New Blog, Who Dis
This is my new blog, with the blog formerly known as Paranoid Enough (soon) redirecting here.
Why? While I liked the blog title (with its DFW deep cut), it also made me seem like a bit of a crackpot. People should be able to make that determination for themselves after reading my work. 😃
If I’m writing online, I want the benefits of having my thoughts tied to my real name. Despite owning this domain, my blog wasn’t hosted here. On Paranoid Enough, you had to do a big of digging to find my name and contact info, so I wasn’t taking as much credit as I could have been for my writing. At the same time, my writing wasn’t really pseudonymous, representing the worst of both worlds.
I also grew tired with the challenges inherent in self-hosting a blog. When I launched the site, a custom Jekyll framework was great for learning frontend and web development skills. However, I no longer want to be spending my time writing custom CSS that ends up only working on some devices.[1] I’m now hosting this site on Ghost, which handles much of what is needed under the hood to grow an audience, including SEO optimization, site analytics, and built-in newsletter functionality.
I have mixed feelings about this. I still really like clean simplicity in the design of Paranoid Enough. I also feel a certain nostalgia when I think of that time in my life: the work it took to spin up the site, the embarassment that I feel when I read my old writing. It's similar to the feeling I get when looking at a high school yearbook or an old home video, a mourning for the person I used to be and an appreciation for how far I've come.
But ultimately, my hope is that:
- These changes will allow me to solely focus on writing and publishing
- The rebranding will serve me better long-term.[2]
The site isn’t perfect, but I’m optimizing for getting my reps in — for hitting the “Publish” button — rather than making countless minor tweaks to formatting and language that no one but myself will notice.
Onward and upward.
Ironically, I've spent far too much time formatting this new site and manually moving posts over from my old site. I hope that is a one-time cost. ↩︎
This old Mark Manson post helped convince me that this needed to be done:
↩︎And it was on that beach that I came up with two ideas that would change my life.
The first was changing this website to markmanson.net (BRANDING!!! LEVERAGE POINTS!!!). Within six months, traffic increased 5-fold and my income 3-fold. The site would soon be read by millions of people, shared in over 100 countries, and get me published in some of the most prestigious publications around the world. And this would all happen while doing fewer hours of work than I had been doing before.
