# My new look and a new feel

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2008-05-20T04:19:17Z


Over the last few years, my blogging slowed down and came nearly to a halt. I tried to figure out what had happened. Had I written about everything that I was interested in already? Was I just sick of blogging? Was I sick of my tools and the design of my site? Was I spending too much time playing World of Warcraft? I'm not exactly sure. It was probably a combination of all of these things.

I had also gotten sort of sick of social software tools, conferences about social software tools and talking about social software tools.

Sometime last year, I was talking to Anil and he was REALLY excited about Movable Type version 4. He explained all of the new features and how excited the crew over at Six Apart were about it. It was a long time since I had heard Anil excited about anything and it was sort of contagious. Boris and I had been talking about a site renewal for a long time so we decided that MT4 would be a good occasion to revamp the site.

Granted, MT4 still has some kinks, but it's a great improvement and I'm really happy. (Although it wasn't me dealing with the kinks.)

So here's the new look. We're still working on a lot of things right now and this is a "soft launch" of the new framework. The idea is that the top page is more of a dashboard and not a blog, although the last blog post is featured there. I'm trying to turn this social network stuff a bit inside-out and see if I can make my own site the destination and the social networks the branches.

What we're working on next is the community pack that works with MT4. If it works correctly, I will be able to create profiles of my friends and let them add links to their social networks. This will replace that old "faceroll" I had with something a bit more dynamic. I don't expect my site to become yet another social network, but I would like to allow people to see the connections between the people I'm connected to on my own site in the way I'd like to display it. Once we get this going, I'll be looking to everyone for feedback on what I should and shouldn't do.

While the haiku-like constraint of Twitter is really neat, I'm starting to miss blogging again. ;-)

Thanks to Boris for the awesome design work. Thanks to Kuri and Jim for the back-end help. Thanks to Anil and the Six Apart team for pushing us along on MT4. Thanks to Susan Kare for the nice new logo. Yay!

PS: Try clicking on the little icon of Jonkichi on the top right to see the super seekrit Rupture include.