Date Posted: March 1st, 2010
I posted the short version on twitter:
Just changed the domain name of LVC to ThePathLessTraveled.net Reason: No one could pronounce LVC 
There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s the big one. For branding purposes, picking a French title was a bad idea. If people aren’t sure how to pronounce the domain name they won’t talk about it to anyone else. A ginormous drawback.
I decided to make the change now instead of when everything was totally ready (like a new front page, about page, theme, among other things) because I was tired of waiting to start building my blog. The domain name was holding me back. I had to get rid of that barrier. I had to change it now.
Why ThePathLessTraveled.net?
Because TheConsciousLife.net was taken.
Seriously though, I like “The Path Less Traveled” better as a name than “The Conscious Life”. TPLT is aspirational, visual, and has the right connotation. It’s about living a better life by taking the hard, good road. It’s about challenging yourself. It conjures a vision of a path in a forest full of obstacles that leads to something beautiful. “The Conscious Life”, on the other hand, is a bit vague. What does it mean to be live a conscious life? Would you know what a blog with that title was about? What image comes to mind? To the first two questions I have a vague notion of what it means to live consciously and what kind of content a blog with that title would have. As for images, nothing specifically comes to mind.
Oh, yeah, and there’s that Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken”… The blog is practically automatically memorable.
The bottom line is this new title excites me. It makes me want to talk about my blog. It makes me want to promote my blog. I have confidence other people will be more inclined to talk about my blog with its new title.
New Feed Location
If you’re subscribed to the RSS feed, it’s in a new location. The old one will still work, but one day many moons from now I may retire it. Proceed at your own risk.
New Twitter Username Too
I changed my twitter username to niquepath. I went away from the “use my blog’s name” approach since thepathlesstraveled is so long–a definite negative on twitter. I’m also unlikely to want to use my name for anything else. If I feel the need to use twitter for Early Music stuff I can use blowthyhorn, which I already have registered.
If you’re already following me on twitter, you don’t have to change anything. It should have updated it automatically.
Yay changes!
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Date Posted: January 1st, 2010
Happy New Year everyone! This year at LVC (and in life) I’ve accomplished a lot.
My goal for 2009 was to concentrate on writing. I had visions of me pouring over my old blog posts, crafting them into masterworks. Yeah, that didn’t happen. I did, however, write quite a bit, so I didn’t totally fail.
For 2010, I’m again going to focus on writing. I may go through some old posts and polish them up a bit. Mostly I’m planning to write regularly. None of these month long breaks like I had during the summer. I’d also like to build up a reserve of posts I can take the time to really think through a post or two. I want to provide something really valuable here. What that means is for January I’m going to move to a one post per week cycle, posted every Friday. In February I’ll probably ramp it up a bit.
Looking back on the past year I’ve had a hard time figuring out where to find readers for this site. The topics I covered were quite varied, from
getting organized to
taking adviceto
finding the right career to
sustainability and
thriftiness. There’s no one place where these people could be. And it doesn’t really help my brand identity.
To combat this I’ve picked a theme for 2010: Relationships. It’s already the topic with the most posts (19 as of today), it’s an area where I have a lot to say, and it’s an area I need to work on. In case you’re wondering, the reason I think I need to work on it is that I’m an introvert and don’t really want to be. I have no problem being around people I know well 24/7, but being around lots of new people drains my energy. I do not want to have this drain of energy anymore. I have a hunch that the problem lies in some kind of mental block–it’s not like I’m anti-people or something–so I imagine some practice and some navel gazing ought to do the trick… or at least do something. Making it my focus for 2010 will be incentive to do something about it. I’ll report what I learn on here.
You’ll notice that by “Relationships” I’m not just referring to primary romantic relationships. In fact, that’s not really something I intend to cover all that much. There are plenty of books on that topic, and many of us are starving for other intimate relationships. We have friends, but can we count on them when we’re in need? How can we develop strong friendships? That kind of thing.
Also just because I’m focusing on relationships doesn’t mean that will be the only thing I write about. It’ll just be the default topic.
Looking forward to an exciting year!
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