Spring is almost here–New Look for the site

Spring is almost here and I have taken this time to do a little spring cleaning.  Doing a bunch of redesigns to the blog, a little branding work and adding a new digital property to the mix.

Over the past few months, I have been adding more and more Smart Home articles to the Blog.  Based on the traffic stats, people are responding to them.  I think that is thanks to the overall technical nature of the blog before.  There seems to be a lot of cross over appeal to smart home tech and IOT in general.  So you can continue to expect more VMware, Citrix and Smart Home blog posts in the future.

So you may have noticed a new logo on the site. (or not, it’s subtle)

This logo was designed by my good friend Steve and incorporates another one of the logos he designed which is the Bear Stone Smart Home logo.  That is the logo that I have been using for the house’s  BearStoneHA twitter account.  Since I will be continuing to post about all of these topics, it made sense to bring the logos in together a little.   This also brings me to the new digital property in the mix.  This is the Bear Stone github account.  This presence on GitHub holds all of the configuration code for the Home Assistant hub that runs the Smart Home.  I’ve completely redesigned the documentation there to give it a fresh new feel and hopefully help new users get more into Home Assistant and Home Automation in general.  The repo just recently passed the 1000 star mark as well on the site and that was a pretty solid accomplishment (for those of you that understand the GitHub star ratings).  Think of stars as subscribers.   If you haven’t checked out the GitHub site, I’d recommend you check it out even if you are not running Home Assistant.  I tried to add a lot of easy to read information in there related to more generic Home Automation that you might find useful.  

Lastly, I moved the email subscription list from Feedburner to Mail Chimp.  Feedburner will continue to provide the RSS feed but Mail Chimp will take the feeds and send them out via email.  So if you would like to have new posts from this site sent directly to your inbox when I post them, be sure to sign up to the Subscriber list here (or scroll to the bottom of the site).  It only takes a minute and an email address. 

This was just a quick note to let you know what changes are happening.  There is a lot more in the hopper so stay tuned…

-Carlo