DotNeil.com

Apologies to subscribers, casual readers, and new visitors; this post includes some new year resolutions of which, if you’ve read one already, you’ve probably had enough already. There’s one bit of good news, though. I have, yet again, re-designed this site, and it’s the best version yet. Here’s a screenshot for those RSS subscribers with clickthroughitis;

This theme should be around for a while.

Whenever I need a break from more complex work, I find it therapeutic to do some restructuring of a simple system, e.g. this blog. And that’s what I got up to over the Christmas holidays whilst other people in the house were having a lie in (I find it difficult to sit around watching TV - I have a constant need to be working on something).

This is the sixth iteration of the design since it launched (albeit on another URL) in Feb 2007. That equates to the following ratio, which I’ve interpreted in a complex visualization (at the very least, it’s an angle for this blog, if not a killer, Digg.com-front-page-worthy, USP);

My suggestion to aspiring bloggers is that you focus on the content and not the layout.

As a big bonus, whenever I spend time working with WordPress (the blogging platform powering this site), I invariably end up meeting talented developers eager to find solutions to other peoples coding problems. Some of these developers even want to become involved with Web Appropriate. Therefore, having a side project which can be shared over public forums is an almost guaranteed way of finding people who’ll help you implement a business idea further down the line. After six or so re-designs, I’ve met some great developers.

Blogging

In 2007, my most painless blog posts were those that wrote themselves in a few hundred words or less. Longer than a message on Twitter, but shorter than much of the stuff that other bloggers expect people to read; they were usually complete with a illustrative image. For example;

This post received a couple of nice reactions and was very easy to write.”

Excluding what you’re reading right now; I don’t want to post lengthy opinions in 2008. Instead, I’ll be making short posts, usually summarising and twisting news from elsewhere on the Web, to help out those people that don’t have the schedule for masses of RSS from Web industry blogs (I calculated I’ve been ‘reading’ 200 RSS delivered blog posts every day of the week for the last twelve months - I wouldn’t want you to do the same). I’ll also be posting my own ideas, too. It’ll all be useful, maybe humorous, and, hopefully, interesting reading. I’ll certainly put a lot of effort in to an image for each post. Easy to consume, and nice too look at, too.

Check out the new features on the site, they should make visiting my URL more fun. You can now rate posts using a star-based system (it’ll tell me what I’m doing right or wrong - I desperately want truthful feedback on how I articulate my thoughts in text). Please, go back through the archives, rate everything with one star (no, you can’t go any lower), and I’ll work up from there.

Rating posts takes no time at all, and the interaction has some nice effects chucked in.”

Finally, what are your plans for the coming year? Please make sure you post a comment letting me, and any visitors, know what you’re up to in 2008 (it doesn’t have to be related to the Web industry). I still only know about two or three of my subscribers!