Nico’s „How to Blog“-Compendium

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There’s an interesting compendium on Nico Lumma’s blog Lummaland where he describes his basic ideas on how to maintain a blog. I have the nerve to copy his work to translate it into english. I believe it’s quite a valuable resource especially for those who are at the beginning of blogging. The more you get to used to blogging, the easier it is for you to get comfortable with the usual netiquette.

1. A Weblog is no Forum neither Email.
– don’t use „Hello, it’s me again“ phrases to introduce each entry.
– don’t sign with „Best regards, XYZ“ or „Sincerely yours, XYZ“ as it appears obstrusive and strange.
– to order your entry with paragraphes aids in the reading process.
– some correctness of spelling and grammar should not be forgotten.

2. Sources.
– sources are compulsory and/or to be linked.
– link to the exact source and not just the main domain „via cnn.com“ unless you link this reference to the exact URL.
– fancy users speak about the Permalink, the permanent habitat on the source’s server.

3. Comments.
– the weblog is yours.
– if somebody is molesting in the comments, you may simply delete it or close the comments.
– you don’t have to acquiesce everything.
– a reply to comments is often appreciated.
– anonymous comments are simply uncool.

4. Trackbacks.
– you inform the readers of another weblog-entry about other topic-related articles in other weblogs.
– choose trackbacks wisely and not „just so“.
– mutuality is important to trackbacking as you should refer within your article to the trackbacked entry.

5. Images.
– many images are copyrighted, please validate their use.
– images should fit into the entire layout of the blog as 1024×768 for an image is way too large.
– keep PG-13 rating for your images or password protect the blog for special visitors.

6. Music.
– don’t let the music start upon visiting your blog.
– links to MP3s which are copyrighted and are not royalty free should not be placed except if you like to consult your lawyer.

7. Content and Topics.
– write whatever you like to write about.

However I believe that the deletition of comments is not always the right choice as it might result in a flame war between you (the deleting side) and the comment’s author (the flaming side). Sometimes a tough discussion requires value based argumentation, but spamming and a wordwar of insults is not acceptable. Over all, you’ll get better and better in time the more you use your blog.

/von

Design Directory

Just a small note since this might turn out handy for the future of anybody who likes to hire designers: The Design Directory is an international links database with approximately 1625 categories. (You may hire me, too.)

/von

Election Project – Beta!

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We managed to finalize the blog for the fictional Democratic Christian Filipino Party (DCFP) of our student project. We? This group consists out of my girlfriend Katharina Schnitzer and two wonderful companions of our student group Torben Behmer and Kristin Balke, and with me the four of us represent this political party’s website for the Election Project course this term.

Why not using a blog for our election campaign project?
Here’s a list of reasons…
1. We do not need to rent an extra serverspace.
2. We must not rely on our lector to get updates online.
3. We can modify the content any time.
4. It’s almost easy to use without great HTML knowledge.
5. Everybody can contribute new articles and input to the „website“.
…
n. well, enough for now! Everyone has most personal issues why to use a blog instead of a handmade crafted html website. It’s automated, it’s dynamic, it’s modern.

About the DCFP’s technic background: Of course I used the Blogspirit software package to create this blog a few weeks ago and most of it’s original functionality remained. However, I modified the templates to show just the headlines and category names at the Main Page – while the blog’s articles are fully extended in the archive, categories and in the permalinks. I basically erased the sidebars‘ content such as the calendars, recent articles and comments, and on top of this, I only need to manage to get the Search-Engine and Join-Us areas operational… oops ;) !

/von

Destroy Me!

While reading some RSS feeds I came accross the Searchenginewatch which featured Netdisaster. You may enter any URL at Netdisaster and choose from several catastrophes like mold, dinosaurs, wasps, spilled coffee and cigarette burning. Or you may want some harder stuff, then try to drop nuclear weapons over the entire web-site or keep Mars Attacks! digitally alive with some of the most devastating effects – or just take your paintball gun and colorize the website.

/von

Don’t Click it!

I feel being intuitively affected by this design case study as I’ve always felt being resistant against clicking. Since I’ve always enjoyed shortcuts or using the keyboard instead of endlessly scrolling and moving the mouse around, I managed to browse the entire site without a single click – except the one caused by my laptop’s mousepad.


