Recently I implemented a new category structure on How to be an Original. That category structure makes a clear distinction between the posts that are on topic for the main topics of this blog, the personal posts that are related to my story and the other stuff like technical announcements.

How to be an Original is a personal blog AND a topical blog. Some time ago I discovered admitted that a large part of it is personal, and I’m okay with that.

At the same time I can imagine that some of you are not interested in my ramblings, dwellings and progress updates. I’ve got some good news for you: I created a special feed that contains only the posts that are on the main topics.

The full feed

This is the original feed and it contains all posts. If you are subscribed to How to be an Original, this is the one you’re reading now.

It contains all categories:

• WHO are you
• WHAT do you want
• HOW to get it
• My Story
• The Other Stuff

Subscribe to the full feed now.

The lean feed

This is a trimmed down version of the feed. It does NOT contain posts from the categories “My Story” and “The Other Stuff”. You’ll miss out on all of my adventures in failing in mastering goal setting, you won’t see my weekly reviews, you miss the technical announcements. If you’re thinking right now “I wouldn’t miss those posts at all!”, then this feed is for you. Clean and simple only the posts that are really on topic (so you wouldn’t get the one you’re reading now).

This feed contains the following categories:

• WHO are you
• WHAT do you want
• HOW to get it

Subscribe to the lean feed now.

The comment feed

This is just what it says it is. If you enjoy the comments here, and don’t want to miss a single one of them, this is your feed. Mind you, it contains ALL the comments. There’s no specific feed for comments on the “lean feed” items. And there’s always the possibility to subscribe to the comments for a specific post, just below the comment box.

Subscribe to the comment feed now.

If you’re a long time visitor to How to be an Original, you might have noticed that I’ve changed my categories this week. This was a job I wanted to do for a long time, but I have been procrastinating it for a long time.

Yes, even productivity bloggers procrastinate at times. That’s partly because we don’t always follow our own advice, but also because procrastination isn’t always bad. In Producticity Secrets I wrote: “Procrastination separates the urgent from the non-urgent tasks.”, changing my category structure wasn’t urgent at all. I even had doubts whether it was even important.

Covey’s quadrants in full swing

That all changed when I moved to Dreamhost. In the process the categories didn’t come through as they should have. I won’t go into the technical details, but in short: I just screwed up. Changing the category structure (or getting my old structure back) suddenly became urgent. I still wasn’t sure about their importance though.

That too, changed rapidly. Only days after writing that I kicked ass because I was on Alltop, my feed was taken down again. ACK! That’s not good at all. I soon figured out that it was most likely due to the fact that almost all my feed items changed over night, because they publish a category-feed! The same is true for the ultimate GTD index, and when I checked my status there, it quickly became clear that my category-feed was all messed up.

That sure was experiencing first-hand how the dynamics work throughout the quadrants of Covey’s time leadership matrix! Useful? Yeah. Enjoyable? Hmm.

The new categories

Back to the categories: the need for working on the category structure did not solve the very reason of my procrastination. I didn’t know yet what I wanted to do with them! But I’d better figure that out fast, because I needed to fix them on short notice.

The approach I took was to first sit down with my moleskine and start writing, drawing, mindmapping and so on. This usually sets my thoughts in motion. After that I sat down behind the computer and browsed my own blog thoroughly.

That was fun! I “discovered” quite some old posts that I had forgotten about. And somehow they pointed me towards what the category structure should be, and that a category - subcategory structure would fit me best. In the footer there’s a sentence about what How to be an Original is:

“How to be an Original is about discovering who you are, deciding what you want and learning how to get it.”

There you have it, it states the three main topics:

• WHO are you
• WHAT do you want
• HOW to get it

Not all posts fit into those three, so I made two more categories. One of the is called “My Story“, and it contains all the posts that are about me and my path towards living my legend, changing my habits, achieving goals and being productive. In the post about passionate bloggers I stated that How to be an Original is a personal blog, and I stand by that statement. But it’s also a topical blog, and the new category structure reflects that pretty well.

