my playground for a whole new batch of shenanigans. I've had a blast creating it and I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

By all means please go and explore matthewlipstein.com. But if you're interested in any back-story of how I got here, enjoy some explanation and navel-gazing below.

Why the change?

Stupidfresh has been great to me and we've had a lot of fun. A few months ago, Blogger (which powers this site) announced they were changing the way my website would work, and for a large number of reasons I just wasn't down with keeping my site on Blogger.

At first I was simply annoyed by the reality of having to make major changes to the website. After some simmering however, I took the chance to step back and examine my online presence and persona. Why do I have a website to begin with? What's the point? How do my contributions to Twitter, and my other blogs play into this? Who reads all this stuff anyway?

What I began to understand is the content I share online allows me to explore elements of who I am. We're all multifaceted individuals, and for whatever reason I've embraced the opportunity to show a few sides of myself on these here Internets.

But as of late I've felt that I've spread myself out a bit thin. A Stupidfresh blog rant here, a work Tweet there, and maybe a video of Theodore to round out the day. There are too many outlets segmented for too many specified purposes.

It became clear that it's high time to bring together all of these areas under one banner. The new site is configured to pull all my different worlds together on one website. But how does it work? I'm glad you asked.

Under the Hood (For my nerds and the people who love them)

I had a lot to consider when thinking through how to put this all together. Some of my criteria included:

• Backend - Who has time to hand-code anymore? Give me a strong CMS for publishing
• Mobility - I want to create all styles of posts while out in the world, either from a computer or simply my phone
• Cross-posting - The key to my quest was finding a way to post in one place and have that be mirrored on my website, and vice-versa
• Simplified Workflows - Beyond the work it initially takes to configure and design the site, this should all run itself moving forward.

It turns out that a service called Tumblr affords me all of these things. Their web & iPhone posting tools are simple and powerful. They have built-in import tools that will grab anything I share on Blogger, Twitter, and the like and automatically post it on matthewlipstein.com. As a bonus, Tumblr also has it's own social network between Tumblr blogs. Tumblr users can follow each others sites and "like" each others posts.

To get a sense of what's coming in and what's going out, I created this schematic. Yes, this is the type of stuff I think a lot about. [Click to enlarge the image]


Basically, I've tried to design my "one site to rule them all".

See You on the Other Side

I'm looking forward to seeing how this all develops, what's going to happen next and I'm hoping you'll join me for the ride. Nothing will be deleted from Stupidfresh - all these posts will still exist online, but all new content will be going down at the new site.

You can subscribe to updates to the new site either via email or an RSS feed.

Thanks to all who have read and supported Stupidfresh in the past few years. Let's keep it going full steam.

So here's an update on the ongoing analysis/transition of my online identity. I've been finding a lot of power in these resources:

• Nathan's comment on my previous post, and the similar thread on his site.
• I've been liking the presence and design approaches taken by Jason Permenter's site and the Flavors.me service.
• I keep going back to Merlin Mann's "Better" essay. This is really helping me focus on the point of all these Internet shanningans. Carve out a few minutes and go read it on his site.

Last night I started the process of migrating elements of this here Stupidfresh blog over to the Blogger servers (that's how all this craziness started in the first place). One tactic I'm considering is just leaving the current iteration of this site as an archive (Stupidfresh Classic if you will), and moving on.

Tumblr has been really intriguing to me as a very efficient, light-weight, on-the-go method of continuing to post online. Hmmmmmm.

One key to this mess would be to find the tools that will cross-post well. That will allow these different modalities to play nicely together, and wil build in redundency. Hmmmmmmm.

As before, I'm struggling with "what's it all for"? Nathan makes the point that blogs used to be the place to "just spill", but now there are plenty of places to do that. So maybe my goal is to Rube Goldberg all of of my spills into one pitcher. Hmmmm.

Domain names, hosting, history, ownership, ease of use and more booshy you coudl imagine come into the mix here, but I digress. I am getting closer.

Post Script: Please pardon the public multi-post monologue here. In addition to working this through, I'm also hoping to gain your perspective (yes, you!) . So hit me off with a comment or an email.

Labels: rant