The story behind creating this blog

Before I start posting on this blog in earnest, I thought I had better set out how it came about.

Since September 2006 I have been writing my Process Guy blog. I used it to write mainly about politics, especially the internal affairs of the Liberal Democrats, and in a random way about other things that interested me or I felt strongly about.   I did not have any great purpose for the blog other than to develop my writing skills and learn about the process of blogging.

This I feel I have achieved. So much so that I began to have wider ambitions for the blog. I began to want to see if I could use it to start influencing opinions. The main focus for this was again the internal affairs of the Liberal Democrats. However, my attempts to do this led to me feeling restricted by the format of my old blog. This was partly the technical limitiations of the Blogger platform, but also the style of the blog that I had adopted, and in particular the name. While I knew what I meant by “Process Guy”, I’m not sure anyone else did! In fact, it may have put some people off.

I admit that any lack of success with my blogging can be attributed more to my inability to post frequently than anything else. It has to be said that the frequency of my posts was somewhat erratic. However, I felt a new approach was needed.

At the same time I was becoming more conscious that I was failing to get the most out of my various online presences. I believe that having a strong online identity will be important for me in achieving those things I want to achieve both in politics and professionally. I am not sure my old blog, the small website (more a holding page) that used to be at my personal website’s URL, and the other places that stuff about me can be found online were really doing me justice.

So it was becoming clear that it was time for a change.

So I decided to go away and come up with a completely fresh approach that would fit with what I wanted to do. So I shut up shop at the old blog, spent some weeks doing some head scratching, and then spent more weeks playing around with WordPress template code, and developed a new design for a personal website/blog. The plan was to try and combine my different online outputs and create a very strong single online home for myself.

Then, well, not a lot happened. As is sometimes the case with me I began to think that my ambitions and creativity had leaped a little ahead of the practicalities. I realised that I had built something that was over complicated and would be difficult to maintain. So I different approach was needed. I decided to go back to having a more straightforward blog and then do something much simpler with my personal website.

Luckily the WordPress theme I had developed turned out to be pretty robust and easy to adapt so I didn’t have to start coding from scratch. So over the last couple of days I stripped down the old theme and created this design for my new Strange Thoughts blog.

I hope you like it.

This content was originally posted on my old Strange Thoughts blog.