At the same time, Justin Tadlock released Outline, a new child theme for Hybrid that is quite pleasant on the eyes and will do nicely until I come up with a custom look.

I’ve also been wanting to show my Google Reader shared items here on the blog for a while and found the nifty Recommended Reading plugin last night from fellow New Englanders C Murray Consulting.

Hope you like the new look, let me know if anything looks out of place.

Moving to adamp.com

As you might’ve noticed (unless you’re reading this in a feed, subscribe if you aren’t!), today my blog no longer resides at adampieniazek.com and instead is at the much more sensible and easy to remember adamp.com.

I’ve actually had adamp.com for a while. Interesting story there, I saved $450 on the adamp.com domain name. A squatting company tried selling it to me for $500! I told them, meh, they let it expire a month later, triggering my auto-buy-if-it-expires option at GoDaddy and bam, here we are.

For a while adamp.com would just redirect to myfirstnamemylastname.com but I figured why bother, adamp.com is the better domain in all aspects and I can convert adampieniazek.com into a landing page of sorts. If you head over to this blog’s old home, you’ll see there’s a landing page up for the root domain but everything else is 301 redirected to here. I’ll put up a tutorial on how I did that over at The 42nd Estate shortly.

Until then, if you spot any issues or problems, let me know. Hope you enjoy the new, minified domain!

Artwork credit: anonymous0910 | CC 2.0

Dot Boston

Prose of a Pol was always a bit clunky. Sure I’m Polish and proud of it, but don’t write enough about Poland here to warrant the title. Plus, prose has a negative connotation. Apple dictionary defines prose as:

written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure : a short story in prose | [as adj. ] a prose passage.
• figurative plain or dull writing, discourse, or expression : medical and scientific prose.

Not quite the brand I’m going for here!

The name is also an ode to my home city and my home neighborhood, Boston and Dorchester, respectively. It was inspired by an upcoming event I’m partaking in called ADORE-chester!, which aims to celebrate the good about Dorchester, rather than the negative that is often portrayed in the mainstream media. Since I also write a good amount about web technologies, the dot is a play on the period used in all web addresses. In my opinion, it’s a win all around.

What do you think of the new name?

What Changed?

The new design features a fixed header that stays at the top wherever you go, allowing you to quickly search through the site, access the archives, send me an e-mail, subscribe to the blog feed, or connect with me on one of my favorite social media sites. My intent was to move from a huge header that simply looked good to one that took up little real estate but was useful. To that extent I think the new slim, fixed header is a big success. But let me know how you feel, I’m always open to feedback!

Some of you may be disappointed that I got rid of the old header with the great Apple keyboard shot, but it was time for a change. Sorry Dave I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Other changes were dropping the sidebar widgets to the bottom of the page, allowing me to give the main content a much wider space. Doing so lets me embed full size YouTube videos and wide images into posts. As you can tell, I really went for usability and functionality here rather than looks. The look itself is really simple and clean and draws the focus back onto the content.

On a sidenote, you’d think the new wider look would break on an 800 x 600 resolution, but that’s not quite the case. By dropping the sidebar below the content the design scales gracefully to a low resolution.

I’m still working on re-adding some of the widgets I had before (most notably the Scribnia and Friendfeed widgets) but otherwise it’s all done!

Before & After

Here’s a snap of the before look (note, it’s not an exact replica as I deleted the old look, this one is from an older local copy I had but it’s basically the same):

Old header, body, and sidebar

Now let’s take a look at how this section looks in the new design:

Oooh...more room for content!

Another section I wanted to tweak up was the Thesis teasers section. I felt they were a bit small so I widened them out and made each teaser fall on its own line. Personally, it makes it easier to scan through the teasers and archives and allows for a bigger thumbnail image.

Here’s how the teasers used to look:

Effective, but can they be improved?

Looks OK, but in the move to the wider main content column, they looked a bit scrunched up and out of place. In the new design each teaser falls on its own line:

What a tease...

Another section I felt needed a good deal of revamping was the comments and footer. Here’s a look at the old comments and footer section:

Comments and footers, pretty bland.

Quite bland, eh? Let’s take a look at the new comments and footers, which for those of you using new versions of Safari or Firefox feature lots of easy to look at rounded corners.

Roundy boxes.

And here’s the comments:

New Comments with more rounded corners

That’s about the bulk of the changes. There’s a few more tweaks and touchups here and there but the majority of the look’s covered above. If you find anything out of place or have any suggestions or questions on how I did something, feel free to ask. Hope you all enjoy the new design!

Thanks to eelke dekker for the HTML vs. CSS lego figures.

