I last redesigned my blog in July ‘08, resulting in a sleeker look and faster load times, and I thought all was finally right with the world… until I got an email from a friend asking me what in the name of creation did I do to my site.  She mentioned coming here and not knowing what it was about, that the design gave too much space to ads, and she couldn’t see ME here anymore, and the content just wasn’t enticing enough to draw her in and read more.

After I stopped crying for a few hours, I decided that she had a point, though I wonder just how many people actually come away with this impression.  Does my site’s design confuse you, or do you know right away when you visit here that you’re reading a personal blog?  Do you get what the site is about?  Is the look aesthetically pleasing, or do you find it cumbersome and difficult to scan?

Regardless, I’m eventually I’m planning to do another redesign, this time with a more magazine-type layout (similar to this site maybe) but looking at all the themes out there, I end up getting nauseous and having the overwhelming urge to drink heavily (like Mountain Dew mixed with Dr. Pepper.)

In the meantime, if you ever visited a blog and came away with the impression “Wow, that blog was nicely designed!” let me know in the comments.  I might take a look at it and see if it can provide some inspiration of how my future design might look.

Tags: blog, design, inspiration, redesign, theme, themes
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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I’ve been trying to decide what to blog about lately, but I got nothing here.  Seriously, nothing.  I’m off from work this week though, so I might chance a one day road trip somewhere just for the heck of it and blog about that, but other than that nothing’s happening.  I’m not getting any emails, no phone calls, no instant messages, no hot girls ringing my doorbell and telling me I’m the man of their dreams.  NOTHING.

So I turn to you, my beloved audience for some inspiration.  What would you like me to write about?  Suggestions, anyone?  Anyone?

Tags: audience, blogging, funk, inspiration, suggestions, writer's block
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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A guest blogger at JohnChow.com challenged the audience in commiting to writing at least one blogging post a day for 20 days. Apparently if you make something a part of your daily routine for about three weeks, it will eventually become a habit and thus a routine that will be easier to stick to.

I decided to answer the challenge as well, since one of the big problems I’ve had in getting this blog going was my history of erratic posting frequency. I have to admit I was actually afraid to link to Chow’s blog because he’s currently in the Google doghouse for engaging in controversial link building. I thought if Google saw that I linked to his site, they would think that I was another evil fan of his and then blacklist me from their search index for all eternity, forever doomed to the dark pits of internet obscurity.

I think I worry too much.

As for what’s holding me back, I think the main reason is TIME. I’m spending a lot of time working at my job, catching up on my news feeds, tweaking my site, reading up on affiliate marketing, learning about microstock photography, gaming, watching TV, staring into empty space, just about everything EXCEPT blogging. I make no time for it at all, and it shows.

There’s another reason for this though: I have nothing to write about. Well nothing that I think will at least interest anybody. I think my writing sucks monkey’s balls too. No matter how good an idea I have for a blogging post, it never seems to translate well on “paper.” Somewhere in the blogging process things get jammed up and the end result is mindless crap. Maybe as I attempt to blog more often things will get better. Maybe not.

Maybe I need a life. Maybe I need a woman too.

Tags: affiliate marketing, audience, balls, blog, blogger, blogging, chow, daily, doghouse, empty space, eternity, google, habit, inspiration, john chow, life, monkey, muse, musing, obscurity, oogle, photography, pits, routine, time, tweaking, watching tv, writing
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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Is it me, or does the mass of social networking (or Web 2.0) sites out there seem to be such an overwhelming chaos of convoluted information that even Einstein would have trouble making sense of it all?

Unfortunately though, not content to see 3 or 4 daily readers perusing my blog (despite my anti-social tendencies), I decided to make a journey through the social networking universe and see what was out there, and whether I wanted any of it to come back to my little corner on the web. I also needed a vehicle that would help me find relevant content that could truly inspire me (while also setting me apart from other bloggers). I started by going down the list of social networking sites found at Wiki, and from there I proceeded to spend the rest of the day clicking from place to place, sometimes bored, sometimes impressed, but mostly confused and perplexed.

Some sites seemed simple enough in its concept, but others begged the question: “What in the blue @#$% is the point of all this?” First there were the MySpace clones, some of which appear to improve on MySpace’s shortcomings. Whatever. As far as I was concerned, such sites were online slums exhibiting the worst that humanity had to offer, so I quickly moved on whenever it became obvious that a site I was visiting had been designed using a model similar to MySpace. To be fair, Facebook wasn’t nearly as bad or coarse as some of the MySpace pages I’ve surfed, but it’s really designed for those attending college (and for employees of popular companies).

