The idea for ShrinkGeek came from a series of emails back in January of 2008. We’ve told the story here before so we won’t go over the gory details again, but the Cliffs Notes summary of the story is that we took that idea and managed to make it a reality in May of 2009.

In the time that has passed since we’ve posted how-tos on things like 100 calorie breakfasts, had the chance to talk to other geeky fitness fiends like Tonya Kay (Creature from Stan Lee’s Who Wants To Be A Superhero), taken a look at fitness games and gizmos out there, and managed to attract a small but dedicated community. We feel that we’ve started something good, but there has recently been a great deal of talk among the geeks here about how we could make this year even better for our little labor of love.

ShrinkGeek 2.0 is what we’ve come up with.

Today we’re bringing the newer, shinier, faster version to you – and with several improvements from the original design we started with. Some of the improvements are:

• Forums – Simply put: while a blog is a great deal of fun, it doesn’t really give readers a place to share their stories. This was something we felt was severely lacking in the original site, so we’ve added a new forum system in.
• The Daily Quest – Looking for ways to jump start your healthy new year? Taking inspiration from MMOs, we’ve set up a Daily Quest that you can complete for your own fitness level-ups. Each day we’ll post a challenge on the forums for everyone to complete and report back.
• More reviews, interviews, and featured content – You’ve voted with your comments and pageviews, and we’re working hard to bring you more original content. We are still going to post links to news that we stumble across from other sources (with our own thoughts tossed in to the mix), but we’re going to make a concerted effort to have more original content here as well.
• A stronger commitment to Facebook and Twitter - While we’ve had a presence on Facebook and Twitter for a long time now, we really didn’t do anything with those services other than treat them as glorified RSS feeds (and really, if there is one that Twitter doesn’t need it is yet another link bot). We’re planning to use both services as another way to communicate with our readers as opposed to just linking to stories here.
• Our new mascot! – Lemuel “Lemmo” Pew, one of the creators of a truly trippy webcomic called Blank It, helped us bring to life an idea we’ve had in our heads since we originally launched the site. The cute little guy you see at the top of this post is going to be showing up a lot around these parts in the future, and we’re really excited to have him along for the ride.

At ShrinkGeek we believe that if you want to improve yourself you constantly need to take a look at what you’re doing and ask yourself if you could be doing it better. That’s what we’ve done here, and we’re really happy with the results. We hope you are too!