I’ve wanted to reboot my blog for a while now and the timing for the #vDM30in30 challenge couldn’t be better. I participated last year and had a great, if somewhat stressful time completing the challenge, so why not add some spice to the holiday season this year, right?
Just like last year, I’ll be distributing my writing across (at least) two blogs – this one and my food blog, Geek Food Critic. I’ll keep the food stuff there and everything else here.
Topics I have in mind right now for either blog:
- My review of the new Apple TV
- My experience as a new Giganto Phone User (iPhone 6S Plus)
- A truly terrible experience at the Apple Store
- Thoughts on Dell World 2015
- Upgrading SCCM 2012R2 to the latest Cumulative Update
- A review of The Salt Lick, a BBQ restaurant
- A look back at our first year using Zoom video conferencing service
I’m sure there will be more, especially once I look at the backlog of food and tech posts I’ve meant to write for a while.
So why the blog reboot?
Good question. I started Single Malt Cloud in June of 2011 because I wanted to document a large VDI project I was spearheading and also (I thought) our university’s “journey to the cloud” – whatever the heck I thought that really meant at the time. I enjoyed writing about VDI and related technologies for quite a while, but I’m not working directly in that arena anymore. Over time I branched out and wrote about other topics, including consumer technology, IT conferences, my favorite podcasts – you name it. But it always seemed a little odd to be writing about that stuff on that blog.
The other reason is I was recently asked by a colleague what my blog name meant, and why it was named “Single Malt Cloud” and I realized two very important things:
- There was no reason for him or anyone else to “get” the little play on words I thought was so clever when I registered that domain name late one night, and explaining it stopped being fun a long time ago.
- I’m a father now, and while I am far from a prude, if I’m still blogging when my 3 year old son is old enough to read something his dad writes on the web … well, I’d rather it be under my name (or as close as possible given domain-squatting jerks), not a blog with a type of whiskey in the name.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the content over at SMC. I’m paid up through WordPress.com for a year, and it all lives at a free blog underneath the domain redirect anyway. I may leave all or most of the content there, or I may selectively pull some posts over here for continuity’s sake.
I’m trying out Squarespace for real this time. I’ve done a 30 day trial before and wasn’t pleased with the way mass imports from WordPress worked and I also didn’t like the idea of having to pay for an account for every domain on which I might want to host a blog, instead of just directing a domain to a subfolder on one account. That doesn’t bother me so much anymore, because as the father of a 3 year old I don’t have enough time to actively write for more than 1 or 2 blogs anyway. I’ve also played with podcasting a bit over the last year, and I like what my Twitter pal Keith Townsend has down with his CTO Chat podcast at Squarespace.
So that’s why I’m rebooting the blog, why I’m building it here, and what I’m doing for the first 30 (now 28) days. Wish me luck!
This is post #1 in the 2015 #vDM30in30 Blog Challenge
Mike Stanley 