Welcome everyone to the new Random Sarah. I hope you like the new theme, but more importantly I hope you enjoy the new content. I’m moving towards having this be more of a personal blog again. I made an attempt to do that last year, but I’m giving it another shot.

I’m not yet ready to admit defeat and say that Tumblr killed my blog, but I will say that it wounded it. My Tumblr has become a place where I really can post about anything. It really is much more random than Random Sarah is these days.

But I’m not giving up on my blog just yet. I’m just allowing myself to explore all the different things I’m interested in here on Random Sarah.

Don’t worry, I still love the internet and I’m sure I will write about startups and tech from time to time. But I also want to feel free to post about art, photography, interior design, food, and all the other things that catch my interests.

That may seem a little unfocused, but I got some good advice recently about blogging, if you keep writing, it will get focused. That’s exactly what happened when I started Random Sarah back in 2008. The more I wrote, the more I found myself talking about social media, online communities, and gadgets. It was a great way for me to get involved in the community and learn. Now that I talk about a lot of that stuff on a daily basis for work, I want to explore new areas in the same way.

I hope you keep reading Random Sarah. Any feedback you have on the changes I’d love to hear it.

But when you build a community, you also need to see how it reacts to changes that you make. When I started blogging about health and food, those posts never got nearly as much positive feedback from the community as the posts I would write about iPhone apps, or my geek gift guide. Just because my personal interests shifted, I can’t expect the entire community I built to be interested in it too.

So even though this is my personal blog, I feel that the content has lost direction and I would really like to re-focus it. I will continue to write about technology, geeky things, and online communities here on Random Sarah.

However, writing about food, health and my diet is something that I have a growing interest in and while I won’t write about it here on Random Sarah anymore, I am pleased to announce that I am started a food blog called Eat Raw. I wanted to start from scratch and build a community there that is interested in learning more about raw foods, and health in general. I have different goals for Eat Raw now then goals I had when I started Random Sarah. Some of my goals are the become a featured publisher on FoodBuzz, to grow a community that is interested in Raw Foods, and possibly attend a Raw Foods culinary school and see where that takes me.

These are all things that I would love to happen, but it will take hard work and dedication to the community for it to grow. But I wanted to let all of my Random Sarah readers know about my new endeavor into the world of food blogging and to let you know that I will continue to bring you the same Random Sarah content here that you are used to.

Thank you again for supporting me and reading Random Sarah.

How does one find time to blog in the midst of all that?!

I’m starting to thing that I really have to start a writing schedule, and make the time to write the blog posts I want to write and make the videos I want to make.

I enjoy producing content, so it’s stressful for me when I don’t have time for that outlet in my life.

But I wanted to give you all an update on my weight loss goals, and staying healthy through all this stress. I’ve officially lost 20 lbs!

When I first started at Postling, it seemed very difficult to stick with my regular eating schedule. When you are suddenly out of your element, you lose control of your food to a certain extent. And if you aren’t the type of person who plans every meal in advance, suddenly not being in your own kitchen can make deciding what to eat very difficult! (especially when you are vegan)

I’m starting to feel like I’ve regained control and even picked up a few great tips on how to eat anywhere and stick to my plan. (more on that in a later blog post)

Stepping on the scale and seeing a lower number than before still feels amazing, and I’m looking forward to losing the next 20 lbs!

What is your opinion of people who have “personal blogs” (that are clearly about a single topic or have a main focus) deviating from the normal scheduled programing to talk about something else that is important/interesting to them. Should they find somewhere else to write about it? Should they just post it on their blog and let the readers decide if they like it or not?

I’m posting this both on my tumblr, and on randomsarah.com

If you read either blog, I really want to hear your opinion. Also, I’ve been thinking about changing the link in my twitter profile to direct to tumblr instead of randomsarah.com, but I’m not sure which would give new follows the best idea of who I am, what I talk about, etc.

Thoughts?

It talks about the trend of Blogazines (blog that is designed like a magazine) not a magazine wordpress theme but rather designing a creative layout for each new blog post, based on the content itself. This requires skill, patience, dedication to the content and, most of all, effort on the part of the designer!

Reading these blogs is amazing. The content speaks to you visually and really pulls you in with the design. One such blog is Dustin Curtis. Here is what he said about creating this type of blog.

What prompted you to create a “blogazine” instead of a traditional blog?

