The Relaunch of RyanFarley.com and How Twitter Helped my Career

Friday, July 25, 2008 5:29 PM Filed under:

General

The Relaunch of RyanFarley.com and How Twitter Helped my Career

I've neglected this blog for quite some time now. Wow, it's been a while. I decided it was time for a relaunch. So, I've migrated the blog to Subtext (I stayed on .Text long after the project was dead) and have a shiny new look and feel. I figured if I put some time into the blog skin then I'd be more likely to keep posting.

For a while now, I've kept up my CRM related blog (See crmdeveloper.com), but I keep that blog focused on CRM related topics. This blog will continue to be on .NET development and software topics as it was before. I'm pretty pleased with my new blog skin. I tried to stay away from the shades of slate blue and gray that I usually fall back on, although I guess I just couldn't shake the gray :-)

Here's a comparison of the look of my old and new blog:

The old and stale look of ryanfarley.com

I thought the old look was getting a bit stale, very XP hehe. Any feedback on the new look?

So why the change and the renewed desire to blog? Honestly, I attribute it to Twitter and some great podcasts. A while back I decided to give Twitter a try (see twitter.com/ryanfarley). At first, I completely didn't get it. Once I got subscribed to some people to follow that interest me, that all changed. I felt like I was listening in on conversations between people I consider great in the industry. People like Jon Gallaway, Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman, etc (to name only a small few). I actually started to feel inspired by these short <140 character tweets. Then I started listening to podcasts (again, inspired by the activity on twitter) such as HerdingCode, Hanselminutes, Deep Fried Bytes, and started listening to Carl Franklins DotNetRocks again (I used to listen but stopped as some of Carl's co-hosts changed). The result? I felt completely inspired and excited to be a programmer. It was just awesome. Not that I've not liked being a programmer. It's what I am and I love it. But sometimes you fall into work routine and you loose a bit of the passion. I feel completely pumped up again, and I basically owe it all to Twitter. Yes, a bit strange.

More to come...

Comments

Jeff Ballard 7/26/2008 11:27 AM

The new site looks really nice!

Out of curiousity, what made you go with Subtext as opposed to BlogEngine.NET? I'm using Subtext (with one of the default skins) and have considered moving to BlogEngine.NET, but haven't made any changes yet. I was considering it as BlogEngine.NET seems a bit more active than Subtext and there might be more updates...

And after all your raving about Twitter and being pestered by others, I finally gave in.... jdballard
Mark Dykun 7/26/2008 11:42 AM

Ryan, like the new look. Glad to see you got your passion back. I will look into Twitter and see what it is all about.

Mark
Ryan Farley 7/26/2008 11:43 AM

Hi Jeff,

The *main* reason I went with Subtext was really to not break links. My blog has always been on .Text from the beginning (which as an open source project was abandoned and then baked into Community Server). Subtext is a fork of .Text so structurally things are the same and all my URLs would not change. That was important to me because even though I've not been updating this blog, it still gets an insane amount of traffic and I didn't want to loose that and have all the search engine indexed links be broken.

Another reason is that I know how it works already and didn't have to learn something new. I've dug all through the inner workings of the .Text code (an advantage of hosting your own blog) and knew just what to do to accomplish what I wanted to do with the blog. This is also a reason I need to start submitting patches to Phil Haack and the rest of the Subtext developers :-)

BlogEngine.NET is quite nice. If I wasn't already committed to .Text/Subtext and just starting a new blog, I'd probably go with that one. The administration stuff is really nice and Mads et al to give a lot of time to it.

Nice to hear from you Jeff and I'm now following you on Twitter :-) (BTW, you have to get a desktop client if you're really going to get into Twitter, I use Twhirl http://www.twhirl.org/)

-Ryan
Ryan Farley 7/26/2008 11:43 AM

Thanks Mark, I'll look for you on Twitter :-)
Si Philp 7/27/2008 12:24 AM

Welcome to subtext.. Believe the new version will be out soon. The project is always on the look out for additional helpers ;)

Your skin is very nice. Giving me some inspiration.
ReedE 7/28/2008 10:39 AM

That's AMAZING!!! lol! JK!
Ryan Farley 7/28/2008 12:10 PM

Hehe. My daughter (ReedE) has posted her first comment on my blog. I'm surprised she even reads it :p
Will Asrari 7/28/2008 1:40 PM

Was wondering when this blog was going to be revived.

Welcome back!
Dan Hounshell 7/28/2008 1:53 PM

Congrats and welcome back to the new and improved Ryan Farley!
Dan Hounshell 7/28/2008 1:53 PM

And the new theme looks great!
Ryan Farley 7/28/2008 1:55 PM

Thanks Dan!
Bryant Likes 7/29/2008 7:30 AM

Welcome back! The blog redesign looks great!
Paul Eaton 7/29/2008 7:47 AM

Looks great Ryan!

Not sure if you've had a chance to check them out or not, but there are some other really good podcasts you can check out too...

http://polymorphicpodcast.com/
http://pixel8.infragistics.com/
http://aspnetpodcast.com/

Paul
Haacked 8/4/2008 9:48 PM

Wow! The look of your site is impressive! Would love to get something like this as an official skin to Subtext. Pehaps when you're ready to move to your next look and feel. :)
Ryan Farley 8/4/2008 9:52 PM

Thanks Phil! I do plan on contributing after wrapping up some projects, maybe not _this_ skin (yet), but something for sure. Part of my goals to improve myself as a developer include contributing to an open source project (http://ryanfarley.com/blog/archive/2008/07/30/becoming-a-better-developer.aspx) I _have_ to do it now since it's posted :-)

-Ryan
Haacked 8/4/2008 10:00 PM

Welcome back!

It's funny, I saw your post via Technorati and I was thinking to myself, that name sounds familiar. Then I took another look at your comparison image of your old blog and new one and I realized that I used to be subscribed to your blog. The new look is so different I didn't realize it was the same blog as "public void blog" but with new energy and vigor!

I'm subscribed again. :)

Phil
Ryan Farley 8/5/2008 12:15 AM

@haacked Hehe. Yeah, I figured it was time to put my big boy pants on and drop the silly title.

Anyway, I'm completely glad to be back blogging again.
-Ryan
sikat ang pinoy 2/4/2010 7:37 PM

What do you think the best between blogengine and subtext?
Gabby 3/17/2010 7:13 AM

Would love to get something like this as an official skin to Subtext. Pehaps when you're ready to move to your next look and feel