Mysterious Flame

So MF has had a new look for about 2 weeks now, and it’s finally got all it’s content back. (Hopefully I didn’t clog anyone’s RSS reader with a ton of “new” posts.) As I mentioned in my last post, I resuscitated the old posts from trusty old Google Reader, reformatted the text and images and tweaked a few grammatical points here and there, and viola! Mysterious Flame is back on the road. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten the comments back on the site. I’m honestly not sure how to do that since I’m not a power WordPress user (yet), but frankly, there weren’t that many to begin with, so I’m OK with it. If you want to go back and re-comment, by all means, do!

Hopefully I was able to retain the old Permalinks (I checked, but there are probably a few that I missed.) So if you see anything that looks out of place, a broken link, or something that’s missing, please let me know via the contact form.

Hello to newcomers

I want to welcome newcomers to feel free to poke around the site and explore. Have a look at the About page to see what this site is about, (“sharing ideas for maintaining creative momentum and finding ways to become ‘unstuck’”). Take a look at the Art & GTD Series, which is one of the main intellectual problems that got me to start the whole site to begin with. I’m also pretty proud of the posts I’ve done on Stuckness, Gumption, and Motivation.

Welcome back to old friends

Old friends, I hope you’ll enjoy the new site and find it more usable than it was before. I’m sure some things will be tweaked here and there, but I think this design will prove to be more versatile in the long run. For at least a year anyway. ;-)

Upcoming content

While it has indeed been a while since I’ve written anything new, I’ve got a few things in the pipeline, as well as some cool/useful tools I hope you’ll like.

Anyway, it’s good to be back, and I look forward to getting this ball rolling again. See you around!

So you might’ve noticed: Mysterious Flame has been down for a while. I’m a man, I can admit it: it’s my fault.

See, it all happened when I tried to take advantage of a special Executive Shared Plan package at A2 Hosting to combine different web hosting accounts into the same account (this site and my fine art portfolio, and I failed to back up the SQL database(s) correctly.

And MF went kablooey.

But there’s an upside to this! I’ve had some ideas knocking around for redesigning/restructuring the site as well as moving it from Drupal to WordPress. (Drupal was overkill for what I wanted out of the site, and the forum idea never took off.) So this was an unexpected (read: unplanned) opportunity to take a stab at it and try to get my webdev skills sharpened.

So take a look around, and please be patient as I hammer out some kinks. I’m still working on recovering all the old content (thanks to trusty ol’ Google Reader, I was able to find pretty much all my old content, and revise it here and there.) So, kids, there are two lessons to be learned here. Lesson #1: Always backup properly, especially your databases. If you don’t know how, find out! Lesson #2: When things go wrong, there’s an opportunity to create something newer and potentially better.

Back from the Beach

Mysterious Flame is back from a brief-ish hiatus. As you may know, it’s run by one guy (me), and the month of December was pretty crazy busy. Aside from the holiday craziness in general this time of year, my wedding and a honeymoon put other things on hold. Not that I’m complaining.

So I’ve been back in the studio, working on a painting and making some progress. I have a ton of ideas in mind for paintings that I want to do, so I’m anxious to finish the piece I’m currently working on and get started on some new pieces. I’m back at the keyboard, too, and I’ve got a ton of ideas for Mysterious Flame as well, for all sorts of topics to discuss and people to guest-write and interview.

So toss the RSS feed in your feed reader (I recommend Google Reader or Bloglines) and check back often for some neat stuff we’re going to explore.