Can you resist?

(via M-E-X Blog)

/von

Blogroll Modifications

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I believe it’s time to modify my Blogroll in this blog’s navigation bar. To be honest – it disturbs me greatly. Since I’m reading over 150 blogs and newsfeeds each day (once they’re updated by using my RSS OWL aggregator), this handful bunch of links does not conform with the concept of Blogrolls. One idea instead of maintaining the Blogroll here is surely to publish the major categories of my feed list which will directly link to the OPML files, or I might only link the whole OPML file instead of pushing the other blogs into my content.

On the other hand, I wonder if Blogrolls are useful or rather not. In the end, it is just a nice service to push other blogs and increase their pagerank in search engines (unless you no-follow them). Keeping this in my mind, the whole concept of a Blogroll might become redundant since I am definately not using my Sichelputzer blog to jump to others. I do prefer to get content as fast as possible – which is the automated process of reading feeds. That’s why my Blogroll element might disappear sooner or later today.

/von

Berlin at night and a fallen tree

I feel like publishing the recent photo modifications for my desktop’s wallpaper, and I’m starting with a blurred and stylized image showing the skyline of the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin followed by another photo I’ve taken in late fall 2003.


download 129kb


download 187kb

/von

ICQ needs help! (Update)

Why are companies not able to ask native speakers of a language before launching a service in this particular language? I feel numb by reading this banner ad on the ICQ Homepage… but Kat’s and my lungs were filled with Oxygen nitrogen while laughing so hard at it! On the other hand, I hope the translations done by myself aren’t that bad, but this is a classic. „ICQ – Jetzt aus Deutsch“ is completely false, instead it should be „auf Deutsch“ if the language is meant by the designers or „aus Deutschland“ if they refer to the country itself. Thanks, now opting out!

Update
Thank you Mirko! We didn’t notice the „Jezt“ mistake at all since the original „Jetzt“ has a subordinary value due to the spelling mistake compared to the clear grammatical mistake of „aus“. Well… I believe ICQ should take care of their foreign language ads, and I’m going to take care of the Blogspirit translation again – time to recheck the work from the holidays ;)

/von

Timeless Web-Design?

Thomas commented on my blog and the design – thank you. But exactly your comment, Thomas, made me wonder about my website’s design. I believe it is the same layout which I used in 2003 – and I have not made a significant change yet except minor updates like image additions. There has been no real modification, and no alteration of the looks of this site. Without improvement, I’m hardly catching up with modern existence on the web.

For instance, the most disturbing factors are the doublette found in the blog categories and the major navigation bar at top. Of course, the Starting Point has to remain as major entry to the site, and the Sichelputzer is the actual link to the blog. The category for links in Linkage fits its purpose perfect as much as Shots’n’Pics fits for the gallery – but the other categories of Ego-Mania, Unicum Akademie and Party Radar seem to be redundant the more I contribute to the blog. I hardly update these parts of the site, and even the categories of the blog are filled once or twice a week by now.

I considered two extremes for a redesign of the layout – classical hardliner vs. multimedial overload. The first principle has its focus on the simplicity of design found in the early stages of the internet. Traditionally, Google, Ebay and Amazon still keep the simplicity in their design as major steps of multimedial design is nearly banned within the layout. On the other side, the focus on multimedial content and design plays an important role in today’s media. With grafical power and miracles of technology, another method of overloading the user can be reached.

But a clear destinction between informational content and multimedial content is a must. Probably, a merger of both alike the current layout but with a higher interactivity and linguistical focus on information and entertainment, perhaps edutainment, will aid the process of enriching this virtual spectre of myself. I need to reorganize the content and find a new design… if anybody has some ideas, feel free to let me know! ;)

/von

The Holnis Peninsula

Sometime in late fall 2003, I went out for a walk on a sunny day and took a few photos with my digital camera. One of these pictures serves in an edited format as current desktop wallpaper. I took this photo while the sunbeams covered my skin with warmth and bright light, but I filtered the image in Adobe Photoshop with a blue saturation and difference-clouds.


download 129kb

/von