It’s done. For the first time since I started this blog in mid-2001, I’ve changed the name. Along with the name change comes a new look, a new underlying blog engine, and a new focus in my blogging. This will be a new beginning.

Let’s talk about the old name first. “mindless ramblings of an ineffectual preacher” was adapted from the title of my foreword to a term paper I wrote for GP while I was in ACJC, back in 1998. The original title was “senseless ramblings of an ineffectual preacher” and was meant to be tongue-in-cheek (the term paper was about cults) as well as a self-deprecating nod to my largely non-existent evangelistic life at that time. I modified the title — or rather, by the time I started the blog in 2001, I’d misremembered the title and substituted a different first word.

Now I’ve decided on a new name: The Panegyrist. This was partially inspired by a trend that Jon and I had going when we were doing up our own websites in the late 90s: we would find and use long obscure words. So we had website names like “Telaesthesia” and “Cornucopia”. This time I chose “Panegyrist” partially because it starts with my surname, Pan. The origin of the word, ancient Greek, appeals to me. And most importantly, I found the word’s meaning rather apt. A panegyrist is an orator, making public speeches that are usually either eulogy or praise. This seems to go hand in hand with what I have in mind for this blog.

A few months back I blogged about being attracted to WordPress’ ease of use. I finally decided to make the switch from Nucleus to WordPress, a somewhat painful decision as I still very much love Nucleus. I’ll blog later about all my reasons for switching, but for now suffice it to say that I expect it to become somewhat easier to maintain this blog, and with all the AJAX I managed to cram into the site, I hope it’ll be easier for my readers to get at the content as well.

The new look is heavily modified from Scott Wallick’s theme called Minimalist Sandbox. After some internal struggle I decided to stick with my usual all-green colour scheme, and used a colour palette called “nile croc” as my reference point. The look is partially inspired also by Clagnut (although I eventually decided against the double sidebar) and makes heavy use of famfamfam’s excellent Silk icon set.

Then there is the issue of my switch in focus. In the early years of my blogging mrip was very much a “dear diary” type blog. Recently it’s become more of a soapbox in addition to the diary entries.

From hereon in, though, I intend to greatly reduce the diary content of my blogging and focus more on writing opinion pieces, primarily concentrating on technology and software issues, and occasionally blogging about religion, government, and free speech, in addition to whatever else comes up in my mind. I will still do diary entries once in a while, but in general I’ve decided to move those to a private blog. Now that I’ll be starting work (eventually) it might be a good idea to blog less about my personal life. I also don’t intend to blog too much about work directly.

Why all the big changes? Well apart for the individual reasons for each one, there’s a general all-encompassing reason. I’ve always been a bit sentimental about new beginnings, seeing them as chances for renewal and revival. Well, revival might not be needed here, but after 5 years of blogging, some renewal certainly is called for. Now that I’ve graduated and my student life is over, I certainly do see this as a new beginning and a fresh start on a new phase of life.

So goodbye to mrip, and say hello to The Panegyrist.