The answer is simple. To those of you who have ever tried to find an available url, you know. It’s tough. Everything is taken. When I began this blog on a whim one afternoon in 2006, I registered “survivela.com.” Our first publisher, correctly, thought that was too Los Angeles-centric and asked that we make it more universal so that we could expand our readership. Thus began the second painful search for an unused URL, followed by a third painful search due to a comedy of errors too tedious to describe.

Rootsimple.com is here to stay. I like it a lot better than “Homegrown Evolution.” It’s easier to remember and I dig the symbolism.

“Everything changes and nothing remains still …. and … you cannot step twice into the same stream.” as Hereclitus says. The publishing and blogging world is getting a bit crowded in the “urban homesteading” category. It’s time to expand the conversation and explore some new home ec related topics. We don’t want to become stale. Having a new book coming out later this spring, Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, also makes for a good moment to update our website.

Incidentally, for those of you trying to find an unused URL, I discovered that you can just add the word “burrito” and you’ve got yourself a website. So go ahead and register rootsimpleburrito.com before someone else does.

You might recall that several months ago we said we were going to do a website redesign. Well, we’re finally getting around to it. Over this weekend we’re going to be monkeying with things, so if you check in, you might encounter strangeness. When it’s all done, we’re going to have a new name and a new look.

“Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good” is a favorite saying around here, frequently repeated because we so frequently forget it. We’d planned to make lots of changes to this blog and lay them out with a big “Ta Da!” But that didn’t turn out to be practical. As you’ll soon see, this redesign is pretty minor. It’s just the first step of what will be a slow evolution that we’ll undergo through tiny tweaks and additions as we figure things out. And really, that’s the best way to change.

“What kind of changes?” you ask? Well, those ideas are still developing, but our overarching goal is to offer our readers more: more posts, more resources, more information, more voices. 

This weekend, though, all we’re doing is changing our background to white, adding some navigation tabs, and changing our name. What’s our new name? Like the lady in the picture above, we’re going to keep our secret under wraps–at least until tomorrow.