Repeat visitors to the site will have noticed some changes, yet we’ve failed to offer a public explanation. Part of this is because we were first testing things out and wanted to see how it went before we fully commited, but now we’re ready.
Sixteen years ago we launched mendax.org – both a landing page for an abstract organization and the whisperings of an e-zine. In reality, the domain came to house a smattering of ideas and projects, loosely organized into what would become our blog – our central online presence.
When we thought to transition the site away from WordPress a few months ago, it provided us an opportunity to look more closely at the site’s various stages – periods in which we focused on one aspect or another. To be honest, much of the older content was poor, both in focus and presentation, and while we still use the site as more an avenue for spilling recent musings rather than publishing finely edited prose, we feel that the site has matured in recent years insofar as what we post.1 Our focus has narrowed, even though our target audience still isn’t singular.
We considered rebranding the site several times in the past, and even made a half-assed attempt with the WyldKard.com domain name, but we never fully pulled the trigger. We realized it came down to sunk costs, but there remained an emotional attachment to the original domain.2 Still, with several forces colluding at the same time, we recently decided to move ahead with scratching the old domain, which is why it now redirects to our renovated home, The Beast Within.
We say “renovated” instead of “new” because we decided to keep using WordPress after all, so moving all our old content was a fairly simple task.3 The Beast Within will continue to pay homage to the subtitle we’ve used at mendax.org, “A mental brouhaha”, for though we hope to continue focusing the content at the site, we’ll likely still jump around between various topics, as many bloggers are wont to do. In other words, we consider The Beast Within an evolution of the old site, not a displacement.
We hope to write a more concise mission statement moving forward. In the meantime, let us know what you think about the new look.
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A lot of older content was a rehash of interesting news articles we came across, but our commentary wasn’t particularly deep. Had Twitter existed back then, we probably would have used it to link this kind of content, instead of hosting it at mendax.org. ↩
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There’s also a practical argument in search-engine-optimization (SEO), but hopefully 301 redirects will resolve this concern. ↩
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You’ll find that using an old article address at mendax.org will point your browser at the parallel article on the new site. With the exception of some posts we may delete in the future, most substantive content will not vanish. ↩