The site gets a new name, too.

After months of thinking about a new name for my personal blog and book support site, I finally took the plunge. The new name is An Eclectic Mind.

Why Eclectic?

The name comes, in part, from a regular visitor here, Thomas Fucili. He read my post “What’s in a Name?” and responded using the Contact form with a suggestion: Eclectic Pronouncements. I liked eclectic, but didn’t like pronouncements. He came up with a replacement word and I thought deeply about it but made no decision.

I liked the word eclectic because it seemed to suit the site’s content. As anyone who visits the site regularly knows, I write about widely varied topics. In the world of “pro blogging,” that’s a big no-no. But I’m not blogging to make money, so I don’t really care if the site’s not focused enough to build a high volume of regular visitors and feed subscribers. I write about what interests me, while providing support for the folks who buy and read my books.

The second definition seemed to suit me, too. I don’t think inside the box and can’t be easily labeled. I listen to a lot of theories and opinions and choose the ones that make sense to me — even if they don’t usually co-exist in other people’s belief systems. I’m not a philosopher (although sometimes I do feel ancient) but I’m a strong believer in independent thought.

Eclectic seemed a perfect fit.

The Domain Name Challenge

One of the challenges I faced was coming up with a name that was somewhat (at least) original and still had the domain name available. Although I don’t expect to formally change the domain name for the site, I did want new visitors to be able to find the site by clicking in the domain name with a dot-com at the end. I came up with a few twists on the word eclectic but couldn’t secure the domain names for any of them.

And then, one day, I just came up with An Eclectic Mind. The domain name was available and I bought it. Without really realizing it, I’d settled on a new name.

That was a few weeks ago.

A Day of Changes

I wanted to tie in the site name change to a complete site redesign. So I spent some time looking for the right theme. I found Cutline, which I’ll probably discuss in some detail in future blog posts. I also wanted to [finally] upgrade to the current version of WordPress (2.2.2 as I write this). I knew from experience that the upgrade would break some of my plugins and my current theme. So it made a lot of sense to take a whole day and just do the name change, upgrade, and new theme.

That day was today.

The site’s not done yet — I’m still adding in a few features that my old site used to have — but I expect to be finishing it up over the next few weeks. I’d love to hear your comments about it; use the Comments link or form at the bottom of this post to share your thoughts.

But for now, I just want to thank Thomas for his suggestion. I couldn’t have come up with the new name without his help.