After delaying and delaying this project for various reasons, I’ve finally launched a new blog design for Lance Weatherby????????. Lance, whom I’ve worked with for about a year at ATDC, has been a great friend and mentor. He’s provided great input, advice and leadership.

As a way of saying thanks, I decided to lend my design skills to help Lance’s blog become a little more appealing. Check it out, comments are always welcome.

So Lance Weatherby turned me on to this guy, Paul Stamatiou. He’s 21 years-old and has been blogging for a few years now. He’s a CS student at Georgia Tech. He blogs about web technologies and posts gadget and technology reviews. He’s built a solid following and was even in the Technorati top 100 for a while.

Basically, he blogs about cool stuff he’s interested in and he does it very well. His blog is insightful and well written and has established him as a voice in the web startup community. Marketing and ad agencies now contact him to promote their clients’ products. He was even featured in a Nike+ ad.

It’s a testament that anyone who has something good to say can establish themselves online. My favorite posts of his:

• Thoughts on Startups
• A Realistic Back to School Guide for College Students
  
• The Next Level

Well, after years of sitting by and watching others blog, and after years of reading those blogs, I’m finally entering the fray. I thought a blog would help me connect with some of the community here in my new hometown of Atlanta. It will also be a good outlet for me to share my thoughts, interesting links, etc and help my friends from NYC and my family keep tabs on me.

So, after deciding to create a blog, I next had to figure out which blog software to use. At my previous job we had used Blogger.com to support numerous (20+) blogs. We continually had uptime problems with their software so I could easily eliminate them. Next I looked for some free PHP blogging software.

BBlog looked promising but lacked some of the plugins and functionality I wanted. Through my current job, I was exposed to Typepad, which is a good blog platform for beginners but didn’t have the advanced flexibility I needed. So, I settled on Wordpress and I must say I am quite happy.

The software was a breeze to install and only took a few hours to build the custom theme templates. The one problem I have with Wordpress, and some may see this as an advantage, is that it doesn’t actually generate HTML pages. It uses PHP scripts to build the pages on-demand. This is normally fine, but as those familiar with the Digg effect know, when your blog gets lots of traffic, the added weight the PHP scripts puts on your server can crash your blog. But, I won’t be having that kind of traffic anytime soon, so I’m fine with this.