Hello again everyone! How have you been? It’s been a busy time for all of us, and after a couple months of not updating this blog like I used to normally — I’m back, and Asnio is back in full swing.

There has always been a lot of plans I wanted to carry out here but never got around to in the summer. I plan to carry these things out this upcoming season however, and there will be more on that stuff later. But, I have exciting news for you now:

The New Design

Yes, if you haven’t noticed, the new design I have been tweeting about for the last few days on Twitter has finally been put up. I started the design back in July, but never finished it. At first I was going to release it for free at Blogussion, but as I started working on it more I decided it would be a great way to refresh Asnio for when I go back to working here. But there is more planned for this design later.

So the one thing I focused on with this design is navigation. Navigation is an important part of a blog, and I felt like the tiny nav bar at the top of the blog in the previous design wasn’t doing much.

New Navigation vs. old

As you can now see, the navigation bar sticks out much more than it previously did and looks much more appealing. In the blue bar, I have placed the pages on my blog that you can access, like learning about me, or my pile of free stuff. Below that are some of the categories on the blog where the most interesting content is placed. You can of course see the full list of categories in the new, gorgeous footer.

Right below the navigation to the right of the page I have used the Multimedia box feature in Thesis to create a random rotating images section where I have included three banners to different places on the blog that I want you to visit the most:

• Thesis Thursday — A weekly series dedicated to the Thesis framework
• Freebies — A place where I throw stuff I make for you to download. And it’s all free, hence the creative title.
• Young Bloggers — A weekly series where a new young blogger is interviewed.

New Footer, Better Steroids

I still have the same awesome footer in effect here (want it?), but it’s amped up a lot. It now spans across the page, holds much more relevant content and just looks a lot better overall.

A new feature I added to it is really cool, the smooth scrolling feature. It’s at the very bottom right of it, and if you click it, you will go to the top but it will be a much smoother ride if you understand what I’m saying.

Content Navigating

I made getting to more content a lot easier than before. I decided it would be a lot better to get rid of all featured posts and setting all of my posts to display as teasers. Now, more content can fit on the page and the size of the scrollbar is slimmer.

I decided to go a little more magazine like in the sidebar and put the latest post from specific categories in the sidebar. I use an incredible plugin by an amazing blog — Latest Posts by Category which is just an incredible plugin that is easy to use and style.

Look Around, Stay for a while. Grab the feed

Well, the Patriots game is starting right about now and I have to go. Rather than writing about every single thing I did here and why — I think you should go look around the blog. It’s quite easy to get around too, as you will soon find out.

Have fun, and go Pats!

After two days of hard work designing, testing and fixing, I am pleased to announce one of those changes to Asnio I was talking about. For the first time ever, I’m releasing stuff for free on a blog.

It’s important to release things for free every once in a while to build your blog. But I think I’ll just save blogging talk for another blog.

What I have to offer you

So far as part of my freebies list, I have included the footer modification you see here on Asnio, and the archives modification I use at my other blog, Blogussion.

It’s a nice little start, and I will try to add some new stuff in there every once in a while. If you do choose to download anything and need help with it, feel free to go to my contact page and send me an email and I will help you the best I can with anything I throw in there.

Check ‘em out.

It finally hit me. I have finally realized that I have an opportunity to actually build Asnio into more than a blog I update whenever I feel like. It all occurred to me, and I’m psyched as hell to develop this blog into a more productive site.

Asnio has gone through a couple of phases during its short lifetime so far. And guess what? Another one is starting, and this phase is going to be a lot more fun! But very briefly, I want to go over the phases this blog has gone through already.

The 3 Phases

Phase 1: A Personal Blog — It was my original goal to make Asnio a personal blog where I could post things about my life, and my general web thoughts. It seemed pretty fun, but the only thing is that no one really cares much about anyone’s personal life (unless you’re a celebrity, which I’m not). So that idea was short lived.

Phase 2: Not a Personal Blog, but Not a Niche Blog — I don’t even know what the hell to call it. Basically, I updated this blog whenever I wanted to. I created the Thesis Thursday series, which a new post would be published every Thursday. So there was one post at least.

But I don’t really consider it a niche blog if you don’t have a set posting schedule. So that’s not what Asnio was. It was really just a blog about a young entrepreneur who would update his blog whenever he wanted.

Phase 3: The Revolution — Call it over dramatic, I call it progress. I am going to put Asnio through a “revolution,” and make this a blog worth subscribing to. I am planning different kinds of things, and will be testing out things I have never tried before. I am completely serious about this blog, more than I ever have been.

Why I Am Focusing on This Blog

For a variety of reasons, I have decided to change focus here. I received complaints about writing too little, and I also received complaints that there is too many Thesis related posts going on here (which I agree with myself).

