Rebooting

I’ve been blogging for almost five years now.

I started, mainly for work, when I joined Mozilla, and everything about it was kind of a revelation at the time.

Not many places incorporated regular blogging then, and it was another sign I’d made a good choice in joining Mozilla, which was pioneering ways of creating open source software and building a global community.

The main thing I came to love about blogging was interacting with people who cared about what I was writing, whether they agreed with it or not. Over time, I learned about a whole bunch of folks who were doing incredible things to help the Web, and connected with people whose work I’d admired. (None of this is news to you if you blog.)

Joining Automattic has been a whole new experience of diving into the deep end of the pool.

I haven’t blogged as much as I would have liked mainly because there’s been so much going on. Like 24/7 communication with my excellent co-workers — we all work from our homes or the road, no commute, and a lounge instead of an office — and with WordPress community members who are blogging zealots in the best possible way. Thank you for welcoming me to the community and feeding me tons of interesting ideas (I’m looking at you, Jeff Chandler). My life has been too exciting to blog about as a result, I swear.

But I love and have missed writing and connecting with others through my blogging. So I’ll try to slow it down just a bit and share more here.  Also, I’m going to start pulling in pieces of my activity on other services to supplement the posts like this one. My most used web services these days are WordPress.com (here and for Automattic work), Twitter (which is already syndicated in one of the WordPress.com widgets at right), Flickr, Foursquare, and Delicious.

I see a lot of resetting and rebooting of people’s blogs in 2010. WordPress.com continues to evolve and I’ll share here some of the things these changes enable, like better integration with social networks and improved alternatives for many different kinds of web publishing.

I run this blog on WordPress.com with domain mapping, and I’ll try to make it clear when I’m using tools that are non-obvious — right now that includes custom CSS, the P2 theme (as interpreted by MT), Typekit fonts and several widgets.

Four months in, I can report that I am now part of a stealthy force that is as ingenious and disruptive as my one year old daughter. Striving always to be generous, while uniting code, art, life and the Internet to distribute the collective wisdom of a global community (we’re ambitious! ). I find it fascinating that we are this small — just 50 of us spread out all over the world — yet so mighty because we are part of a worldwide open source community.

So, yes, please stay tuned to find out what other creative brews we have cooking. And as always, help spread the news about WordPress!