Then it was on to sites that offered… well I wasn’t exactly sure what it was they offered. The worst offender I think had to be BlinkBits. I just stared at this thing for what had to be 30 minutes and I still couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. It did appear to be overwhelmed with spam though, and whenever I made a test submission, the content just seemed to get lost in all the advertising for Viagra. Hooo-kay…. Blinklist on the other hand seemed to be more polished, but it was still hard to understand the actual purpose of it. The list of “blinks” I sifted through didn’t seem appealing enough for me to check out (and again a lot of the blinks appeared to be spam).

My headaches from surfing finally started to wane when I began checking out the social bookmarking sites. Del.icio.us as some people by now probably know is the most popular one there is, but to me it seemed a little… bland. REALLY bland. So bland in fact that I thought for sure I was missing something, a key feature I was supposed to enable to access its full features. But nope, Del.icio.us was just a simple bookmarking service that utilizes tags to help you organize your bookmarks. Its interface though was just plain UGLY to me, and once I realized it couldn’t be changed, I began to understand why other social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia existed. I’ve already uploaded my bookmarks to Del.icio.us, but I think after I organize them I’ll export tham to Ma.gnolia, which has a much more polished and appealing interface to me. Del.icio.us seemed like the barebones equivalent of a Linux box, while Ma.gnolia gave me that happy-dappy, flower-filled MacOS feel, complete with sunshine and rainbows. There were a few other bookmarking services as well with some truly novel concepts, like Backflip’s method of organzing your bookmarks in a Yahoo style directory, but the rest more or less seemed redundant to me.

I then moved on to blogging oriented communities, like Xanga, Blogger and LiveJournal. But the most polished one I’ve found thus far was Vox.com, created by the makers of the MovableType blogging script. I’ve already been able to duplicate most, if not all of the features offered by these communities on my own blog, so I didn’t feel the need to join for the time being. One community that stood out a little though was MyBlogLog, which was designed with the idea of having people connect with other readers of their favorite blogs. I played around with it for a while, but didn’t see much use for it, partly because my favorite blogs weren’t listed, and partly because the listing of readers for a particular blog didn’t tell me much, if anything. All you see is a small thumbnail of the reader and their usually cryptic usernames underneath. It was still an interesting concept though, so I may decide to stick around and see if I can make it worth my while. There was another site called Squidoo that looked intriguing as well, giving users the ability to create “lenses” that were in essence start pages piecing together a variety of content reflecting the user’s personal interests. At least I think that’s what it is. It basically just offered a different way to organize content, but unfortunately the design seems to make it susceptible to spam as well. Some of the lenses read more like bland advertisements rather than a user’s actual personal take on places on the web that interested him.

For the most part I ignored some of the popular social networks based on specific themes since I was, ironically enough, already a member of them. Namely, I’m thinking of YouTube, Last.FM and Flickr. These three sites have definitely proved their weight in gold, and I’ve been consistently using all of them to complement my own blog. It’s funny, while I generally despise mainstream social networks like MySpace, these theme based networks on the other hand are like manna from heaven. There’s even a site called Doostang that’s designed to help people find jobs through social networking. Muy coolio.

I also came across a few nifty sites that offered a variety of ways for people to organize get-togethers and meetings in real life. Dodgeball (which uses mobile phones to send you alerts when friends and crushes are nearby) and Meetup (which allows you to find groups and meetings of interest in your area) were two of the best I’ve seen. If I had any friends I’m sure these services would certainly come in handy.

Finally, I soon I began descending on news oriented sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Tailrank, NewsVine (and many, many more). Newsvine by the way actually looked in some ways like NetVibes (a service that allows you to design your own personal start page through aggregation). It looked interesting, but WAY overloaded with content. It was one of those things that required your full attention in order to understand how it worked, but I suspect I’ll be investing a lot of time learning how to use all the features it offered only to end up wondering why I bothered in the first place. Tailrank was more blogging oriented, providing feeds for the user that can help you glean what
topics were currently drawing the most interest in the blogosphere. Reddit offered a Slashdot-like way to submit and discuss news items in a vanilla but very addictive format. Then there was Meshly, a service that offered a way for users to submit articles and content via instant messaging. Digg was far more polished in its look and voting system and remains one of the top sites in this particular category of social networks, but in the end I began to realize why these particular sites weren’t that appealing to me. In truth, I wasn’t really a news oriented person. I’m as interested in what’s happening in the world as anyone else of course, but sites like Digg and Reddit completely overwhelm you not just with news related items, but LONG discussion threads such news articles regularly spawn. They seem to go on forever, and ever, and ever, and…

I also noticed that these news oriented networks tend to draw a particularly monolothic demographic, so much that the vast majority of users that peruse these sites could probably be described as angry white male geekazoids who generally spend their pastime decrying in rabid fashion the latest evils of the current White House administration. Ironically enough, this probably would have still been the case had a site like Digg been launched in say, 1998, which back then would have undoubtedly provided an outlet for angry white male geekazoids to vent their frustrations over, uhhhh… the latest evils of the White House administration. In a way this is what I believe is the downside of time based content. It’s repetitive, cyclical, and ultimately boring. Wars come, wars go. Scandals come, scandals go. There really is nothing new under the sun. And I was getting tired of reading through news items that continuously sparked the same old rehashed arguments and flame wars ad infinitum. Good grief, tell me something NEW.

