I’ve been busy over on the other side lately, so be sure you are following along over there. There is some very cool stuff coming in the next month and change that is MINI related and I’m pretty excited about all of it.

I’m also going to making some changes (again) to this site. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many resumes I send out, I just can’t seem to make anything happen. So it’s time to take off on my own and try to generate some income anyway possible. I need a website that reflects that.

What does that mean to you? I’m not sure yet. Of course it will be cool, but that might mean that I move my more ‘personal’ blog posts over w(t)f and keep this more technical, which I’ve already started.

Anyway, go to the MINI sites and see what’s happening. If you are in SoCal, stop by and say hi when I’m at MINI of Ontario or catch me at AMVIV with almost the entire WRR crew.

Yet another anniversary of my time on the internet has passed. And by quite a bit.

Turns out, I have now, officially, been putting words to screen (and it’s verifiable) for just a bit over 7 years! If you were to go back through the archives here, you will find my first post, at what was windthefrog.net, happened on November 5th, 2003. Of course, I’ve been doing for a bit longer, but those were posts that were eaten by Blogger or vaporized by Greymatter when I switched over.

7 years and change. Anyone curious what that means? According to the handy dandy Wordpress Dashboard it means

• 1,428 posts contained within 41 categories
• There have been 1,927 comments made, 1,911 approved
• I’ve used 642 tags

I’m not really sure what the word count is, but figure that each of the posts that I make here is usually around 300, than means that I’ve typed out over 400,000 words. Staggering. And that’s just here.

To get the full look back, I need to include the posts from dbmini.us, which started September, 2002, those stats would look something like this.

• 2,491 posts contained within 68 categories
• There have been 3,760 comments made
• I’ve used 721 tags

Using the same math as above, but assuming an average word count of 200 per post, that gives me a grand total over the past 7 years of almost 500,000 words that I have put to screen.

And that doesn’t even count the 6,657 posts on Twitter or the 2,591 posts on Tumblr. It also doesn’t count the hundreds of posts at Motoringfile that I have my name of them, or the 658 posts at White Roof Radio. If I had to guess, that’s got to be close to 750,000 words that I have put to screen in the last 7 years (and change).

Amazing.

I have decided to go back to the “I wonder who will find me” model of personal publishing, instead of forcing it onto your screens. I’ve been pushing stuff to Twitter long enough, so you know it’s all here. Now to see if you keep coming back.

To be a little more clear, anything that I post here, on dbmini, w(t)f, Vimeo or Viddler will no longer automatically get posted to Twitter, which also no longer automatically posts to Facebook.

I will be putting everything back into Friend Feed if you want a one-stop-shopping experience for everything I share online, but that’s as far as it goes.

If you are one of my Facebook or Twitter followers and want to be able to keep up with my shit, might I recommend taking the time now to discover the absolute brilliance that is RSS and Google Reader. Everything I do has an RSS feed and it’s a great way to keep up. Bonus is that there are a ton of sites out there that also have RSS feeds, so you can easily subscribe to them to get the latest updates.

If you are one of my Twitter or Facebook followers that is tired of reading duplicate posts or seeing links from me, you won’t any longer. You’re welcome.

Finally, I will be removing FB Connect from donburnside.com and reset the Wordpress comment rules appropriately.

As always, thank you for your time.

After thinking about it all day yesterday and the day before and getting feedback from some you, I have decided to do a complete reorg of all my sites. You see the new nav starting above. Not the final draft, of course, more proof of concept. It will be something like that.

Here is my current plan.

• Move dbmini to it’s own Wordpress installation under db.com/mini. dbmini will remain online in it’s current form and place indefinitely. It’s still my primary email address (which is easy to change) and there are a ton of inbound links to that site. I will put up a page say that’s it’s moved and not updated there any more.
• Incorporate w(t)f into db.com as the blog portion of the site. w(t)f will continue until the domain name expires, at which point I will let it go.
• Create a new section called video. All videos will go here, MINI and not MINI related.
• Create a new section called audio. Try to find a way that posts from WRR and THCS will import automatically. If not, I will figure something else out. Maybe at the very least post links from the feeds.
• Create a new section called pressd. This will live in it’s own WP install and database.

Mechanically, this will work. The real trick is going to be in the integration which I will talk more about after the jump.

Coming up with a way to tie all of this together visually is going to be tricky because while I want there to be some consistency, I also want to be able to keep the design of each section as unique as possible. Plus keep the navigation uniform, or as uniform I can.

Then there will be issue of the feeds and getting people to resubscribe. I think I will setup feedburner feeds for dbmini and here soon and point you to those at your earliest convenience. Watch this space for more info. Otherwise, each section will have it’s own feed.

So, when it’s done, the sitemap would look something like this.

• donburnside.com – Will still contain what it does now, for the most part.
• donburnside.com/mini – dbmini will live here
• donburnside.com/wtf – regular blog posts will live here
• donburnside.com/video
• donburnside.com/pressd – For Random links
• donburnside.com/audio – for the audio shows

While the priority for this is high, it is a non-paying gig so I will be able to work on it when time allows. And it’s also a fairly involved project. I say if I can get it done before the end of September I’ll be in pretty good shape.

Keep an eye on this space for updates as they happen. You know, like changes to the feed.