Over a decade ago, I started up this little site of mine (then called the-journals.com) and powered it using Radio Userland. Life in its first generation was grand, but that solution eventually went the way of the dodo and I was on to greener pastures with choosing Drupal as the system to power the second generation my site. It kinda worked, but it required a lot of tinkering to get it to do what I wanted it to do and I simply never had the time I would have liked to put into it. That also led directly to not posting as much content as I wanted and with the popularity of web-based social networks exploding in the last several years and the ease these tools allowed their users to publish and share content, I quickly felt left behind and was faced with a new decision. Do I abandon my site altogether and jump on the facey spaceies out there like everyone else or do I keep the site and find new tools that function better for what I want?

Well I knew I wanted the full ownership and control of what content I would produce and how it would be shared, but the current social networks didn’t give me that ownership and control. I also knew I definitely didn’t want to ignore all of the social networks out there just because everyone is on them and it’s a great place to share content. I eventually came to a decision that included both. I would still continue my site with new tools that would allow me to create, organize, and control content easily. At the same time, I would build the functionality into my site to be able to push that content to outside social networks so it would be more accessible and easier to share. My goal was defined.

Project: Rich enters its third generation by continuing to be the hub of all things me and things like my Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Vimeo, YouTube, and 500px pages would be portals into that hub. That’s what I want and that’s what I’m going to work on over the next couple of months here. It’s starting today with moving onto WordPress to power my system and I’m sure there’s going to be fluctuation in how the site functions for a while, especially with all of the post before this one, so bear me. Good luck to us all…