My Dear Hard Drive

Just so you know, some of my frequent commentors like Tony Single and Pushyarag2000 are automatically put to the moderation queue or spam folder for some reason. This is annoying but I can’t seem to find the reason for it. Will have try and find it later, but as for now, I didn’t do it myself and I still expect and appreciate your comments!

Few days ago, I followed a comment-link to read the blog of a person who left me a very interesting comment. What I found was a blog so badly designed I could not read it. I simply could not read it even tough I really really wanted to. I skimmed through some of the posts after setting my browser so that I could almost comfortably follow the lines of massive text, and found an entry that was wondering why the blog wasn’t doing too well. I found that this blogger had followed every rule in the book to get his blog out there… Exept what comes to designing blog layouts. This is the state that I found the blog in. I needed a total 27 screenshots to fit the front page onto a screenshot. 27 - I kid you not. So I contacted him directly to offer some insight to what might have effected his success as a blogger - the design. I thought it was such a shame seeing his beautiful writing being cluttered by all sorts of gadgets and widgets and thingamabobs, that you could not tell the header from a tag cloud. As it happened, I offered my help and he accepted, and we’ve been working together to improve his blog there on. I am truely happy he accepted my help as I think he makes a fantastic blogger.

Arguing with him over some design elements made me think about good web design and the beginner mistakes that I think everyone makes, especially if they are very keen on making their own layouts to start with. I know I had my era of using every possible font colour I could think of for the mere joy I knew how to change that colour. Fortunately that was 1998, and most people were still just as excited about the fact as I was, so nobody cared. In fact, I got compliments of my “3D-effect” on the website, created with the usage of different font colours! To amuse you, here’s the layout in question:

And yes, that is an animated cat on the top of the page. It was the times when you could not possibly design a website without adding animated gifs on it and “clipart” was blossoming.

Next thing of course was the fonts. What could possibly say more about your personality than the selection of fonts? And because you have a personality, you have to choose Comic Sans Ms, just like every other beginner out there. Having to let go of the crazy fonts and colours can be truly a emotionally painful growing experience. The web safe selection of fonts is just so boring! No personality, no nothing! But in the end we all give up - we hate the websites created with crazy fonts and realise that other people hate our website with crazy fonts.

These days the biggest temptation comes in the form of widgets. Put in a shout box, recent viewers of both MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog regardless of the fact that most visitors who show up on one will show up on the other, or the fact that they all came through EntreCard just to fly by your blog without reading a word and you want to reward those fleeters by giving them a drop back and some link love for dropping a card. Then you have to show your Alexa ranking, Technorati, SezWho and BlogCatalog rating. Your readers simply have to know where on earth your last visitors came from so you add that thing that shows the towns and countries of your visitors, Live Traffic Feed. You don’t see the tree from the forest any more, and the blog loads up like an old horse pulling a load of rocks uphill. However broad your band is, it is never broad enough to cater for all those widgets!

Furthermore, you have to understand that the bulk of the widgets have not been designed to help you or your reader. They are designed so that you would put a free link to their creators website onto your site. Most of them are utterly useless. Just because a widget is free to use, doesn’t mean you should use it. The same way as just because you can change the font colour, doesn’t mean you should. Just like just because you can spit for 5 meters doesn’t mean you should. Get where I’m going at?

There are a lot of free templates out there that you can pick and use as your blog template. Take advantage of them! You don’t have to do everything yourself. I have been educated in web design at a very respected school back in Finland, and I still use ready made templates just because it’s easy, convenient and frees up my time to do what is really important; Write. What I do with them is fiddle around with the colours and images to get a look that is more me. (This layout for example was grey. I don’t want grey, I want orange! And no, I don’t think this one is just perfect, no. Enough fiddling is enough for me. :p )

If you are new to blogging and web design, you will have to learn to control your enthusiasm. Running around franticly finding the next cool and hip gadget is going to drive you crazy and not necessarily drive you traffic - apart from away from your site. Every time you find a widget you want to use, stop to think: What value does this add to my reader? How is this going to help my reader to find what he wants from my site? If it is not beneficial to my reader, will it be really beneficial to me? If it is beneficial to me, is there a way I can use it without posting it to the blog? Like Alexa ranking. If your rank isn’t really good, I don’t understand why you should show it, unless you are selling advertising. If your ranking is good, then probably your comments area is blooming, so that possible advertisers know already that your blog receives engaged readership who take interest in your blog for longer than just dropping that EntreCard.

