Do not adjust your TV set. We control the vertical, we control the horizontal. This is indeed the Hive. What you are about to witness may once have been called Chronicology, but now it is the Radical Hive. Where once there was Brian Garside, now there is only the HiveMaster.
This idea is a few months in the making, but it was always on the back burner, now the time feels right to make the move and turn this into my new home.
So what’s the big idea anyway?
I’ve been experimenting with some new content management tools for a number of months. I like to try new things out, and after stumbling through a Drupal install, Expression Engine install, Pligg install, and a Joomla install, I took the advice of my good buddy Liam, and gave WordPress a whirl.
It was instant love. I still have a really great relationship with Pligg (and I plan on launching a site with it soon), and me and Drupal are good buddies still, but WordPress is just awesome.
I’ll detail the awesomeness in…umm, detail, at a later date, but what’s the quick overview?
RSS, searchable archives, easy categories, ridiculous extensibility, simple skinning, and invisible comment verification are the simple ones that come to mind.
Why not Chronicology?
Chronicology was intended as an online comic. It may become that again some day, but for now she’ll just be a nice simple redirect to RadicalHive. I have to be honest, chronicology is not a simple word to spell, and telling people how to get there…ain’t exactly easy.
The other thing is that I’ve been promoting myself as a “web guru” for a little over three years now, yet I neither “web” nor “guru” on a regular basis. I want to get back into the habit. I’m also going to set up a nice little “Comic Corner” on this site where I can talk about comics.
I also think the name is cool. I know the word “Radical” has negative connotations, but it also has some roots to surfer culture, which I’m appropriating for web surfing.
I’m working on some new themes, which will make Radical Hive truly mine, the first one will be Bee inspired, buzzing off of the “hive” part of the name (you’ll see the logo in this post). My second theme will be surf inspired, nice blues and whites, lots of space, and loads of “airyness”.
I’ve got plans beyond just changing up the look and feel of the site too. I want to tackle the subject matter that I write about.
I plan on writing a lot about my experiences with Content Management Systems, both the one Ryan and I wrote, and the open source ones that I’ve looked at. I want to write about CSS, AJAX, and all of the other acronyms that I’m passionate about.
I want to write about comics, their meaning, their place in pop culture, the business of comics, and where I see the industry going.
I want to promote, and maybe even monetize the stuff I write. Folks forget sometimes that I wrote semi-professionally for the better part of a decade (sure it was about sports, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know how to construct a column).
The site itself has a ways to go. I have to port over a few hundred comments, and I’m still formatting some of the really old stuff, then I have to set up a bunch of redirects from Chronicology to here, but most of it’s minor stuff, especially with the help of WordPress.
Yeah, I’ve got a lot of plans. This is the first step. Join me, won’t you? Subscribe to my feed, pop in a comment, make yourself at home.
This is a test of the posting system. This is only a test. If this were a real post, you would have been informed that your spelling was wrong and that your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries.