Since I’ve joined Twitter on March 19th of this year I’ve felt a great resurgence in what I call my Idea Machine. For the longest time, blogging into the aether felt more like blogging into the nether. Twitter has helped me connect to people instantly, and the conversations I have had the past month have stoked the same fires in my mind that have become embers, over the past few years.

I’ve been writing online since 2003. I have seen and participated in blogfights, championed causes, networked with others, made many friends and few enemies. I’ve spoken my mind and stayed quiet when I’ve had to. I’ve written on politics, posted pictures, shared tidbits of my life. Sometime in 2005, I chose to focus on a few other things other than the site; to this day it has never achieved the same level of exposure as it did before. Granted, there are far more sites out there now. The growth in the number of bloggers remains exponential, though the longevity of most blogs, I’m willing to guess, has shorted, but not at the same rate.

I was my biggest source of discouragement. I would sit down for a post and lose confidence in the value of my own ideas. The question that usually ended the posting activity was “hasn’t this been written before?” I realize now that the few who read my site, the few who stuble upon my domain, may not have read what I have. If the admission that a problem exists is the start of the problem’s solution, then my problem was that I had little confidence in my own work. I say was, because this is the day I start doing something about it.

I’ve spent the past year and few months going to the gym almost every night, gradually improving my health. It’s time I turn this site back into my mental gym. There will be a redesign, there will be a shift in topics and I may fork off any writing about national politics to a category not included in the front page, or to a separate site. (Following the 2008 election I set myself up on Red State, but I haven’t updated in a while, and I will write about my experience there soon enough.)

My mental gears haven’t felt this well-oiled in a very long time. There’s a yearning, a hunger that I know I’ve felt before, it’s frightening and familiar and exciting, and I want to bring all of you along for the ride.