Today I'm announcing my new site, Unapologetic. Obviously, for readers of The Axx, this may have some effect on you. First and foremost, The Axx is not going away. Rather, I'm forking it, moving part of it to a new place whilst keeping it's heart here where it belongs.
The Axx has always been a site with two completely different visions, both competing to be featured most prominently. The first vision was of a website where I shared the advanced URL actions I was creating for anyone to see and use. The second vision was of a personal technology blog where I contributed my own thoughts on the latest apps and news to the tech world. As I have progressed with The Axx, both of these aspects of the site have been successful. However, the problem I've always faced is that these two competing visions never aligned into a single website. Uniting The Action Page and The Axx blog never really happened because they both required a dedicated environment. Today, with Unapologetic, I'm finally giving each vision the prominence it needs and deserves. With the old Axx, my writing was often overshadowed by my actions, yet my actions seemed forever undervalued by being jammed into a subpage of the website. Not only were they separated from the home page, but even upon going to The Action Page you were required to navigate further into the "Actions" section to read through each action. Well now actions at The Axx will finally be getting the attention they deserve. In the next few days the "Actions" section of The Action Page will be transferring to the site's home page. New actions will be featured prominently with truncated descriptions and direct import links available for people who just want a sum up of what the action does and then to import it. Title links will direct you to the full content posts if you want a more in depth description. Finally, the new home page for actions will now support a full content RSS feed, so you can subscribe to get new actions as they arrive without having to check back manually.
With the release of Launch Center Pro 2.0, LCP has entered the arena of apps supporting direct imports of actions. With this newfound ease of adding actions to your Launch Center, I will be adding support for direct import links of Launch Center Pro formatted actions to all of my new actions as well. Obviously all actions won't be fully compatible to each app, but whenever possible there will be options to use one or the other.
Looking back at my own action directory, many of the actions are outdated by new features in newer versions of Drafts and LCP, others actually contain typos or errors. Due to this, I won't be transitioning all the old actions to the new home page immediately, but rather, starting somewhat from scratch and adding older actions back again as I have time to go through each and update them to newer and cleaner forms based on the techniques now available. LCP support will also be added to older actions when possible. The current pages will all continue to exist, so no old links will be broken. Furthermore, in alignment with my new goals for Unapologetic, any terminal errors or typos in my actions, links and description posts will no longer be acceptable. I will be doing my best to hold myself to a higher level of quality, and I hope that you, my readers, will help me do so. If you see any errors in my work, of any sort, I urge you to make them known to me so I can correct them as soon as possible. Hopefully, however, there will be very few to worry about.
As for those of you following The Axx for my actual writing on the blog section, I really hope you will accompany me to the new home for my writing at Unapologetic. I encourage you to read my introduction post over there to understand my reasons for starting the new site, and the refreshed goals I have for my writing. Briefly, my main focuses will be on writing more daringly, not being afraid to voice my opinions, and creating more of my own original content instead of just linking to posts from other blogs. I also put a huge amount of effort into making what I hope you'll agree is a much more fun, colorful, and friendly design, and a better environment in which to read long articles. I would love to here your feedback on the design choices and future goals for Unapologetic.
The Axx has always been a place for actions. The only reason the site began was for me to have a place to put my actions, and the blog portion usurped their rightful place at the helm. With my main writing moving to Unapologetic, actions from The Axx will finally receive the attention they deserve at the home page of the site. By dismantling the complicated layout of The Action Page, I can now reenable the Squarespace responsive design for the entire site without ruining the layout, thus making the experience of reading about and importing new actions from your mobile devices a much friendlier one. I still have big plans for the future of The Axx, and this is only a small step towards them, but it's a big change from how we began, so I hope you will be as excited about it as I am.
The update to The Axx will be coming within the next few days. In the mean time, you should go check out Unapologetic, which is live already, and make sure to tell me what you think!
