I started using “The Humanaught” back in November 2003, when I created a LiveJournal blog to capture my travels as I set out with a backpack and a couple of guidebooks, anxious about leaving my home continent for the first time. Amazingly the LiveJournal site is still there, though all the posts have long-ago been imported here.

After 5 months of travel I returned home and the Humanaught blog went on hiatus as I went about saving up money for my next grand adventure — not knowing at the time that it would eventually lead to living in China for more than half a decade. In the fall of 2004 I registered thehumanaught.com and began playing with creating my own Web site, eager to reformat the content I had created while travelling, while also preparing for my move to China in January 2005.

This is when I discovered Blogger, and their ability to publish a blog using their management system but your own hosting. At the time it seemed somewhat akin to the promise of flying cars. I continued blogging this way until May 2006 when I moved completely to a self-hosted blog using WordPress for the first time. Considering what I do with my days now, it was an auspicious move to be sure.

Truth be told, I grew tired of “thehumanaught” quite some time ago. At first it served to add a bit of anonymity, which seemed so much more important in the early days — long (in Internet time) before Facebook shared the details of my life and Twitter captured every fleeting thought that flitters through my brain. Additionally, over the years I’ve been using it I had built a small but (mostly) respectable name for myself in the online sinosphere, and that was the name I was known by.

But I think it’s fair to say that most people who know me by “the humanaught” now also know me as “Ryan”, and for the people yet to get to know me, I’d rather we get started on a real-name basis.

I’d be being a bit disingenuous if I didn’t also say that moving to ryan-mclaughlin.com wasn’t also to help establish, build and control my personal branding. It’s not exactly a term I’m comfortable with or really feel worthy of, but I cannot escape the fact that I make my living online and my reputation (and by extension, name) play a large factor in that.

The last, but potentially largest, reason for the re-dubbing is simply that the focus of this blog has changed a lot since it was first created. Originally it was my outlet for sharing travel tales and stories about living in China. And while I’ll still be blogging about both on occasion, most of my about-China writing takes place at Lost Laowai these days, and travel … well for the time being at least, our new baby has made us pretty stationary (* with the exception of some rather large news I’ll be writing about soon).

And so here we are, a new dawn of sorts for this site. A new name, a completely new look (which I’m still tweaking) and hopefully a bunch of new content — untethered and gloriously unfocused. Some blogs are about specific things, this one is just about me and everything I like to think/talk/write about. I hope you enjoy it.

I had nothing against the last design (despite it borrowing 5 bucks and not paying it back), but after having it for nearly two years I was starting to itch for something new. So, I sat down Sunday morning and killed the ass-end of my weekend whipping up what you see before you. There are still a bunch of kinks I need to work out, and a few features I want to add, but she’s mostly there.

A few months back I started including here on TheHumanaught.com links to articles I’ve written on other blogs I blog at. I did this because I noticed I hadn’t been updating here as much as I did at one point, but was blogging more than ever. I was trying to find a way to make this site give a clearer picture of what’s going on with me — being that it’s my blog and all.

You’ll notice that I’ve continued with this idea, but have shrunk the off-site posts to a simple headline. I didn’t like under the old design how my Humanaught posts were largely drowned out by the off-site posts. I wanted people to know about them, but not at the cost of losing this site’s content. So, now you’ll always see the most recent TheHumanaught.com post right up at the top of the main page, followed by the 20 most recent posts I’ve written (anywhere) – summary versions for on-site and headlines for off-site. Hopefully this organizes the content and makes it all simple to navigate/skim.

Also inline with trying to make this site as clear a picture of my digital life as possible, I’ve increased the visibility of my Twitter updates — taking it from an obscure box in the footer to the top-spot in my sidebar. This better represents the importance Twitter has become in my online experience.

Additionally, there have been some damn fine improvements to WordPress since my last site redesign, and I’m working at incorporating them into this theme (most obvious to visitors will be the threaded comments).

Should you get lonely for the old layout, fear not – it’s on the Way Back Machine. I look forward to your thoughts on the new design.

I’ll be tweaking some design elements over the next little while, but the biggest change is that I’m now importing posts I write at all my blogs (Lost Laowai, The Tech Dynasty, Dao By Design and Tip Trick Mod) into my stream here.

Though this blog’s focus is primarily on my expat life in Suzhou, I also want it to be a bit of a snapshot of me in general, and with so many writing/blogging projects on the go across the Web, I wanted a way to pull them all together.

If you are a reader of my other blogs, don’t fret, I’ll not be clogging up your feed readers with a bunch of duplicate content. The Humanaught feed will only contain articles specifically written for this blog. Also, all content coming from off-site (say from my new CNET Asia blog) will be clearly marked, and link directly to the original post.

Thanks for your patience if you happen to be at the site while I’m mucking about.