An Experiment in Scotch

A cou­ple of weeks ago, the 10,000th vis­i­tor found their way here to The Exper­i­ment. I’ve been con­sid­er­ing how to mark this momen­tous occa­sion (even though those vis­its aren’t par­tic­u­larly reli­able and cer­tainly, my sit­ting at home hit­ting F5 try­ing to drive up my visit count doesn’t help. Not that I would ever do that). I decided to cel­e­brate in what can only be described as an odd way. I’ve changed the theme of the site to the cur­rent one, The Eru­dite by Soma Design and I’ve taken the track­ing code for both Siteme­ter and Google Ana­lyt­ics off the site.

Let me explain. I’ve been think­ing about a new theme for a lit­tle while. The old theme was really cool and was cer­tainly an improve­ment over my past ones. How­ever, it wasn’t quite “me” and it tended to be a lit­tle too busy for my tastes. About the same time I started think­ing about a new theme, I started to think about what I really wanted to get out of writ­ing here. Many of my posts aren’t par­tic­u­larly thought­ful and while I will prob­a­bly never stop post­ing human Taser guinea pigs and peo­ple falling down esca­la­tors while a cat plays a key­board, I’d like to focus more on my writ­ing, on my thoughts on a vari­ety of sub­jects and how I express those. Essen­tially, I’d like to improve my craft of writ­ing and find out what my voice really is.

In a supreme case of serendip­ity, Word­Press had a noti­fi­ca­tion of some new themes up on the Word­Press dash­board and I hap­pened to see The Eru­dite one. It’s billed as a theme for writ­ers and read­ers and clearly, it lives up to that billing. It’s very clean and the only thing to focus on is what’s writ­ten here. I decided to update to it and in the process, to stop wor­ry­ing about how many peo­ple were vis­it­ing my site or what my daily aver­age was (big deci­sion for a data junkie). I’m just going to write and see what happens.

I hope that peo­ple con­tinue to com­ment because I won’t really know you’re read­ing any­more (Hint: I knew some of you came here because I had your IP address or incom­ing domain name logged in Siteme­ter. Like say if you came in to check out what I was writ­ing while you were sup­posed to be work­ing at SMU. ) But even if peo­ple don’t, I’m hop­ing that by mov­ing to a very clean, word focused blog design and remov­ing the dis­trac­tion of how many peo­ple were vis­it­ing on any given day, I can focus more on what I have to say. I’m attracted to other voices on the web who have thought pro­vok­ing ideas and I’d like to join that small cho­rus with par­tic­u­lar ideas of my own. We’ll see how it works out together.