Welcome to the new DanFinnen.com

Welcome to DanFinnen.com 3.0! This site started many years ago as a flat personal webpage that looked like garbage (too much red!) When I graduated from college in 2011, I tentatively started adding articles and reviews about photography, which quickly expanded in popularity and became the reason 99% of people came to the site.

The only problem was, I never designed the 2011 version of danfinnen.com to handle a large amount of content. Every page had to be built from scratch in HTML, and there was no easy way to make any change to the site as a whole. Without even a basic CMS, as I wrote more content, I was digging myself even deeper into a hole. Even the front page, which was supposed to act like a basic blog, was all drawn up in HTML.

This summer I decided to do a complete overhaul of the site and finally integrate all of my content into WordPress. It’s been an insane amount of work, but I’ve finally got everything (mostly) working. I’ve designed DanFinnen.com around content, letting articles, posts, and reviews all take center stage.

Now that I’ve made it easier on myself to create, I can focus on what I love to do most – write. Expect multiple new blog posts every week, as well as an ever expanding series of reviews and articles. Beyond Polaroid cameras, I’ll be adding in articles about technique, theory, and more in the photography world. To start out, I already have several new pieces up for you to enjoy.

I’ve added my Top Ten Tips on Growing Up Hard of Hearing, a new article about growing up with a hearing impairment. In addition, there’s a review of a theatre performance in Chicago and an all-new retrospective of the first few years of the Impossible Project.

I’m terribly excited for this new chapter. I’ve always wanted to blog seriously (are those words allowed to go together?), and this new setup will allow me to significantly expand the scope of my writing. Let me know what you think and if you find anything that doesn’t seem to work. This site will still be morphing and evolving over the next few weeks as I work out all the kinks. Soon it will emerge and spread its wings as a beautiful butterfly. Or a dragon. Dragons are much cooler than butterflies.