Though I didn’t write the welcome message until two days later, on September 12, 2005, Fluid Imagination moved from TypePad to Wordpress. We were with Typepad for just over a year (we launched Fluid Imagination on August 9th, 2004), and by the time a year rolled around, I felt that TypePad was too constraining for the kind of site I had in mind. Unless one was familiar with the underlying code of TypePad (called MovableType), one was unable to mess around with the design too much. Plus, it was a pain the ass to set-up multiple authors for the site, and a pain in the ass to institute any quality control.

After some research and advice from a friend, I found WordPress to be the publishing engine of my dreams.

Designing With WordPress

Over the last 12 months, we’ve had four major redesigns. I wish I had pictures of each of the different designs we’ve used, but I didn’t have the forethought to take screenshots of any of them. I can, however, link to the original versions of each of them.

The first one we used was K2, which is one of the most popular themes for all of WordPress. Developed by Michael Heilemann, Chris J Davis, Zeo, Steve Lam and Ben Sherratt, K2 is a dynamic theme with an active community, all of whom are more than willing to help out those who need it. For a beginner who was just getting his feet wet with WordPress, it was perfect.

My only problem was how popular it was, and how much it looked like a standard blog. I wanted something different for Fluid Imagination, something that really stood out in the blogosphere. After some research, I found Squible, a beautifully built theme that was developed by Theron Parlin and the folks at ThoughtMechanics. On December 1st, 2005, I launched it on Fluid Imagination.

Squibble is still my favorite theme. It put the newest post in its own little section at the top of the page, plus an interesting smart box with all sorts of cool information about the post. It also had a neat little section for the asides. It was easy to customize, and it, too, had an active and helpful community.

I only changed it because it didn’t mesh very well with YouTube (read this post for the tricks I had to go through to include a YouTube video on the site). I started looking for a theme that interested me, and for a while, it looked like Kiwi (plus Canvas) would be it. Canvas is a drag and drop application that lets the end-user (in this case, me) design my own theme from almost scratch. Kiwi was the base theme that I would have started with, but after that, it would have been all me. Unfortunately, I felt even more limited by Canvas than I did by TypePad. I guess ease-of-use and powerful customization aren’t as easy to pull off as they are to imagine.

While looking at Kiwi though, I discovered Tarski. Tarski was a basic theme. Posts on the right. Other stuff on the left. But its back-end was very clean, allowing me to customize it rather easily. I got to put in a cool little header image that I thought fit well with the name of the site. And I liked how, when compared to the bells and whistles of Squible, the site just kind of stayed out of the way. On May 23, 2006, I changed the site over to Tarski.

Then August of this year rolled around, and I started to feel the itch again. I wasn’t bored with Tarski or anything. I just wanted to get my hands dirty on some programming code, plus I started to feel like the sidebar on Tarski was getting to be a little much. I had a lot of information stuffed into a single sidebar column. So I went looking for something new. And I found CrayonWorld, put together by the folks at wpthemes.info.

I played around with it a bit, playing with the header image and the colors, and I came up with a butt-ugly theme that no one, including me, liked. It was only live for a period of about three hours before I took it down and replaced it with the theme you see today, PlainTxtBlog.

Writing With WordPress

Over the last year, I think I’ve forgotten much of what I had learned when it comes to blogging. At one point, my hope was to become a top blogger on the Internet. Where most experts were saying to pick one topic and stick to it, I had the idea that Fluid Imagination would stand for one thing and one thing only: good writing on any topic that caught our imagination. I think, for the most part, I have failed on that account.

Sure, there have been a bunch of posts that I am proud of, but generally speaking, I’ve been disappointed by the quality of my writing on this blog. I won’t tell you the steps I’m going to take to change that, but know that I am actively working on it.

I’ve got some ideas on how the Fluid Imagination blog could improve in the future, but I always come back to the same thing: the desire to get you, the reader, blogging too. This goal was one of the major reasons for changing from TypePad to WordPress. Ideally, Fluid Imagination should be a network composed of those of us who feel inspired to write something, to write anything.

So, over the next few days, I’m going to be looking into ways to make it easier for you to contribute to Fluid Imagination. I still expect to handle the yeoman’s work when it comes to the site, but I think it would be fantastic if we could open up the list of contributors to include the rich voices and opinions of those of you who come to Fluid Imagination.

Because I don’t want Fluid Imagination to be just my voice. I want it to be all of ours.

And with that, let me just say thank you. Thank you to the 35 or so people who come to the site everyday, and thank you to all the others who only visit every once in a while. In the next year, I hope Fluid Imagination will become even more valuable to your daily web surfing than it is right now. And I’m going to work to make that happen.

So thank you.