OlberBlog | Chris Olberding’s personal website | Thoughts on life, design, and everything! | Jacksonville, Florida |

I created this blog largely to familiarize myself with developing custom WordPress themes and have since struggled to conceptualize what, if anything, would be appropriate to write in this space. This struggle is compounded by the fact that I own a web design company with it’s own, though neglected, blog and as a business owner I am forced to be cognizant of the nature of the information and opinions put out on the ‘interwebs’. So then, this post is an attempt to talk through and define the purpose of this space.

What Isn’t Appropriate

The role of this blog is sandwiched between what would be more appropriate for the Station Four blog, what is inappropriate to publish publicly at all, such as topics belonging more to a personal journal, and what is inappropriate to publish publicly given my role as a business owner.

Of those three categories “Publish at all” is easiest to define; no posts on personal relationships, events, etc. The line is a little more blurred concerning the Station Four blog. Tutorials on technology and design should clearly go there rather than here. Same with professional analysis of market trends or happenings in design and marketing. However I am not sure if a personal editorial on design trends or just general thoughts and ramblings on the subject would be more apropos on the OlberBlog or not.

Deciding what isn’t appropriate to publish due to my role as a business owner is still trickier. Should posts about politics be avoided. How about thoughts on larger yet still contentious issues such as religion, philosophy, and art? Should I worry that a post where I outline my thoughts and interpretations of contemporary art might later offend or alienate a current or future client?

Safe Topics

I am a pretty large consumer of entertainment. I watch a large number of movies and probably listen to ten new albums a week. However, I don’t have an interest in putting together proper reviews of these things. Perhaps lists might work “top 10 albums of the month” and the like.

I would say lists and observations about new services and sites that don’t directly overlap or have implications on design and marketing might be appropriate here but I scarcely would know what services and sites I find interested don’t.

Perhaps community events and things going on in the Jacksonville community could go here. I have a couple posts on the S4 blog that are very narrowly focused on what the company’s been up to; posts like those don’t really belong in a blog that you’d preferably want people outside of Jacksonville to consume.

So maybe any topic that involves actually knowing who I am, what Station Four is, or living in Jacksonville should go here. General topics of interest to the design/marketing community at large would be more appropriate on the S4 blog. So a post about the Jacksonville Food Fight, which we are a sponsor of, would go here even though my relationship to it is through Station Four.

My sister recently dug up some photos from a report she did in the fourth grade on “Her Favorite Relative”, which was, of course, me. God knows why, I was awful.

At the gentle and repetitive urging of GoDaddy I renewed my personal domain names that had been sitting around unused for a little more than a year. Faced with the likelihood that if I didn’t figure out something to do with them I’d be throwing a few dozen bucks to these empty domains in another year, I decided to get out of my asp.net hole and finally play around with WordPress.

First hurdle was to come up with a design, or rather convince myself to throw something, anything, up because if I got the notion of spending time on or coming up with a design I actually thought was good for my own site, then I’d never get out of Photoshop. So found an old picture of Pinky, threw it up and Voila! Next!

Topic and Purpose

As my personal blog, I intend to use this space for posts that may not be appropriate for my business blog, S4 Blog. Music, local Jacksonville issues and events, as well as business and web design stuffs that I’d feel more comfortable being presented by the ‘me-individual’ instead of the ‘me-corporate-monster’.

Setting up and coding the theme for the OlberBlog

Setting up the blog was easier than I expected. Actual database and admin setup was easy. Took very little research to figure out how to code a template from scratch and I appreciated that some of the function calls to pull in data allowed for customization of the markup via passing arguments.

I look forward to determining where it might be appropriate to employ or suggest using WP to clients as opposed to a more robust (and .NET) blog or our in-house custom CMS. In a fast paced client environment there is a lot of pull to stick to a single framework since expertise and experience leads to faster deployment and larger margins, so it’s nice to step out and work in other frameworks, languages, libraries, or even packages like WordPress every once in a while.