Maybe it's the nice weather, or maybe it's the feeling that everyone — including myself — keeps saying the same things over and over again, but I haven't had the urge to write a blog article for at least the past month or so. And despite my disdain for writing blog articles about blogging — and of apologizing for the lack of content — I am going to do just that.

So let's take a step back to the redesign of our site and blog a few months ago. I want to talk about one of the major goals we had for the new version: freedom from form. With the redesign, we wanted to escape from the traditional blog format and treat this site more like a magazine. We wanted to have different types of content, from featured articles, to quick blurbs and whatever else in between. We wanted to move away from posts arranged newest to oldest and start to think about content through context, rather than chronology. Of course there were technical issues to be dealt with — which is why we decided to build our own proprietary CMS instead of customizing our old Wordpress installation — but the main shift was in mindset, not in how we used a certain tool. We needed to stop thinking blog, and start thinking web-based periodical.

The overall goal was more diverse content, arranged in a more relevant manner. We also wanted to show a little more personality, since I feel we come of a little dry (though you can partially chalk that up to the process of finding a voice). So did we succeed? As far as I'm concerned, only partially. I still don't feel like our personalities come through as intended, and our plan to diversify content has been hampered by our lack of content (lately, anyways).

So what's the cause of this? Well, unfortunately, one negative side effect of our newfound ability to easily post short blurbs, is this newfound ability to easily post short blurbs. Writing blog articles can be time-consuming and sometimes daunting, but these shorts can be written and posted in about 10 minutes, which leads to many more shorts being posted than featured articles. So has this freedom from form hurt the quality of our content? (You can let us know.) Is the constraint of the blog post a good thing? It certainly does force you to write in a certain way, preventing you from being lazy. On the other hand, the ability to add shorts does increase the frequency of posts — even if it is sometimes at the expense of quality.

Another cause might be personal burnout. I don't know about you guys, but I'm not finding too many conversations on the "blogosphere" very stimulating as of late. I'm also finding very little to add to the conversation myself. Maybe it's because there's no cause to champion as strongly as before (see: web standards). Or maybe it's because everyone is burned-out from the use>over-use>abuse of everything "Web 2.0." Whatever the cause, it seems to be somewhat widespread. Maybe it will just take a summer recharge to spark something. Or maybe everyone has decided to do a lot more walking and a lot less talking. We are certainly trying to do as much with some pretty extensive work on billQ (more on this later).

But anyway, I just wanted to give my personal thoughts concerning our experiment with this blog since there is an underlying discussion to be had about whether freedom from form — whether in writing, or design, or anything else — leads to greater benefits, or greater blunders. Feel free to share your thoughts. Also please chime in if you too are experiencing blogging burnout. It will give me some company.

And if this post comes off as a ramble-fest, it's because along with my lack of urge to write articles, I have also lost my urge to edit them, should I somehow manage to accomplish the former. I'm not apologizing for this, just making it known. Plus, it's like 100 degrees in here.