Why I Bike

Shane from Boston Biker approached me about writing a guest post for his awesome blog about bicycling in Boston. I was glad to accept as Boston and bicycling are two of my passions I never get tired of writing about. My guest post for Boston Biker talks about why I choose to ride a bicycle as my main transportation method. Bicycling is economical, environmentally friendlier than driving, and a great form of exercise but that’s not why I bike.

Social Media Roundup from Boston

In a guest post for Boston Young Entreprenuers, I linked to five stories from social media bloggers in Boston, with a little personal opinion mixed in from yours truly. Great way to get some quick info about building a web presence, and how to use that presence effectively and sustainably while getting productivity out of social networks.

Wrap-up of The 42nd Estate’s BYE Presentation

In May, I presented The 42nd Estate’s business model at a Boston Young Entreprenuers meeting. I received tons of great feedback and wrote a post for BYE on what I learned from presenting.

Hope you enjoy them!

Well, I’m cool with that. We’ve got a ton of great writers and communicators in the area. Still, hop on over to Scribnia and write up a quick objective review of me. Would love to hear your thoughts on my writing style and content. Feedback is always welcome!

Don’t know what Scribnia is? Check out my post on the awesome online author review community.

Thanks to the team at Scribnia and my readers who’ve already reviewed me. You all walk hard!

One of the tricky parts about Google Friend Connect is finding other blogs with Google Friend Connect installed. Sure, there’s a Google Friend Connect Directory but it’s a bit sparse at the moment. So, I wanted to share with you seven eight great bloggers who have the Google Friend Connect community widget installed. Check them out and join their community. They’re all very solid reads. While you’re at it, scroll down and join my Google Friend Connect community in the right sidebar. All you need is a Google account. Over time, as I add some Google Friend Connect features (recommendations looks interesting) you’ll already be setup to use them.

Before we dive into the list, let me point out a great resource for finding out more about Google Friend Connect that one of my commenters pointed me to. It’s written by Chris Lang (who also appears on the below list) and is a very well put together guide to installing and utilizing Google Friend Connect.

Bloggers with Google Friend Connect

1. Stuart Foster – The Lost Jacket

Stuart blogs about the social media trends, techniques, and best practices at The Lost Jacket. Not only is it an informative read, it’s often quite hysterical too.

2. Justin Wright – Life of Justin

Justin is a digital nomad and member of The 42nd Estate. He writes about blogging, traveling, technology and the digital nomad lifestyle at Life of Justin.

3. Marko Saric – How to Make My Blog

Marko delivers tons of great tips about how to style your blog, write great content, and promote it effectively. For anyone with the Thesis theme, How to Make My Blog is a must read as he delivers tons of great tips on how to customize Thesis. Marko just recently added Google Friend Connect and gave me the scoop that he’ll be writing a post about his implementation of it soon.

4. Jim Gaudet – SEO and Web Design by Jim Gaudet

Jim is an IT guy living the good life as an expatriate in Costa Rica. He blogs about SEO, web design, his adventures on the beach and random cool stuff he finds online at SEO and Web Design by Jim Gaudet.

5. Mike Volpe – Marketing with Mike

Mike is a Vice President of Marketing at HubSpot, an inbound marketing firm. He writes about inbound marketing (shocking, eh), social media, conferences, SEO, and other good info at Marketing with Mike.

6. Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer

Jason is the Director of Social Media at Doe Anderson and an all around knowledgeable dude. He pumps out great content on marketing and branding in the social media age. It’s a real solid read and he usually goes into a good amount of depth on each topic. The 500 words or less post is a bit of a rarity at Social Media Explorer (that’s not a bad thing when the content rocks).

7. Robert Scoble – Scobleizer

Skipped over the Scoble the first run with this post, but as Chris noted in the comments, Robert has been using Google Friend Connect on his blog since his new design. Scoble blogs about the social web and hypothesizes about where it will all lead. Scobleizer is a great read for anyone who wants to read about how Web 3.0 or the 2010 Web will look and feel like.

8. Chris Lang – Google Friend Connect Tactics

Chris’ blog is one I just discovered via his comment below on my blog. Google Friend Connect Tactics is a perfect addition to this list as Chris writes about using GFC, new features, and other Google and social news.

9. Jack Humphrey – Friday Traffic Report

Jack is a late addition to this list but is another great blogger with Google Friend Connect enabled. He writes about blog marketing strategies, including SEO, link building, and social media at Friday Traffic Report. Note, the Google toolbar only came up for me when I visited his individual posts, not his homepage. So if you don’t see it immediately click through to a post.

10. Coree Silvera – Market Like a Chick

Coree comes from a sales and marketing background and over time migrated into network and internet marketing. She writes about marketing (of course!), social networks, and female bloggers and entrepreneurs at Market Like a Chick.

Do you have a blog with Google Friend Connect enabled? If so, share it below in the comments so we can check it out and connect!

