Simplified.

For those who have been reading neoHOUSTON a long time ( and visit the web page rather than just pulling our feed! ), you’ll notice a radical overhaul of the web site today. In what’s become roughly an annual tradition, I’ve redesigned the site to fit where I feel it is and is going as of right now.

You probably have also noticed that neither I, nor Dean, Martin, or Dave, have had time to post anything since November. That’s not a great way to keep a blog going.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of this site in the past few weeks, and have been mulling over how different that looks today from where it was a year or two ago. Up until about a year ago I was working pretty hard on developing neoHOUSTON into a ‘go-to’ newsmagazine for quality-of-life issues in Houston. My goal at the time was to recruit a dozen or so talented writers and work with them to cover the important goings-on within the city on a daily basis.

Since then several things have changed dramatically. First, Dean and I have different jobs. Dean started his new job this past fall, and I started my own company last October. Running my own business has been a lot of fun, but it has also been incredibly time consuming, so there hasn’t been a lot of time for me to write the kind of in-depth news analysis that I used to enjoy writing so much.

Second, over the past year and a half I’ve gotten the chance to serve as President of CNU-Houston, which has been absolutely awesome. In case you don’t know about it, the Congress for the New Urbanism is the nation’s leading advocate of walkability and sustainable urban development. We also happen to be a conservative organization lead by practicing designers and developers rather than policymakers, and we believe that the way to bring about change is to demonstrate that ours is a superior product and let it win in the marketplace. So, if those principles fit with your own, you should look into CNU membership.

Running my own business and leading the local CNU chapter are very satisfying pursuits, but they don’t leave me with the kind of free time that I used to have. All that said, I really like this blog, and I’m very proud of the collection of excellent essays that have accumulated on it over the last 3 years. So I didn’t want to walk away from the site.

What I finally concluded was that one of the things that was really hampering my use of the blog was the presentation standard that I set for myself when I was thinking that neoHOUSTON should be a news magazine. So, as of today you’ll find neoHOUSTON dramatically simplified, which I think will be good for readers and authors alike.

From here on out I’m taking neoHOUSTON back to being a blog. Rather than let the lack of time to create professional illustrations keep me from posting, I’ll post without pictures more often. Rather than worry about whether or not I’ve made a perfectly reasoned argument to withstand the inevitable criticism my ideas will receive, I’ll shrug off the occasional rant someone directs at me.

What made neoHOUSTON interesting at the beginning is the same thing that makes it worth keeping around: the ideas. Whether the ideas come from me or my fantastic team of contributing authors, the ideas themselves are the stars of this web site, and the new design reflects that.

Houston has a lot of professionals making the case for quality-of-life, and now that includes me. Rather than make neoHOUSTON an extension of that work, I’m taking it back to being something that we don’t have a lot of: bold, off-the-wall, outside-the-box, ideas.

Will this make me post more frequently? Maybe not. But the site is now going to emphasize the accumulation of interesting ideas rather than the timeliness of content. And that, for me, is a big relief — one which may inadvertently improve the timeliness of the content after all.

For everyone who has been reading this blog for the past three years — thank you. It’s not dead, and I think the next phase of life for it will be more fun than the last one was.