Reading an interesting article on burning birds site about blogging popularity got me to thinking about the popularity of my site, which isn’t all that great.
Not that I’m complaining, not in the slightest. When I first started out (yep all 2 months ago) I went on a bit of a rampage getting my blog on all the pinging lists and whatnot… however, now that I’ve calmed down from the initial excitement I must admit that I’d rather get my content to a level of quality that I’m happy with before shouting from the rooftops again. (and yes that includes my spelling mistakes)
There have been some interesting comments about link exchanging on blog sites and I generally have this attitude:
I’ll link to what I think is good, and I expect others to do the same, being linked to on someones site ‘just because I’m linking them’ seems really stupid to me.
Which is why I’ve yet to inform the blogs that I link to about my existance. Like I said before, I’d rather get the quality and identity of this blog sorted out before telling people about it.
Life’s not always a popularity contest, and if it is then being popular for the ‘right’ reasons will always give you a better feeling and stronger friendships/relationships.

… wow I feel a bit like a cheesy childrens cartoon ending with a good moral comment like that 😀

Its strange, I can look at a website (and I look at a fair few), and I can see when a design is good or when its bad, if I take a bit of time I can usually also decide if the layout flows nicely or the colours go together.
But for some reason I don’t seem to be able to ‘do’ these things, admittedly I’ve not put a huge amount of effort into the design of this site. Quite probably for the simple reason that if I did it wouldn’t look all that much better.
I’d like to think that these things get better with practice, and perhaps they do. Until that time though, I think I will just stick with stealing ideas from other people (without shame) and using my trusty colour wheel program to help pick colours that actually go with each other.

Which reminds me I need to take a screenshot of this design, so hopefully in two years time I can look back and say ‘geez was a really that poor at designing back then?’
I can hope 🙂
Although it is a LOT better than some sites out there 🙂

Well for the first time I have written a post and then saved it as a draft so I can come back to it and improve/edit it before releasing it to the view of you, the gentle reader. Does this mark a new and exciting direction for me and this website? Well probably now, but certainly possibly.
It’s perhaps a bit opinionated and I need to make sure that my opinions are worded correctly and written well as I really don’t like the idea of people getting the wrong end of the stick.

Even thought some inevitably will.

[note]:
It has been drawn to my attention that there are a stupidly large number of typos in this post, rather than edit the post to fix them I’ll just hold my hands up and confess that I didn’t follow my own advice and proof read what I’d written before posting it… that should teach me (watch it not).

I doubt you will have noticed, but I have added to the bottom of the front page a navigation by page control as downloaded from this clever guy, which I’m really pleased with it seems pretty damn cool 🙂

On a different note I’m going to have to go through my css and check for conficting or wasted margin/padding values… I noticed that this could be a problem when trying to get the positioning of the navigation links at the bottom.

Well hows this for a strange coincidence?
I split the style sheet for this site into two, one for possition and one for the colouring and images. Now the reason for doing this, well I’m going to be a bit coy about that as I’m still working on it, but hopefully it should be good 🙂

..but anyway back to my point, what do I read today but an article by a designer that actually knows what he’s doing, saying all about the virtues and stuff of spliting the styles like this. Well I felt chuffed, this is the article if you’re interested, and hopefully you’re all curious and excited about my secret plan (yeah right)

I was gonna blog yesterday, honest 🙂

Not that anyone would have been worried or anything…
I just wasn’t in the right ‘writing’ mood, I had plenty to say but felt I was missing the will to say it, or at least to articulate it in a satifactory way.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this post, I have read on some peoples blogs that if they don’t post every day or even every few hours, people will start to e-mail them asking if there’s anything wrong….

I can not even begin to imagine that kind of poularitiy/maddness, and I kinda hope that things never get to that level.
Although its always nice to be wanted 😉

The more observant of you will notice the ‘Time’ addition to the menu on the left *points <=*, there is a count down until my drink drive ban is over, a ‘static’ net time clock (by static I mean it only updates when you refresh the page) and a count up since I first started blogging… somehow it seems longer than that but still.

The countdown and countup are run by my first php script :D, of course there are many of these kind of php scripts about but none of the ones I found did proper months.
By this I mean calender months, rather than all-months-are-28-days-long type months.
I’m not gonna pretend that I did it all from scratch though, clever stuff was stolen from this counter script by Jeff Holman.
Also I’m not gonna pretend that its the most efficent script at the moment, just looking at the code I feel that there is much room for more cleverness, and maybe if I get enthused then I’ll have a bash at really sorting it out…
If I do then I’ll probably ‘release’ it on this site (the excitement is almost palatable…not).

If you think this is cool and want it, why not encourage me with words in the comments section 😛