I’m never satisfied with my work. Invariably, two weeks after finishing a design, I feel like I can do better. When I originally tried to design my blog, I kept finishing a design, hating it and starting over. This happened ten or twelve times until I finally gave up. Eventually, I realized that each post could stand on its own and be its own design that fit the content. Despite the holdbacks of HTML and CSS, it has worked much better than I had even anticipated.

Advantages?

The main advantage is one I didn’t anticipate. Doing a blogazine article requires a lot more work than a traditional blog post, and that has kept me on my toes; because such a large investment is required, I publish only what I feel are my best articles.

This seems to keep the quality fairly high. I start four or five articles for every one I publish. If I had a normal blog, that wouldn’t be the case — the other four articles would be published too, even though they wouldn’t be as good as the ones I do end up publishing.

Disadvantages?

The biggest disadvantage is that CSS and HTML are terrible technologies that weren’t designed for page layout. They were designed for structured content presentation, like for a newspaper, where all the elements throughout the website are the same and are re-used. But I’m trying to make a magazine, where the content and presentation are inextricably mixed and unique. The way presentation CSS is supposed to be decoupled from the content HTML is totally counter to the mission I am trying to accomplish, and it makes coding the articles frustrating, messy and time-consuming.

My solution to this problem has basically been to ignore convention and use inline styling for most of the presentation code and extract the website-wide presentation layer into a separate CSS document. This takes forever and is not ideal. To put it lightly, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with CSS.

I have often wished that I could create blog posts in InDesign. I come from a layout design background and I always had so much fun with InDesign and Photoshop creating interesting, yet still readable design. Unfortunately it would be very difficult for me to create this type of blog. While I do posses the design skill, I do not have any real HTML or CSS knowledge to bring the post to life online.

I hope to see more blogs like this one in the future. I think they are a great way to highlight online content.

I admit it can be very hard at times but you have to come up with ways to get over the blogging blues.

One of my favorite blogs, Style Me Pretty, just launched a supplemental blog called Backstage, where they write about the in’s and out’s of blogging as a business. The blog is a great read and recently Abby Larson wrote a post about Blogging Blues that I really wanted to share with you guys.

I’ve been noticing that a few of my favorite bloggers have been getting the burnout blues these days. And I totally get it. In this industry, it’s really hard to stay on top. To stay fresh and innovative and to approach each new day with a different set of enthusiastic phrases. And although I love what I do, the blogging blues can bite you when you least expect it. So today, I thought I would remind myself and all of you how to bring back that sparkle to the job that you know you love…you just might have forgotten why you love it.

1. Keep a gratitude journal. Sounds big time cheesy, I know. But writing down the reasons that we are grateful for our jobs, for our creative brains, for our lives…will remind us all as to just how lucky we are.
2. Take a break from the mundane and for one day, make it all about the fun. What does this mean? Well…if you are a florist and are bogged down in the business of being a florist, set aside one day to design flowers for your closest friends. Totally YOUR designs, influenced only by your love of your craft. For a wedding blogger this might mean spending a day with a cup of hot chocolate, sifting through all of your favorite vendor sites, finding inspiration in back copies of domino magazine, poring through galleries of your favorite weddings. Even reading your OWN blog to rediscover your voice, your passion.
3. Reserve a day just for housekeeping. It will be a brutal day…paperwork, number crunching, computer cleaning…but in the end, it will free up your brain space to get back to what you love.
4. Reserve a day just for brainstorming. Tait and I had a 2 hour meeting the other day to hash out all of the little details we needed to in order to move forward. It was hugely fulfilling and definitely reignited my motivation and excitement. Getting together a brainstorming meeting with your team will definitely bring back a little buzz. By encouraging everyone to participate (interns too)  in your session, you’ll inspire them, you’ll potentially discover a different perspective, you’ll get the fun brewing among everyone.
5. At the end of the day, shut the computer off, swear off emails and grab a glass of wine or a hot cup of tea. Take a moment to think about your day and to find the bright spots, the spots that make your stresses all worthwhile.

I know that these aren’t particularly mind blowing ideas, but these are little things that I do to give myself a pick-me-up. Of course, we all struggle with different parts of our lives. Running a family, keeping a nice home, maintaining relationships with our friends, running a business. It’s basically impossible to do all of these really well but it isn’t impossible to fall in love with the journey.

