The Renaissance of Bridging the Nerd Gap

Whew.

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks.

Evernote Essentials 3.0 hit the digital shelves to, dare I say, rave reviews.

I managed to switch my entire business over to Office Autopilot[1]. There were some hiccups, for sure, but it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in recent memory.

Finally, my beloved nerdgap.com has undergone a serious facelift thanks to the excellent, talented folks over at Creativity Included.

Since all of that happened (and it all happened in the span of about 4 days), my life has been consumed with email, backend logistics and simply trying to keep my head above water. Thankfully, the business has begun to subside and I can try to get back to something resembling normalcy.

Anyhow, that’s all fine and dandy; I wanted to talk about something else today.

This site has, since its inception, had a little trouble figuring out what it wanted to be when it grew up. With fits and starts, it has historically dabbled in technology and productivity and various combinations of the two (with occasional detours into only barely-related topics). Frankly, its ambivalence has caused me no small amount of annoyance over the last couple of years and I recently decided that it needed to approach the idea of being a grown-up site a little more seriously.

So, we had a long chat, this blog and I, and we came to an understanding, which I’ll outline for you now…

No more programming stuff

Well, I won’t say no more (because sometimes my status as a pretend programmer can lend itself to bending great applications into unexpected shapes), but this will be kept to a serious minimum. That stuff will, in all likelihood, find its home on my other blog that almost nobody reads.

More about the reader, less about me

One of my small handful of talents in this world is that I am, believe it or not, rather adept at explaining semi-complicated things in digestible, easily-understood ways. I have hitherto mostly invented most of my post topics out of my own head and only occasionally regarded the input and feedback of my wonderful audience in deciding what to write about.

That’s over.

I want this site to be, in equal parts, helpful, entertaining, and thought-provoking. In order to achieve these goals, I need your help, which is why…

Comments are back

I know it’s de rigeur to disable comments and loudly decry them as the tool of the devil (heck, I did it awhile back, albeit not very loudly), but if I’m serious about making this whole project reader-focused instead of me-focused, I feel it’s necessary to provide a venue where my attractive readers can become part of the conversation. They’re easy enough to ignore if you hate them, of course, but I think that lots of folks will appreciate their resurrection. Time will tell, I suppose.

Regarding the topics discussed here…

I have a note in Evernote somewhere where I had brainstormed a bunch of possible subtitles for this site. None of them ever really expressed what I wanted them to as succinctly as I wanted them to, but the best one of the bunch went something like this:

“Technology, efficiency, and business — with an Apple garnish.”

The mere mention of business will undoubtedly have some of you recoiling in horror. I understand, truly I do, but the fact is that I run a small business and such topics have become profoundly interesting to me.

Does this mean you’re going to start writing about conversions and copywriting and other such things?!

No. There are plenty of other sites out there that do that far better than I ever could. My hope is that the business stuff will give a new angle to the other two sides of my “topical triangle.”

Speaking of…

Efficiency isn’t the same as productivity, if you ask me. Despite often being used interchangeably, I think they’re distinct concepts. I’m going to delve deeper into this in a future post, but suffice it to say that I’m far more interested in how to work better rather than how to simply produce more.

And, since I’m an Apple guy, much of the technology discussed here will probably be Apple stuff. That’s what I know and I’d rather play to my strengths.

“And much, much more!”

We’ll see how all of this pans out. I’m hopeful that it will, but your help in making this place a fun and informative hangout is going to be pretty crucial.

And, using the freshly-minted comment form below, I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of this stuff. Thanks for reading — I appreciate your time and will do my best not to squander it.

Oh, and the newsletter is going to be a big part of things going forward, so you should probably just sign up now.