Oct 2024
It was 14 years ago.
What felt like a substantial moment of my journey into web was only 2 years. From 2010 to 2012 I started many side projects, procrastinated a lot while in college, and got to connect with a lot of great guys. My WordPress era was a special one.
It started with me trying out so many themes from Themeforest. Why? Because I wanted my WordPress blog to stand out and I didn’t know how to design and develop one. But, I started to learn how to take a theme and tweak it—customize it. I chose AcosminMag2 for my two blogs.
LifeNotion was my first ever blog. I wanted to be like John Gruber and his blog, Daring Fireball. I always had thoughts about technology, especially Apple so I thought why not. This was 2010 and Twitter was still a new thing people were trying to understand. I would even find myself writing about Twitter for the college newspaper, Iowa State Daily. There was such a demand for "Twitter tips" that the infamous ProBlogger, Darren Rowse started TwiTip. I even posted here.
Months would go by and I’d have new ideas while still blogging on various blog names. Throughout all of this, what I can remember is that I stumbled across this blog about blogging called Blogussion. Very meta, but people that were in that scene definitely knew about this blog. Blogussion was created by Alex Mangini who was making WordPress skins for a WordPress theme product called Thesis. Yeah this was the OG drama of Matt Mullenweg and WordPress.
Anyways, I started contributing with a hot take post right away. It was titled "Stop Blogging About Blogging Already".
Alex really liked my posts. So him and I started connecting via Skype and we’d have remote work sessions. We established a friendship. While on s Skype call either of us would rarely talk. It was a way to keep us accountable to working on our side project. At the time, and I think still today the amount of work Alex put into Blogussion really set the bar for a great WordPress blog. On average we’d also have 20-40 comments per post.
Side note: Gah I miss the days of native commenting being popular.
While Blogussion was a team effort I had my own side projects (I mean really they were just logos, Twitter accounts, and domain names) and Alex had his WordPress theme shop called Kolakube with it’s primary product offering being Marketer’s Delight. He was focused and working hard on building this as a business. I witnessed this and this pushed me to buckle down and focus on one project.
Now, during this I had pivoted LifeNotion, the tech blog to a college tips blog. This is how I ended up meeting THE Thomas Frank of College Info Geek. Turns out, we both attended Iowa State University. So crazy. And then, I pivoted again to have LifeNotion be blog about blogging called UniqueBlog.
This all concluded when Alex sold Blogussion.
So then came a blog focused on all topics related to design. By this time I was making logos and loved tinkering with WordPress themes on the side that I wanted to get back into blogging about this focused interest of mine—design. I’ve always been a fan of minimal design and that’s where the name Resimplify came from—the process of simplifying something.
I started a relationship with the 8BIT team from Atlanta who were responsible for the Standard Theme. The relationship prospered so much that they wanted to partner with bloggers and I was one of them. Together we created designs and they were developing said designs for Resimplify.
But, this came to an abrupt halt. What’s wild is 8BIT ended up selling their blog, WP Daily to WP Engine. I know, right?!
What I thought was going to be my moment quickly turned into me back to square one. And now, in hindsight this would be the last time I personally used WordPress or felt part of the WP community.
It was a fun and very memorable 2 years. Thanks WordPress.