As you can no doubt tell if you’re reading this on the site, (rss subscribers click here), things look way different around here. I’m running a new WordPress theme that is more blog-like and it’s what I’ll be using on here for the foreseeable future. Now, there are also some changes also to where things are located that I’d like to go over..
My blog roll is now located in the sidebar instead of a separate page. Both categories, Homies, and LinkLove are still used, they’re just now located in the sidebar.
I’ve trimmed down the amount of static pages and the links to those can be found in the header.
Each post has two nifty little icons in the upper right corner. The one that looks like a little window will minimize the post so all you see is the title and date, while the icon with two arrows will make the content area take up the whole page and get rid of the sidebars. Go ahead, try them out… cool huh?
I’ll probably be tweaking this a little bit more over the next few days and weeks until I get everything just right. Things actually look a lot like they did when I first started this blog a year ago, so it’s kind of neat for me to have a “throwback” theme of sorts.
What do you think of the new look? Like it? Hate it? Anything it needs?
It’s been over a month since I was last blogging on here. Prior to last night, my last post was August 12. I was almost to the middle of a NaBloPoMo and just stopped posting. I also stopped twittering, and my time and interaction on Facebook dropped significantly.
Here’s basically what happened:
I got overwhelmed by the internet. The pressure I had put on posting everyday. Keeping up with tweets as well as tweeting. A growing numbers of blogs I subscribe to. It all felt like too much, so I pretty much put a stop to all of it, cold turkey. And then slowly, over the last couple weeks, began slowly re-immersing myself into the world-wide-social-media-interweb one step at a time.
In the meantime, since I’ve been away from the blog, I’m ecstatic to report how God is making ways, opening doors, and providing the funds for my upcoming time in Australia. As of now, the entire first year, tuition and living expenses, are covered and it’s looking like the second year will be covered pretty soon. Amazing.
Also, I’m in the process of redesigning this blog using a theme that I design and build myself. It’s slow going as my knowledge of Photoshop, HTML, and CSS are not extensive. But I’m excited and hopeful that the new design will be really cool.
So, to sum it all up, I’m back. And to conclude this post, I’d like to leave you with the song that’s been dominating time on my iPod and in my head over the last month. Peace.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the term NaBloPoMo, (and I don’t blame you if you are), it stands for National Blog Posting Month. It’s about getting in the habit of daily blogging, which given my constant feeling of, “What am I going to write about?”, I felt it would be a good idea to take the challenge of posting something, anything, everyday of August. I’m doing this challenge along with my good friends, Sarah and Mindy. I have no idea what I’m going to write for every day this month, but I’ll do my best to put something. This post will count for August 1.
I’ve been blogging consistently for about a year now and have moved the location around from iWeb, to Shaggy Worshiper, to dustinpetersen.com. I loved blogging under Shaggy Worshiper a lot. This place had a certain feel, a certain swagger to it that I really liked. Then I accidentally broke the site while upgrading to the latest version of WordPress last fall. After breaking my blog and losing all of the content on it, I decided to start brand new and purchased dustinpetersen.com to use. It was okay blogging over there, but it felt like something wasn’t quite right; I’m not quite sure what it was. I think that part of it was that it felt a little to “me centered” seeing as how the site was my own name and that I didn’t feel able to blog and talk about worship, and music, and God stuff the way I was able to at Shaggy Worshiper.
So!
All that to say that as of now, I’m moving the blog back over to www.shaggworshiper.com. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last month or so and it feels like this is the right thing to do. So those of you who link to, or have dustinpetersen.com in your feed reader, please change it to point to Shaggy Worshiper so you can still keep up with everything going on.
I’ve been able to import all of the content from the other site to here, so all of the videos, pictures, and posts from dustinpetersen.com can now be found here. There might be a few quirks with the imported content like links pointed in the wrong direction, but if that’s the case, let me know via comment or email and I’ll fix it asap. And like any move, it takes a few days to get everything where you want it to really feel like home, so things may change a little bit look and feel wise, but after that it should be in a pretty set.
I’ve been doing this whole blogging thing for about almost a year now.
I’ve moved homes twice, first on the jump from iWeb to Wordpress.
Then, after I broke shaggyworshiper, the jump from shaggyworshiper to dustinpetersen.
For those of you who have been here since the beginning, thanks for sticking around and putting up with my ramblings.
For those of you who are new around here and maybe this is the first post you read here, I hope that you’ll find something you like here that’s work coming back for.
That’s how most acceptance speeches start out. Well, actually, nowadays it’s popular to say, “OhwowItotallydidn’texpectthisI’msocaughtoffguardanddidn’texpecttowinIdon’thaveanything”. They then proceed to start thanking people who have helped them get to where they are, anywhere from parents, to agents, to people they met in the supermarket, to their dentist.
A couple days ago, my blogging and real-life friend, Mindy, gave me an award on her blog for being one of her favorite blogs. In her review and reasons for giving me an award, she said that I do “all the brave stuff” like be on stage in front of people singing, playing guitar, and praying and then ended it by saying someone should give me a record deal (any takers?).
Thinking about this, I realized that I wouldn’t be who I am or doing what I’m doing if it weren’t for the amazing people that are consistently surrounding me, encouraging me, and challenging; you know who you are. I heard a quote one time that said, “Show me your friends and I’ll show you who you are”, and I think that’s true to an extent; we are greatly influenced and affected by those we allow to get close to us. All this to say thank you to my friends and those of you who are closest to me.
I’ve done one blog post this month. I’m not sure why, but I just haven’t had any desire to get on here and write like I had been doing. But I think that this little time away from my corner of the internet is coming to an end and that it’s time for me to get back here and blow off some of the dust that’s been gathering. Let’s see, this few weeks have been pretty mellow with spring break, housesitting, and some serious talk about vision and where things are going. I also gave my testimony at Kairos a week and a half ago which was really good for me to lay everything out like that in a setting like that.
This next month is packed full of stuff for me: I’m gone the next two weekends on both the junior and senior high retreats, the following Thursday is the Maundy Thursday service that I’m leading worship for, then I’m playing guitar on Easter Sunday. After that is the last two weeks of school, including finals week and then the healing prayer seminar at Community Covenant and then after all that, I get to take a deep breath. Please keep me in your prayers for the next month for strength, stamina, and whatever else I might need. I’m going to try to get back in a regular habit of posting here.
No doubt you’ve probably noticed the different look around here compared to last week. I’m testing some new themes and designs around here and seeing which one I like best. I’ve given the current design a few day trial to see what I think of it and there’s stuff I like about it and there’s stuff I don’t necessarily like about it, and I’m going to give the other themes I have in mind a trial too so it might take up to a couple weeks for me to narrow down the theme I want to use. Please bear with me as things will look different every other day or so and please comment often giving your opinion on the current design of the site. Hopefully by the end of the test period, I’ll have a design and look that is nice looking, functional, and user friendly.
I know that I haven’t written anything here in a while. I’m sorry, but school work is piling up with the end of the semester drawing near and I just haven’t had a whole lot of stuff to blog about. As soon as these research papers are finished and I’m able to think in a more creative way and outside of the academic world I shall be back and blogging to my heart’s content. I’m not sure if that sentence made sense, but oh well, that just proves my point even more.
Starting today, six bloggers are traveling with Compassion to the Dominican Republic to witness first hand what life there is like as well as the work Compassion is doing down there. They will be telling stories, posting pictures, and sharing videos of the experience and the atmosphere in hopes that it will inspire readers to sponsor a child.
This is a really cool thing that Compassion is doing and I strongly urge you to follow along for the next six days as these bloggers share the story of these children. All of the posts related to this trip can be found here.
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