The sidebar has long been a source of frustration for me. I would like this blog to be as helpful and interesting as possible, and the only place to add all the extra information I wanted to share was down the sidebar. However, more information always meant more clutter… and I’m trying to de-clutter everything in my life – including the blog.

I work better in a clear space. My ideal office is a Zen Garden. So is my ideal living environment. Not for any spiritual or mystical reasons – I just concentrate better, feel better and do better work in a large, calm and uncluttered environment. Some people thrive on chaos. I can cope with it, but it’s not my preference.

One thing I found out when we moved from NZ was that throwing stuff out was incredibly liberating. There’s nothing more freeing than filling a skip with the crap that occupies space in your house, selling everything else in a garage sale, and then finally throwing out the stuff you thought wasn’t crap, but after being unable to shift it for 20 cents on a Saturday morning, conceding that crap is exactly what it is.

So, having done it once or twice in Auckland, and now just about at the point to need to do it all again here in Birmingham, I’m starting with the blog.

Here’s what I did:
1. Delete the live bookmarks
If you actually want to see what I’m reading on the internet, then you should make the most of del.icio.us. Set yourself up an account, and in the Inbox section, you could always add me as a ‘watched user’. That way, when I bookmark something, you’ll see it. Otherwise, you could just periodically head over to my del.icio.us page and look at what I’ve been bookmarking. You see, del.icio.us is far more useful to you on its own, than my cluttered presentation of my own links down the side of the blog ever was. It’s time you went and looked at it yourself if you’re interested – and just enjoy the extra breathing room here if you’re not.

2. Ditch the Last FM links
I love Last FM. They’re great – you should check them out. But this blog is not a radio station.

3. Scrap the ads
Purely for the purposes of research, I toyed with the idea of carrying advertising. Many of the people I consult or train are interested in secondary revenue streams, and the Google AdSense and AdBrite services fill this need well. But having established that, I don’t need them here. I already earn a salary to think about this stuff, and while I don’t consider this site a ‘work blog’ by any stretch of the imagination, I do consider blogging an integral part of my job – whether I’m writing about tech stuff or not. At any rate, blogging is not how I’m making my money. It’s just something that I do. So the ads have filled their purpose, and now I can pack them away and leave a clean space.

4. Put away the archives
If you’re here for the first time, you might want to read the last 2 or 3 posts just to get the sense. You’re not going to read the last 10 posts – or the last four years worth. I promise to be at least as interesting as I was a month ago. There’s no need to go digging the deep archives. If you happen to need that stuff, it’ll turn up on a Google search.

I’ve had some very popular posts – some that have had tens of thousands of readers – but the popularity of those posts was always about the number of people who were enthusiastic about the topic, and not to do with the fact that it was me that had written about it. If I was genuinely that interesting, I’d have tens of thousands of regular readers (I don’t).

5. Remove the junk
You don’t need to see buttons of sites that aggregate this or other blogs. You don’t need to see how many people have visited this site. You don’t need all that crap that other websites encourage me to put down the side of my blog in order to encourage readership. I’m no longer in the business of encouraging readership. As far as this blog goes, it’s just for you. I don’t care about all those other people. If people want to link to me, fine. If not, that’s cool too.

The purpose of this blog is not to advertise this blog.

You see, what I get out of blogging is blogging. It’s cool to be read by other human beings, but that stopped being the motivation when I noticed all the other benefits. I think my writing’s improved over the past four years. I think my clarity of communication has benefited. I think it keeps me in touch with the zeitgeist. It helps me understand the online environment in a really hands-on way.

But most of all, blogging, like therapy, is a way of overhearing what you think. When you do that, you can try and figure out what it means. If you don’t sit down and put it in words – either on paper, in text, over a beer with a mate, or to a qualified practitioner, all you have is cloud.

It’s a bit like teaching: how can I know what I think unless I have to explain it to somebody else?

So – I think it helps me to think out loud. If you find that interesting, cool. In order to think out loud with more clarity, I need a zen garden approach to the blog – or at least as close as I can practically come to it.

You’ll see further changes here – and they’ll all be in the spirit of simplicity: ‘less is more’. What remains at present is what I still consider to be useful or important. My photo, for instance. And my profile. I always like to see what people look like and get a sense of who they are when I read what they think. But I’m sure there’s stuff I can reduce further.

The length of these posts, for instance…