And yes, there’s one more category. It’s called “The Other Stuff“, and it contains…pretty much everything that doesn’t fit into any of the other categories. It’s kind of like the purgatory, only more fun

Meta-blogging

I realize that this is another post in which I write about writing, or blog about blogging. They are not the main focus of this blog, and as such they are in the sub-category “General” that resides under “The Other Stuff”. Enuff said?

Image by laffy4k

The move to Dreamhost is complete. Well…almost complete to be fair. The domain needs to be transferred, I need to cancel my old hosting, I need to … more technical boring stuff.

The most tricky part is behind me though. The words I write now are written on a back-end hosted at Dreamhost. And when you visit my blog online, the bits and bytes served to you originate from Dreamhost. Pretty ironic actually: my address is the same, but the physical location of my blog has changed by thousands of kilometers.

I’ll be doing more checks the coming days, and some tweaking alongside. If you notice anything that doesn’t work as expected, please visit the Contact page and let me know!

Blog Action Day

Last year was the first edition Blog Action Day. At the time the event was launched as an annual event. So this year they kept their word and Blog Action Day is back. This year the theme is Poverty. On October 15 bloggers, podcasters and videocaster from all over the world will unite and address the topic of poverty. Thousands of voices with a reach of millions talking about the topic from hundreds of different angles.

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

I have already signed up to participate again. This year I even took an hour of extra time, and translated a part of the site to Dutch. Read about Blog Action Day and sign up to participate.

Alltop

This week I got the confirmation that I kick ass! How to be an Original has been included in the GTD section of Alltop. It’s only the productivity / GTD feed that’s included and not the entire site, but that makes sure that there’s a good topical focus on Alltop.

Alltop is a new activity started by Guy Kawasaki a while back. Alltop shows the last five items of a selection of feeds, related to a specific topic. Go check out GTD on Alltop!

Switching hosts

I’ve thought about switching hosts for How to be an Original a while back, but I’ve finally made the decision to follow through on that thought. I’m switching for two reasons.

The first reason is that my current host causes downtime everyday! Around 1am the database server goes down, and since WordPress is a database driven application, the blog goes down as a result too. I rediscovered this phenomenon, ever since I switched back to being a night owl. The reason for this downtime is most likely a scheduled restart of the server. But 1 am might be okay for people in my timezone, but most visitors on How to be an Original are from North America and for them the downtime is during the afternoon and early evening. Not a good thing.

The second reason is simply financial. I’m consolidating various hosting plans and domain registrations to a single host. And it’s gonna save me a lot of money! I’ve chosen Dreamhost as my new host, and so far I’m liking it very much (only on board for two days…). Dreamhost has had their fair share of problems too, but I very much like the transparency they give on their operations (and troubles). And they have humor.

This week I’ll be moving this blog. I’m planning to make this a smooth transition, but switching hosts is challenging and there might be some glitches. There’s not going to be a new design, so you won’t notice what host you’re getting your data from. For the curious among you: if you see “hosted on Dreamhost” in the footer, you know where you’re getting your data from.

That’s it for now. Wish me luck…switching hosts is not quite my hobby.

In my last weekly review I promised that I would post about how working with the daily planning sheets turned out for me. But this post is going to be a really short one, because I’m about to leave on a ski trip.

• I learned that they’re useful when I use them
• I learned that they’re useful when I don’t use them (and wish I did)
• I learned that there’s a discrepancy between planned available time and reality
• I learned that some occurrences disrupt you’re planning to such an extent that you have to start all over
• I learned that most of those occurrences are out of your control
• I learned that the way you deal with those occurrences determines the extent of their effect
• And I learned to leave room for the eventuality of such an occurrence in case of activities with deadlines

Rocket science? Hardly, but obviously something I had to go through before understanding. Next step is to master this skill.

But first holidays! I’ve got one post for scheduled for next week for you guys. I’ll be back with a regular weekly review on March 9.