Now that the new site is up, I will be cleaning out the huge backlog of posts sitting on my hard disk. I have years of writing piled up that I've been cleaning up for publishing once I figured out what I was going to do with this platform.

Much of the content I'm going to release was prompted by research I did on various hot-button issues that have since simmered. However, as long time readers know, I've always tried to put more emphasis on the quality of my commentary, not the timeliness.

I've already got a rather lightweight post written, edited, and timed to go up tomorrow morning.

It is good to be back.

Dear RZMCOM,

We have come a long way since you were thrust upon the world in the year 2000. Before you launched, I had developed several old school "homepages" but it was when I made the decision to buy the rashidmuhammad.com domain and adopted a quasi-weblog format that you really got going.

When I was a kid, I must have tried twenty times to start a journal. It was hard for me to remember to write entries and even when I did I had a bad habit of losing my notebooks which resulted in stacks of journals all over containing just a few entries each. It was through you that I started building a life chronicle, and also you became a sandbox for personal technical experimentation.

It was important to me that I wrote my own platform just to keep my skills sharp. The lessons I learned developing you paid off in many ways. You were the first application I wrote in .NET. You were the first application I wrote using Gang of Four Design Patterns. You acted as the test case for my generic xNET architecture.

You also provide a stark picture of my evolution as a thinker. The September 11th attacks happened very early in your life catalyzing my interest in global affairs and a renewed scrutinization of my personal faith and my identity as a black male. Some of these things played out on your pages more openly than others, but they were always written and therefore I have a record. I thank you for helping me develop that instinct.

Having said all of this my dear friend, it is time for a change.

I've been neglecting you over the last few years both as a writer and a programmer. For this reason, the gap between the Rashid Muhammad represented by you and the Rashid Muhammad that currently exists has grown dangerously large. I say it is dangerous because you contain many ruminations of a young man trying to find himself and without his current grown up incarnation being properly represented the wrong idea can be presented.

I am all in favor of my post archive being available - and it's not like the Google cache or web archive would let me get away with hiding it - as I believe that there are some truly insightful posts that reveal important things about me and how I see the world, however, I need to get some of the current Rashid out there to round out the picture.

On the technical side, I feel like I've gotten to the point of diminishing returns with personally writing your code. When it comes to figuring out how my spare programming time will be used, there are many options almost all more productive than developing an application that has been done many times elsewhere - and better. For this reason I decided to use the blogengine.net framework and relegate any development to writing extensions. Once I get everything stabilized I will work on porting the old posts to the new database.

So that's it. Enjoy your new digs. It has been a great run compadre.

Here's to another ten years.

Love,

Rashid.