Moving across the country and Mashable have killed my blogging on BenParr.com, but still thousands of people are reading my posts. So, with my change of location, I thought I’d throw in a change of design.

So welcome to the new BenParr.com, the beginnings of a more social, more interactive BenParr.com. The old design has been thrown out the window for this one.

Some of the new updates:

• A completely new design: Thanks to a combination of my work and One Theme, I have a a new design. I have a new logo, new color scheme and a lot more space for widgets.
• Faster website: This should deal with any load speed bugs of the past.
• Navigation changes: You’ll notice that there is a new menu line – this is a quick nav to the topics I cover the most. On top of this, the menu is now on the right hand side, so that content is king. I also have two sidebars for more useful content.

Some of the things you can expect on this new website:

• Integration with my Mashable Articles: There will be a cool widget with my most recent articles so that you can always see what I’m writing.
• Integration with Tech&Beer and Engage Analytics: My two new projects are my tech show, Tech&Beer (more announcements soon, and my consulting firm Engage Analytics – updates from each will be pushed to BenParr.com
• Social media streams: Since I can’t write as much (I will still write), I will help compensate by connecting to my social stream – my Google Reader shared items, my Twitter, my Facebook stream, and more will appear on the blog so you’re in the know about the best social media and entrepreneurship information.

What still has to be done:

• Fixing bugs: The comments don’t appear in titles and there may be some IE6 issues.
• Design tweaks: A slightly bigger font here, a slight color change there – nothing too revolutionary.
• Old article formats: Some of the older articles didn’t take perfectly to the new design. I will deal with them as necessary.

Watch out for more changes and updates. In the meantime, please give me some feedback on what I should do next.

- Ben

The widget below is a live stream of all of the pictures taken on my iPhone while moving across the country. You can also follow the stream by following Twitter account.

P.S. – Here’s the widget

Hey everyone, it’s been a busy couple of weeks, thus my updates have been even less frequent than usual. Normally I like to make my blog more about how to make you more productive as an entrepreneur and as a person. I promise I will get back to writing great posts on entrepreneurship soon.

In the meantime, I want to tell you about upcoming changes and the Twitter photostream experiment I will be conducting while I travel from Chicago to San Francisco, starting next Monday (April 13th).

First, on the changes – I intend to completely redesign BenParr.com with a new interface. It will be a completely new scheme that switches the location of the menu and adds some integrated functionality, such as a widget that streams the articles I write for Mashable and integration with my new tech show Tech & Beer, which should be launching in May. There will also be some integration with my new consulting firm, Engage Analytics, which is nearly done as a website and as a company.

The second piece of interesting news is the cross country move. It’s going to be a grueling, wonderful 4 day journey spanning over 2,000 miles. I will be driving in my truck with a uHaul trailer hitched to the back. But if pictures interest you, I will be taking pictures across the country, in every state and cool place I visit. I will chronicle packing things up, visiting my hometown, my dogs, and the major sightseeing points – the Rocky Mountains, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and yes, even Nebraska’s corn.

The picture above is the boxes being packed. I will be posting all of my photos via Twitter, but I will be re-linking my Facebook status to my Twitter account, so all of those pictures will be posted on my Facebook as well. Be sure to follow my Twitter if you want to see half the country in the span of 3 days.

Those are my announcements. Oh yeah, I’m going to embed a widget tomorrow to stream all of the photos from my TwitPic account so you can see the moving images. Hopefully this will be a good experiment in social media’s ability to share photos and experiences.