Buta no Ie

I find this is somewhat funny as this blog post has been sitting in my drafts list for over 3 years now, when I first started trying to blog in 2006. I started out with a flurry of posts and then only had a single post up in the next 3 years!

Here is the post as is seeing that the two points that were typed out still apply today. I must have had some other points to make that have been long forgotten which I suppose demonstrates the importance of timeliness!

Cang and I had an abbreviated conversation about blogging the other night. I figure I’d finish the conversation here.

He thought I was posting way too frequently. Cang‘s posts are much more deliberate and are fewer and far between. I also think the content has somewhat of a greater value when compared to mine.

I agree with Cang the frequency of my posts (almost 1 per day) are ultimately not sustainable but there is a method to my madness.

First off, I’m trying to get in the habit of posting things in a timely fashion. If you wait too long, whatever you were planning to write about may no longer be relevant or as news breaking. You’ll also start to lose details of your experience or the thoughts in your head, even if you originally took notes.

I’m also throwing stuff up on the wall and seeing what sticks. Sure, one of the goals is to blog about client-side development, something that I still need to get to, but what other things from my daily happenings are people interested in reading about?

Now these things apply specifically to my blog and my goals for it. If your blog is your diary, by all means, keep posting anything you want. If you want your blog to be a specific knowledge resource, yes, keep the posts limited but high in content value.

Timeliness is everything when blogging. If you wait too long, whatever you were planning to write about may no longer be relevant or as news breaking. You’ll also start to lose details of your experience or the thoughts in your head, even if you originally took notes.

Unfortunately for me, I think I’ve missed the window of opportunity to blog about the Future of Web Apps Summit. I may still get around to transcribing my notes over the next few weeks.

Fortunately for you, there are plenty of good posts on the InterWeb to read about in the mean time.

UPDATED September 23, 2006:
Added CenterNetworks coverage of the Summit.

Read more…

A quick list of a few must have additions for WordPress:

• Sandbox; a self-described theme for themers. It produces semantic and valid XHTML 1.0/Transitional markup, is widget compatible and has the ability to be easily skinned via CSS.
• Sidebar Widgets; makes it dead simple to add and order your sidebar content with drag-and-drop administration. No need to hack away at the sidebar.php code for the timid.
• Flickr Photo Album; this plugin will pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. It will also allow you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior; allows you to easily tag your posts inside the Write Post page and display your tags in many different ways.
• Search Everything; did you know that the default WP search doesn’t search pages and comments? I didn’t know that either but this plugin adds that functionality.

Just read this great article on SEOmoz on how to increase your blog’s traffic.

A must read if you’re just starting up a blog and want to actually have some people viewing it.

The default installation of WordPress that my ISP provides is 2.0.3. As I was entering my links, I noticed that single (‘) and double quotes (“) weren’t being displayed properly no matter what I did. I tried replacing them with their appropriate hex entities and HTML entities but no dice.

Turns out this is an issue afflicting the 2.0.3 release. Upgrading to 2.0.4 resolves this issue and I many others. If you’re a WordPress user and haven’t already upgraded, I encourage you to do so.

You never want to be up at 1:00 in the morning, bashing your head trying to figure out why your quotes don’t work.

First post!

Roll out the red carpet… I can’t believe I’ve been in the industry for almost a decade and have never started a blog.

A bit about myself. I’m an User Experience Developer (client-side development) with the Habañero Consulting Group.

I’ve recently been tasked to research how best to get our User Experience Group’s blog up and running. We’ve pretty much decided to go with WordPress. If it’s good enough for Jeffery Zeldman, it’s good enough for me.

Through the WP website I found BlueHost, an inexpensive hosting service. Can’t go wrong with $8/mo for 30gigs of storage and a huge gob of bandwidth. Hopefully they may finally give my website a proper home.

Over the next few weeks, and probably going into months, I’ll document the trials and tribulations of developing and designing a blog from the point of view of a guy who’s livelyhood depends on the web.

So welcome to SingChan.com… more to come.