So a few days ago while I was checking in on the Feedburner statistics for my other blog, Blogussion, I noticed a really high number of subscribers in the Asnio feed count. Now, this number may not seem high to you, but the way I have been updating this blog lately, it’s quite surprising.

I had 72 RSS subscribers.

I was completely shocked. I was shocked that I had such a community growing, and I wasn’t even aware of it. That made me realize that Asnio has the potential to be more than just a blog I mess around with.

The Changes to Come

So far I have a few ideas in mind as to what I will be doing here. I will just list a few of the things that will definitely happen and describe a little about them.

• Design Tweaks - I am going to keep tweaking this design a lot, but I am going to keep most of it the same. I love the fact that this theme revolves around the images and icons I use in posts, so I am going to keep the layout like that.

  So far, if you couldn’t tell, I have added a new beautiful logo to the header, and a small information box to the right of it. Not a lot yet, but damn that’s the best logo I have ever created!

• Post Schedule - My post style here is going to change a little bit. I plan to keep on a consistent post schedule posting. Right now I am thinking either:
  1. Post 3 times a week — Monday, Thursday, Sunday — writing large articles (Thesis Thursday included).
  2. Post on a weirder schedule: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday (Thesis Thursday included)

  I just know that I have to fit my weekly Thesis Thursday series into any schedule I make.

• New Post Series - I have decided to create a few extra ongoing series of posts to publish onto this blog. I am not putting a consistent schedule on any new series like I did with Thesis Thursday, but I will keep them consistent. I have some great ones planning out, so stick around for them!

Those are just a few of my thoughts, and the things that are definitely going to be changing here for sure.

While it’s on my mind, if you guys have any suggestions about the design, or my posting schedule, please let me know so in the comments. This is your blog after all!

Vacation

Just to let you guys know, before any of this happens — I am going on vacation to beautiful Ocean City, New Jersey! I will be there for a week, and it’s going to be awesome. So no, nothing here will have changed until I get back from vacation. Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble!

I will be taking a lot of pictures (at least I’ll try), and I am going to be publishing my first photo blog on Asnio with those pictures. I think it will be cool as I have an account on Flickr, but don’t use it much anymore.

I am leaving tomorrow, Saturday, June 27^th to Saturday, July 4^th. I will have no computer access, so it will be great for me.

So stick around guys, this is going to be fun. See you in a week!

This is it — this is my latest blogging venture called Asnio. This is more of a personal blog for me, but it’s not solely about my personal life (because no one reads personal blogs anymore). I want to write a blog recording my journeys on the interwebz as a 15 year old blogger and entrepreneur.

More specifically, I want to reflect my experience online making money, tell you about the hardships of being such a young entrepreneur, and lots of other stuff. I hope to meet a lot of other young’uns through this blog.

I’m using Thesis

If you couldn’t tell by the epic look of the blog, I am using Thesis. It is a really cool theme that I am having fun messing around with. I decided I needed a professional looking theme that has great out-of-the-box SEO (because I will be frank with you — SEO isn’t my thing) and presents content in a really nice, clean manner.

Everything about Thesis is awesome. The lifetime support/upgrades, the flexibility of the theme, and so much more. So if you think I will be yet another blogger bragging how good Thesis is — you’re damn right! There’s so much great stuff to talk about when it comes to this theme, so I will do my best to write some tutorials and other Thesis related stuff when I think about it.

I will be constantly tweaking this theme until I’m 100% happy with it (will never happen). For some reason the content and sidebars are different widths in different browsers, and I have no idea wtf is wrong. But I’m working on that, so if the sidebar looks too close to the content in IE, Safari, or Opera (should be okay in Firefox) — I’m seriously sorry!

Some things I want to mention

This is my own blog. It’s not authored by anyone else except me, Alex. So, I am going to cut the “professional blogger” crap and have a little fun with this blog.

Some things I want you to know specifically about my “fun”

• I write for people, not Google. Thesis writes for Google.
• I’m going to be honest, when I put an affiliate link on this blog, I want you to click it. So, to make sure you do check it out, all affiliate links have “gtfo” in the URL so you know to “GTFO” and buy a super cool product. Like Thesis.
• When I say that the New England Patriots and Jacksonville Jaguars are the NFL’s Finest (see sidebar), I mean it.

I want to throw up the occasional article that could help you out in different areas of website building. I try to keep all of my blogging articles at my pride and joy, Blogussion so don’t expect articles about blogging here. However, I do want to write about stuff like freelancing, young entrepreneur stuff, and other things on the internet (social networking for example).

Just check out that cool blue bar up top with the (hopefully working) dropdown menus that has all of the categories on the blog. I am a Mac user, so there will be some Apple stuff I will touch up on. I’m also a WordPress enthusiast, so I will be writing about WordPress plenty too. I won’t go over all of my categories, so check them out!

So that’s all I want to really say for now; THAT is Asnio. You should probably subscribe to my RSS feed because it’s going to get a lot more interesting soon enough.