There comes a time in every casual blog's life where you step back and ask yourself about the purpose of what you write and where you fit in the great, growing equation known to some as the blogosphere. I've answered this question for myself a couple of times before and things have changed to fit those decisions. Slowly but surely, I am finding out just what blog niche I want to write for.
Before the MovableType era (for me), there was pre-Google Blogger which appeared as the design-oriented personal blog hosting provider of choice. It opened my eyes to templating but mostly teetered on the brink of being a completely personal journal. After some time and many (bad) template designs later, I looked for a more complex solution - something I could host myself and had it's own commenting system. At the time, choices were pretty limited and although I did look at a few systems, I settled on MovableType. No personal site made it out of this first MT install - I hosted a ~20 person community blog for a while on an iBook. Without hosting, that was the best I could do for the moment. I still depended on Blogger for a personal blog and it was a fairly common sight to see new angtsy posts every fews days. Those entries have since been removed but not forgotten. A long hiatus from the personal blog scene later, I was picked up as a TypePad beta tester and held what started as a personal blog on those servers. It was not long before I started meme-blogging from the TypePad community that formed in my time that wasn't spent blogging about my personal life. Before the end of my TypePad stay, I ended up switching sides and writing mostly info and links with a rare personal post thrown in. A hosting offer I couldn't refuse allowed me to really start my blogging experience with MovableType again. My optimism for a new and different non-personal content pushed me towards getting a domain name which is what you see here. I have more than just blog output, I've created my own little Nick-provided information center where I share photos and (semi)interesting tidbits about technology and blogging amoung other things.
However, in my transition from the personal to the public niche, I've lost the specificity of content on the blog and opted to post about whatever crosses my mind - it's a popular choice but with few readers, I have a slim-to-none chance that someone reading will actually be interested in what I'm writing about on any given day. What's more, I feel as though my domain as a whole lacks coherence and has no way to figure out just what I have contained on the varied pages of my site. Design-wise, I'm very happy with what I have and redesign isn't what I'm looking for. It's the structure of the pages contained within that require a redesign and with it, a more specific redefinition of what exactly this blog is here for. It's not an overnight change like many of the changes I like to do and it's definitely not something that will come without much thought on the subject. As of now, I'm thinking of these specific changes:

• Centralization of authenticgeek.net around the blog - the other pieces will still exist, they'll just exist as links from the blog as opposed to links from the front page. The front page (a placeholder, really) will be removed. I haven't decided on if I just want to redirect to blog.authenticgeek.net or if I should redefine where the blog physically sits on the server - That would make google update it's links for the second time in 30 days if I did it soon enough.


• Removal of my imposed limitations on this blog. With the introduction of a new, professional blog (see below), I no longer feel the need to limit myself as to what I say here. Perhaps personal notes will appear, perhaps other things that I don't currently do much of. In the progression of finding my blog niche, the new blog will be focused on writing for others and this blog will focus on writing for myself.


• Creation of a new blog at a new domain. This blog will be molded around my decision to start work as a private 'CMS Consultant' focusing initally on MovableType development and support. WordPress support is my next goal. More info on this will probably in another post.