General

Like every year, I did less and more than I thought I would in 2011.

I vis­ited New Zealand for the first time, one of the most beau­ti­ful places I’ve ever seen in my life. I flew up in a heli­copter and landed next to a pris­tine moun­tain lake inac­ces­si­ble oth­er­wise. Its beauty took my breath away. One of the high­lights of the year, as well as my life. If there is a Heaven, it prob­a­bly looks like this.

I lost my first car, a clas­sic 1991 BMW E30. I loved lit­tle 20-year old Snoopy, and my dad was espe­cially attached to her. Her gear-box had died and it didn’t make eco­nom­i­cal sense to repair her. My heart still aches a bit when I see old pho­tos of her.

I got engaged dur­ing a lovely, happy week­end getaway.

I unearthed my pur­pose: “A life on pur­pose is one of ful­fill­ment through growth and appre­ci­a­tion. It is a life of artis­tic expres­sion and coura­geous explo­ration, inspired by love, wis­dom and honor.”

I learned how to cook, both healthy and not so healthy dishes.

I revis­ited my friend the monk in Thai­land and filmed an inter­view with him there. It was the ful­fill­ment of a cou­ple of dreams, and a risk taken on a new one. The final video inter­view isn’t per­fect, but I’m proud of it and I gained more from the trip than I could have imag­ined before­hand. Thank God for dear, frank friends who pushed me out of my com­fort zone and encour­aged me to do it.

You’ve never seen Life Coaches Blog look so good.

She’s gone through a com­plete redesign, thanks to the Cur­rents Word­Press theme from WooThemes. This is how she used to look:

The pre­vi­ous, third-generation design of Life Coaches Blog.

This is how she looks now:

Life Coaches Blog, redesigned.

Why Revise a Dor­mant Site?

But you might won­der why I both­ered revamp­ing the site, since I’ve shut­tered Life Coaches Blog since 2008 and have no inten­tions to con­tinue post­ing there.

Over 100,000 Vis­its in 2011

The main rea­son is that Life Coaches Blog still gets a good amount of traf­fic, even though it’s nowhere near when the site was still active. On aver­age, Life Coaches Blog received 11,816 vis­its per month this past year. Posts like What You Didn’t Know About Bruce Lee’s Kick-Ass Suc­cess, 9 Keys to Over­com­ing Dif­fi­cult Times and Get­ting Your Life on Track remain popular.

Besides these three arti­cles, there are over 500 per­sonal devel­op­ment posts still freely avail­able on the site. But the pre­vi­ous design of Life Coaches Blog didn’t show­case the wealth of arti­cles very well, it sim­ply show­cased posts in a reverse chrono­log­i­cal order.

The new Cur­rents theme changes that, the home page lay­out shows you more posts at a glance across mul­ti­ple cat­e­gories, not just the most recent but also the most pop­u­lar, recent cat­e­gory posts and high­lighted posts. This should help new vis­i­tors find inter­est­ing posts around the site more easily.

I write every sin­gle day. It’s my day job. But because I write every sin­gle day, there are days when I reach home, and the words dry up when I want to write for myself. I don’t know if an exhaustible well is an apt metaphor for the cre­ative writ­ing process, but it feels like that to me. Per­haps it’s a mat­ter of sta­mina; some writ­ers – like some run­ners – have more sta­mina than oth­ers, whether it’s a mat­ter of born tal­ent or a trained resource. Or maybe it’s sim­ply a mat­ter of a choked dam, and all I need to do is wait for the dam to break.

Paiboon’s video is going to take even longer than I hoped. A rough cut, about 1/3 of the way, has been done, but I real­ized I know a lot less than I need to about video edit­ing, so I need to take some extra time out to re-learn a few things, and then to head back to editing.

That lit­tle announce­ment I promised nearly a month ago is also tak­ing longer than I’d hoped, but things are mov­ing along and I’m cer­tain its launch shouldn’t be too far off.

In the mean­time, 21 Drag­ons has gone through some minor design tweaks here and there. There’s a new About page with a photo of me pos­ing pen­sively. The Archives page has received a usabil­ity boost thanks to the Clean My Archives Word­Press plu­gin. The text font has been changed from serif to sans-serif, and I’m using a sin­gle font face for the entire site which should help it look cleaner.