So, to all you feed readers, today is one of those days when you should for sure click through and come check out the site’s new look and feel. To be honest, the new look and feel isn’t drastically different. I kept much of the basic look intact but did increase the post font size and expanded the post width and the sidebar width a bit, giving the blog a bit more room to breathe and leaving more space for wider images and video. Also dropped a few plugins and widgets and added a few new ones.

New Stuff

• Added Google Friend Connect widget
• Added FriendFeed widget
• Added new social media icons
• Added BackType Connect to import external comments

There’s still a bunch of things I want to upgrade and tweak, for instance the header image and the photos section. For now though, it’s a nice upgrade that’ll free up some maintenance time and make for an easier read.

Let me know what you think of the new look and feel!

I was getting ready to send off a nice e-mail to the site’s web-master to ask them to utilize my post excerpt feed instead, when I realized that I don’t list the address for my post excerpt feed anywhere on this site! So, to resolve that issue and hopefully make it easier for publishers to find and publish my content excerpt feed I’ve placed the address in my sidebar. Though I welcome any and all publishers who wish to spread the word of the Prose of a Pol, note that I reserve the right to request that you take down my content if you are using it on a spam site or in any way doing something nefarious with it. To 99% of the people out there (who are not spammers), you’re good and can go ahead and use my post excerpt feed without worry, it’s simply a precaution (and a warning!) against spammers.

If you have any questions on this policy, drop me an e-mail.

Then, the power went out due to the snowstorm here in Boston. NSTAR, our electrical utility, was quick to act and the power was back on about twenty minutes later. Once my router rebooted, I posted Car-free for nearly a year! to my blog. After it was live, I tweeted out a link to the post and updated my linkedin status with the url too (tip of the hat to Rachel Levy for the linkedin idea).

Then, the power went out, again. Fifteen minutes later, all the appliances in my house began whirring up again. It’s amazing how silent the house becomes when there’s no electricity to power all our various gadgetry. Luckily, my laptop’s battery was fully charged so I could continue working, but the lack of internet certainly limited me.

I spent the next two hours tweaking a few things with The 42nd Estate’s slick new design, writing up a review of Saints & Soldiers for OTIBR, and working on a few tax related matters. Then…I know you can feel what’s coming by now…the power went out!

When my internet re-appeared, I noticed some hits coming into my car-free living post from reddit and Universal Hub. I figured it’s time to go for broke and did something I never did before, submitted my post myself to StumbleUpon. Afterwards, I sent off an e-mail to a good friend with a few ideas for a site re-design he’s working on for one of the local newspapers here (more to come on this soon). Went downstairs, checked the mail, saw my business cards were here (pictures coming soon), and then…

I won’t even write it but for those keeping track, that’s number four of the day.

At this point, my motivation and productivity were rapidly depleting. To take advantage of the little energy I had left, I packed up my laptop, put on my jacket and walked out the door to head down to the Sugar Bowl Cafe down the street for coffee and free Wi-Fi. Literally as my hand was closing the door, I heard that familiar whirring noise running through the house. I sighed and walked back inside, turned on the coffee maker and flipped on my Xbox 360. At this point, I needed some stress relief and there’s really nothing quite like Call of Duty 4 to take the edge off.

After a few rounds, I heard my iPhone buzzing a few times with new e-mails. I reached over, touched into my inbox and saw a new message on my facebook wall from Linda:

just saw a link to your blog on boston.com… anyway i think we are long overdue for one of our dinners, so if it ever stops snowing put one on your schedule

For my non-Bostonian readers, boston.com is the web-site of The Boston Globe, the preeminent newspaper in Boston. I clicked over and sure enough on their home page under New England Blogs, there it was, Prose of a Pol’s latest post on the year of carlessness.

My jaw, iPhone and pants immediately dropped to the floor.

OK, I lied about the pants bit.

And the iPhone…but my jaw did drop, that part was true!

So I sent out a few texts and tweets to my friends with about seven hundred exclamation marks, checked my server status, and then just sat there in a state of mild shock. The newspaper that I grew up reading, the real one, not that tabloid on Herald Street, just linked to my blog, on their front page. Wow.

At the end of the day, Prose of a Pol had its biggest traffic day since moving over to the new server and it help up perfectly. Reports from my friends stated that the site continued to load instantly during the whole day. I confirmed this fact periodically throughout the night on my iPhone while I worked on a few other tasks. For anyone whose curious, the final stats showed 1481 visitors and five power outages, compared to an average of 400 visitors. It certainly wasn’t my biggest day, that honor belongs to the day fark.com listed my Battlestar Politica post, but being on the front page of boston.com is something I’m proud of. So to whoever is responsible for updating the New England blogs section at the Globe, thank you!