I am starting with a clean slate.

Janella.com is rebuilding from the ground up. I’m starting from zero. This means blog postings previous to this one are no longer available to view. This purging does is not only limited to the blog you are reading now, but also the photos section - which will now hosted on Smugmug. My thoughts on my Flickr account is to post only individual photos there. More on what individual mean in the future.

Why am I doing this?

I have been contemplating this for quite some time. I have been on a creative slump, both in writing and taking photos. It has persisted for awhile now. I have tried dealing with this slump by making manic site design updates to the web site, which regular visitors have seen in the last year.

Part of the problem is with Wordpress, which makes it easy to change your web site’s look by offering plenty of free wonderfully hackable themes. Plug-ins for Wordpress provide additional ways to add features and change the look of the site. Then there are the software updates which can add or change base features. When I started using Wordpress to power the site I started with version 1. As of this posting it is at version 2.3.1.

When I make changes I am satisfied for a short time. Then I start browsing older entries created when using version 1.x or even 2.0, such as the entries of our London trip. I then become unhappy with the way the site looks. The cycle then begins again, changing the site once more. The one constant through these late struggles has been the same - the content.

Yes, the words I have written should stay the same. They should not be edited or reformatted. I should not care that 5 years ago I did not like to capitalize blog entries properly or that post tagging is something I didn’t do last year. I wouldn’t think I would have been the type of person who would care about this, but I do care for some reason I cannot articulate.

What I should be doing is adding new entries when the writing urge hits. I should be taking photos and posting them. But then the above takes a hold of me. It hinders me, stopping me from writing a word or taking a photo. At this point it is something I can’t seem to shut off.

So I have decided to start over.

I tried to think of a graceful way to archive the previous content, other than the archive method offered through Wordpress. At this point I have come up with nothing. What I have written before, and what you have graciously shared your comments on, is not lost. It is simply offline at the moment.

./Janella.com is now ‘red’. “Those of you who know me know that red is my favorite color,” he says sarcastically. I found the Half-Baked via the Weblog Tools Collection site and liked it tremendously.

I hope you are interested in what I write in the future. I hope you comment when you feel the need to do so. I hope to take more photos, interesting photos. I hope to update the site often - in content, not necessarily in design (but perhaps playing a bit with the layout).

From here on we begin anew.