And yet the blogosphere is mostly awash in news, and discussions (or flame wars) over said news, so much that they start to become almost indistinguishable from one another. Where was the diversity? Where was the focus on timeless content, on things that might really matter? The void here was remarkably palpable to me, abandoned instead for themes that would guarantee the heaviest traffic: news and politics. Quality is forsaken in the never ending quest for quantity. And why not? Quantity after all is what brings in the mula.

Tired and weary from my online journey around the world, and from sifting through the endless content at places like Reddit and Digg, it occurred to me that I already had something wonderful and good all along, patiently waiting for me to come home. I had a means to explore timeless content the way it used to be done, back when the web was just getting started. Back when it wasn’t all about news, but about people, about true individuality and innovation. About things that mattered. That something was a small little toolbar currently residing at the top of my browser, provided to me by the good folks at StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon was really what I had been looking for all along. A way to surf the web aimlessly and randomly, and yet still find wonderful places that I could bookmark or blog about in a heartbeat. I was finding content that mattered to me, content I never would have found in a million years perusing sites like Reddit or Digg, or even via a search on Google. The kind of community StumbleUpon offered also proved to be far more diverse, and a more accurate reflection of the general population of mankind. StumbleUpon was the kind of social network that attracted people from all walks of life, rather than just a particular demographic of smarmy geeks who coined phrases like “Web 2.0″ and “folksonomies,” and then expecting the rest of us mere mortals to know what the hell they’re talking about.

So finally, after two bleary eyed days of clicking and surfing, after seeing what’s out there and beyond, the prodigal blogger has finally stumbled his way home. And who knows, if even StumbleUpon should lose its appeal after time, I could always create my own social network.

Tags: 30 minutes, advertisements, aggregation, articles, backflip, blinkbits, blinklist, blinks, blog, blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogging community, blogosphere, blogs, bookmarking, bookmarks, cell phone, chaos, clones, convoluted, cyclical, del.icio.us, demographic, digg, discussion threads, diversity, dodgeball, doostang, downside, einstein, evils, facebook, fashion, favorites, flame wars, flickr, friends, geeks, get togethers, gold, good grief, hooo, individuality, information, innovation, inspiration, instant messaging, interests, items, journey, kay, last.fm, lenses, list of social networking sites, livejournal, ma.gnolia, manna from heaven, meetings, meetup, Meshly, mobile networking, money, movabletype, mybloglog, myspace, nerds, netvibes, news, newsvine, nothing new under the sun, pastime, people, politics, prodigal, quality, quantity, rating, readers, reddit, scandals, shortcomings, sites, slashdot, slums, social bookmarking, social networking, social networking sites, social networks, spam, squidoo, start page, stumbleupon, submission, surfing, tags, tailrank, tendencies, themes, thumbnail, timeless content, toolbar, traffic, universe, usernames, viagra, voting, Vox, web, web 2.0, white house, wiki, xanga, YouTube
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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…will they come?

I finally reached the point where I could submit my new baby to all the major search engines and indexes (using the nifty submission tools at SelfPromotion.com), which I figured would be more productive than screaming “Notice me, notice me!!!” at the top of my lungs to anyone who’d listen. But at this stage it’s like a drop of water trying to get attention in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Of course, there’s always the hope that I’ll experience the “Field of Dreams” effect, and people will come from all four corners of the globe just to see me play b… err, blog.

Yeah right.

Then there’s the matter of what the hell I should be writing about to begin with. I have several ideas, but for the moment I can’t seem to put them into words. It’s like turning a hunk of metal into a smokin’ hot rod, and then not knowing how to drive after you finished building it.

Maybe it’s the heat. For the past few weeks it’s been nothing but lovely 100º+ degree weather combined with an even more lovelier 200% humidity index. There won’t be too many moments of inspiration when the heat and moisture is busy sucking the life force out of you, even when you’re hiding under the bed with the AC on full blast.

Ah well, I’m sure this dry spell will end once I get enough shuteye to make up for the lack of sleep I’ve been missing out on for oh…the past month or so, and maybe once the weather cools off just a wee little bit. Oy, this summer can’t end fast enough.

Tags: blog, blogs, field of dreams, four corners, full blast, globe, hot rod, humidity index, hunk, indexes, inspiration, little bit, new baby, oy, pacific ocean, search engines, seo
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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