I haven't written anything of any serious consequence for this blog in seven or eight months. Obviously, a lot of my available writing time was spent on my chapter for Smashing Mag's The Mobile Book but I had another reason for the long hiatus. The Mobile in Higher Ed "brand" left me feeling a little hemmed in regarding the topics I could cover. Or, at least, the topics that I originally thought I should cover.
In early 2012 I started building a lot of tools (see Detector, Throttle & ua-parser-php). This blog seemed to simply became a series of posts related to tool updates. Frankly, to me, that was sort of boring and not befitting of the original mission of the blog so I stopped writing them. For example, I never posted about another tool that I developed, lazyBlock.
Ultimately, the problem was that I put too much pressure on myself to produce a certain type of content and, when the inspiration never came, I just plain avoided the site and writing. So, in the same way that my Twitter account is "just me," I sort of have to accept that my blog will also be "just me" and reflect my interests in the moment.
The redesign of my blog reflects this change in thinking. Gone are references to Mobile in Higher Ed. I now feel like I don't have to keep every post within those two constraints, Mobile and Higher Ed, which was part of what was contributing to my writer's block. I will have my tool updates, their will be posts about mobile web-related technology and their will be higher ed-related content. It's just that now I know I don't have to fit all of those things into one post.
Thank you for sticking with the blog through the lean times. I hope I can reward that loyalty moving forward. If you're interested in the behind-the-scenes of the re-making of the blog check out the other new post today, Lessons Learned Building the New dmolsen.com: Static, A Performance Budget, Sass & SVG.