There are two rules you should follow when designing websites: Less is more and KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. Unless you are doing an art project, in which case you are allowed to go nuts - but you knew that already. The trick is to break rules with style, but if you’re not sure what you’re doing, you’re better off just following the rules. You should be aware of one more thing. The net has a fashion. Blogs can get old fashioned. At the beginning of the year every blog had a Live Traffic Feed, and now… I can’t see them anywhere. Things change and you have to change with them, just like shopping for clothes.

Now that I got Pushhyarag2000’s blog into a readable state, he will have to teach me how to drive the traffic to a blog. Geesh that guy is like a goat herder getting people on his site!

I’ve been thinking about redesigning the site for ages now, and I finally got around to picking and tweaking a new theme. There are still things all over the place, but I’ll have to do some real work now… I could easily spend the rest of the day fixing little details, but have to move on. *Convincing herself to leave it alone*.

I hope you all like it!

I was looking for an online community for people who don’t want to have children. This was because I generally feel a bit… Well out of my place surrounded with women of my age who are either having children or desperately trying to have children. I search through blogging sites and come across 10 blogs by blogging moms who rule.

I don’t hate kids or anything, just that since I don’t have one, I have none in my near family and my closest experience of kids is having been one, I really don’t feel that connection with moms - unless we have something else to talk about of course. But often, kids take so much of your time that you just can’t focus on anything else, and in all reality, why would you want to?

So I went looking for those communities and was surprised not to find any other than No Kidding, which didn’t seem to have a working online community and was really full on about the no kids stuff. I don’t want to talk about “childfree issues” I just want to talk to people who’s lives aren’t wrapped around a 1 inch little finger.

So my solution is to create a community, I know how to do it technically, but the community creation is a whole other matter, isn’t it? So first I will tell you guys that it exists and can be found here. Sure, it’s barely alive yet, but should you find the idea interesting, you could register on the forum to receive updates - I will be sure to notify you when there’s enough people not having to talk to yourself the whole time…

Feed from the forum:
Childfree
Live information from Childfree

Do you like kids?
Ok, we don´t want to have children of our own, but do we like kids in general? For example, are you godparents?

To me kids are ok, I don´t mind being in a same room with babies or children. But I´m glad that I´m not their mother 


Re: How does your family and friends fell about YNHK?
Me and my husband had told her that we don´t want to have kids, but my mother just don´t believe us... She assumes that my husband would like to have kids...

When will she believe it?
Re: How does your family and friends fell about YNHK?
How clear have you been about the fact it's your choice not to have children? Are they still assuming that you want some someday, but haven't yet tried? Did you tell her that you have discussed the topic and have in fact decided th...
Re: What are the funniest / silliest pieces of advice you've been given?
Oh that's a tricky one... Adalia's mother-in-law is suggesting Adalia and her husband should become a foster parents for abused/neglected children. It sounds like she really doesn't get the grasp of the idea of someone not wanting children. :D
Re: What are the funniest / silliest pieces of advice you've been given?
My mother-in-law has given up the hope that I get pregnant soon, so she has suggested us to adopt a child. And my father-in-law told us last week that we should give home to children, whose own parents can´t/ dont want to take care of (huostaanotettu i...

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I probably should have done this to start with, but as I started this blog a few months ago I didn’t know whether or not I was going to stick with it. I have had a blog of some description ever since the year 2000 or something, but I never really stuck with them, they just excisted without updates. However, now I know that this time I’m sticking around, so I am moving the blog to the root of Sebastyne.net, which will change the blog address into www.sebastyne.net.

I am sad to loose all back links, but glad that there’s like 2 of them, so no big harm done. However, it’s good to get the domain working from the root again, as the root has some old back links & history & “authority” but not much content. :p

Anyway, this is to say that should you bump into something weird during the following few hours, that would be probably the reason why.

The new blog uses the same database, so post should update here as well - but this address will stop functioning eventually, after some plugin changes and so forth… So. Be warned.