I must apologize for the articles being few and far between right now, but I currently have a lot on my plate, and most of the time I have online is being spent on “the project“, which I thought I would give you an update of.  As you might catch by headline here, everything has slowed down a bit, infact a bit too much for my liking.

I find that my biggest problem right now is that I’m too much of a perfectionist when it comes to getting everything look just like I want them too, and if I’m not completely happy with something I can definately not settle, and need to start again from “scratch”, so to say.

Obviously this is slowing things down a bit, but I am hoping that I can get everything looking in a way that will satisfy me, and get on with things. I am still eager to get things going on this one, but all the tedious repetitive work with no end-result, like it is standing right now, is really stealing motivation!

Just a small notice to let you all know that the blog has been upgraded to the brand new release of WordPress. I have been somewhat lazy with the upgrades of the blog software lately, and up until tonight I was still running on 2.0.4, but once I saw that they had released a brand new version which sported some fancy new features I decided I had to take the time to upgrade.

I haven’t really had time to familiarize myself with all the new features as of yet, but from what I’ve seen so far there’s nothing but improvements here. If you’re running WordPress I would definately reccomend that you upgrade as soon as you can find the time. The autosave function for when writing posts is worth the effort alone!

It seems my theme is working just fine with the upgrade, and I’m glad that is the case. If you do see any bugs however, be sure to let me know, and I’ll try to get them fixed as soon as possible.

Not a long post today, just a little something to let you know I’m still alive and kicking. The coder I hired to code the design for the project has finished the job and delievered the product to me. There were some minor quirks that I am currently trying to fix myself, and one that that I need some help from him to fix, but all that should be sorted out soon.

I guess I can reveal now that the project will be taking advantage of vBulletin, which should give you some more clues about what the site will actually be. I will however integrate quite a bit of other features, so it’s not exclusively a forum by any means. This also means that I will have to adapt the design to these other things as well, and that part remains to be done. Once I get that done, as well as the graphical elements of the site, the only thing that’s left on my to-do list before we can go live, is to finish up the content. Not a small task by any means, but I’m looking forward to getting started with it!

That’s about it for now, as I have to get back to working on the things mentioned above. On a completely different note though, there has been some progress on my work situation, but I’ll address that in my next post.

A couple of days ago I asked a an unnamed person if he/she (not giving any clues about who it might be) wanted to do a simple link exchange between our blogs, as I find this person’s blog interesting to read, and I thought that my readers would possibly be interested in reading the mentioned blog. It’s a reasonably popular blog from what I’ve seen, but it’s been running for a good while, thus is more established than my own.

Today I got a response from said person, saying that a link exchange wasn’t interesting because the person only swapped links with other blogs that had more than x amount of visitors. This response amused me somewhat, in part because I don’t really know what grounds the person had judged my visitor numbers, but in reality the visitor numbers of my blog well exceeded “x per day”. I’m actually a tad bit surprised myself of how fast my numbers have established themselves at a reasonable low-to-mid xxx range per day. Why readers can’t be bothered to comment is a different thing, and I’ll try to investigate that further at a later point.

But back to the original point of the post. Part of why the response I got amused me was because it highlighted how different perspectives people have on personal blogging and link exchanges. For me this really isn’t about trying to reach a certain amount of visitors per day, and then celebrate once I reach that. More than anything else, it’s about writing, expressing myself, and share my thoughts with other people, and attract people who find my thoughts interested. I’m not really convinced that this is easier than trying to attract a certain amount of visitors, because there are hundreds of millions of people online, and trying make your voice stand out from the crowd can be hard enough.

And to me, this means that everything that I associate my blog with needs to be something that promotes and brings me closer to my goal of providing something that would hopefully interest those that read my blog. Obviously that includes the blogs that I link to as well. So yeah, just a sort of a funny look at how different looks people can have on certain aspects of personal blogging. I am definately not by any means claiming that one is better than the other. I do however believe that it can be beneficial for a blogger to treat a personal blog differently from any other website (topic specific blogs included), but I will get back to the whys and the hows of this at a later point.

I am pleased to say that the design that I hired a coder to do is more or less finished. I am very satisfied with the job the coder has done for me, and it has been a pleasure to work with him so far. Once the job is completed, I will be writing up a testimonial for him which I’ll let you all have a look at.

Right now, only a few more tweaks remain before the coding part of the design is complete, and the final phase of the design can begin, which is finishing up all the graphical elements. I will be doing this myself, and I’m quite looking forward to it! Graphical design like this is something I enjoy doing, unless the dreaded designers-block makes a visit, but hopefully that can be avoided.

I have also started on the last part of the preporations before the project goes public, which is content creation. Throughout my years online I have learned one thing that is more important than everything else when it comes to drawing in visitors: Good, informative and unique content is indeed king. If you have something that someone is interested in reading, people will come to your site. People will link to your site. Search engines will index your site. In short, your site will have a much better chance of being successful.

Other than that, everything is more or less ready to go. I’m not setting an official opening date for the project just yet, because I would like to have basically everything ready to go, and only the fine tuning left before I set a date. Nobody (except Microsoft) like delays. So stay tuned and I’ll be sure to keep you in the loop.