A few things I wanted to add to this list:

1. Don’t be afraid to re-blog. If someone wrote a post that you like, if it’s something you think your readers would benifit from, or if you feel like you have something to add to that post, don’t hesitate to re-blog the post. As long as you give credit to the original author and don’t try to claim the ideas as your own.
2. Read more. If you are feeling like you are in a blogging rut, read more blogs. And start reading blogs that might not fall into your “category” of blogging. Technically Random Sarah is my personal blog, but it focuses on social media and web 2.0. But I read a lot of food blogs, fashion blogs, friends personal blogs, tech blogs, local blogs. It helps me see what is out there and really reflect on how I am writing my own content.

You have to love your blog, if you don’t know why you are blogging maybe it’s time to take a break from it and reflect on why you started blogging in the first place. Let me know what helps you stay motivated to blog in the comments.

(p.s. if you are reading this in a feed reader or via the email subscriptions, please take a moment to vist the site and let me know what you think of the new theme)

I have been wanting to give Random Sarah a face lift for some time, so I finally did!

I know many of you liked my old theme. But the good news is that you can download it for your own blog if you like!

The new theme keeps a lot of what I liked from my old theme (still Helvetica, my favorite font) But now the blog is my favorite color green! (You might remember that was the color of my wall in my old room in NYC, so I’ve been missing the color)

This new theme has a few fun extra features that I will be tweaking over the new few days, so please excuse me if something don’t look right just yet. If you scroll down you will find a section just for videos. (Not everything is playing correctly just yet, because they are not all formatted correctly) There is also a section at the bottom called “talking points”. This pulls up the posts from my archives that have the most comments. (I thought it was a really interesting way to highlight old content)

The theme also has a special tabbed module in the sidebar showing most popular posts, most recent posts, and recent comments.

The theme is originally supposed to be used as a magazine theme. It has other “magazine like” features. One in particular is a featured posts module at the top. (which I have not yet decided if I want to use) although it might be helpful in highlighting content from my blog, while still incorporating content from my tumblr.

I’m hoping that Random Sarah will be a place that shows everything that I am up to online. I will incorporating more content from my tumblr, and there is also flickr content in the sidebar. I also think this new theme will help me get back to providing some of the random content I used to post on this blog. It is a personal blog after all.

I would really LOVE your feedback on this theme, so let me know what you think!

I have met SOOO many great people and had the opportunity to be a part of such a great community. I am so thankful.

Over the last few days I have known that this anniversary was coming up and I have had some time to reflect on why I got into this space in the beginning. I was looking through my archives from last April which was my first month of writing randomsarah.com.

My writing has changed a lot, my style on video has changed a lot, and the content that I choose to put out has certainly changed. But I think it has changed for the better.

I am very happy with where this blog has come in a year. I have learned a lot about community, blogging, video blogging, podcasting, wordpress, SEO, and so much more.

I have been feeling that my current obsession with tumblr has taken away from my blogging here, but I am making efforts to change that. I signed up for ProBlogger‘s 31 days to a better blog challenge, which will start on April 6th and I will try my best to post EVERY DAY. In addition to that, I also am participating in Video Blogging Week, which will take place from April 5th-11th and will be one new video a day.

Last night I attended an event at New Work City for Runway Project called Resume 2.0. Whitney Hess was speaking about picking your one liner that describes what you do. It made me realize that I am doing so many things, how can I condense them into one line?

I talked to Whitney after the event and she helped me remember why I got into this space in the first place, I started this because I wanted to do online video. I was watching a ton of podcasts and I knew that video podcasting and online video was something I wanted to do.

So I am going to work more on focusing my efforts toward my end goal. I thank you all for contributing to this blog over the last year and supporting me. You have been the BEST Community I could ever ask for! Thank you all for continuing to inspire me to be better.

So for some reason I had it in my head that tomorrow, April 3rd, was the 1 year anniversary of this blog, but I was WRONG! It was actually today and I missed it

That is because April 3rd was my first video post. So I will do the full, one year of the blog, recap, tomorrow as planned. But I still feel bad for missing this anniversary.

But to hold you over, here is one of my first posts from the first day of randomsarah.com a whole YEAR ago.

I know I have been away from video blogging for a while, but I am back! For all of my new followers on twitter, tumblr, and everywhere else, hi! This is me!

In the begining I mentioned Chris Brogan, he is awesome, check him out!

Also you can check out my Tumblr for more random stuff.

Keep checking back here for more video blogs in the future!