Results tagged “anil”

Last month marked the ninth anniversary of me starting this blog, more or less continuously updating since then. As I begin my tenth year here on dashes.com, I've made a few changes around the site.

First and foremost, there's a new look to the blog. My incredibly talented coworker Jim Ramsey created the basic theme, which I made a little bit uglier and naturally added some purple to. (Movable Type users can grab the Mid-Century template set upon which it's based.) I also owe a debt to Joi Ito for taking the original photo from which my little icon is based. There are more changes to come, but even at this half-complete stage, feedback is welcome.

Second, I finished something I've been meaning to do for ages, two new listings:

• Most Popular
• Best Of

Both of these archives are exactly what you'd expect, with the Best Of featuring a number of my posts that I've been most proud of over the years, including some that were less popular but that I thought were worth featuring. There's also a more extensive list of all archives, organized into a calendar or by tag.

I've brought back the Action Streams that I had on the site earlier, and will be doing more to incorporate my various online presences into my site here. I don't plan to just dump my Twitter updates and my bookmarks and crap into the stream of posts here unless you folks think I should. (I'm guessing not.) There's also different ads on the site. I've experimented with a number of different advertising ideas over the years without much objection, so I'll likely continue to do so. Unsurprisingly, the ads are provided by SIx Apart Media.

I'll be doing more with giving folks the chance to vote on things on the site, as well. Coming up with my own list of my best blog posts seems a little ridiculous, even for someone who's as shameless as I am about self-promotion. I'd love to hear more from readers about what posts were interesting, or what I should write more about.

But that brings me to the most important point: Thank you! Over the years, I've seen my technical skills decline, my writing skills improve, my frequency of posting drop, and yet somehow the number of readers has consistently increased. Writing for this site is one of the most satisfying hobbies, most rewarding intellectual pursuits, and most unlikely passions that I've had in my life, and the biggest reason why is thanks to the relationships I've formed with people who've read what I write here.

So, I hope you'll take a minute or two to look over the best or at least most popular things I've written, to see if any of it strikes a chord. And I hope we're all still here having this conversation nine years from now.

... let's hear more about me! I had the chance a few weeks ago to do be interviewed by Leah Peterson. It was a nice chance to talk about some things that I don't usually blog about, and if you're interested in more, Leah has a whole series of interviews on her blog that I found pretty interesting.

As a special bonus, there's a goofy picture of me at the top of the interview from when I was speaking at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention back in July.

I launched a new design for my blog about two weeks ago, but I'd been waiting until I had a chance to shake out a few of the more egregious bugs to mention the new layout and to describe some of the thinking behind it.

First, the page should look at least something like the screenshot you see above. The markup's mostly valid, the CSS is mostly not hacked, but more importantly, it looks kind of like how i think my site should look.

And yep, the big picture of me at the top is a little bit pompous. I'm hoping the tongue-in-cheek nature of that comes across, but if not, it'll just be our little joke. Coming from a family history that includes some actual pundits, I feel like I'm slightly more entitled to have some fun with the idea. Unfortunately, I think there's about a billion political or tech bloggers using the term to describe themselves, so I'll content myself with just naming my blog after myself. That's worked pretty well for the past 7+ years. (Did I mention last month marked my seven year anniversary for this blog?)

One additional item I plan to add to the page is a list of upcoming events. I am doing a lot of public speaking over the next few months, and I'd love to get a chance to meet up with readers of my site. So if you have suggestions about how to present this information, or how you'd like to meet up, let me know.

There's still some little bugs in the display, and I could probably refine the design a little bit more, but finally, here's my new blog design. One of the things I'm most proud of is that the names of the people who comment on this site are featured prominently with the posts, both on the homepage and on the individual post pages. I really, genuinely love the high quality comments I get, so it's likely that any final refinements to the design will be focused on highlighting good comments to have a more prominent place on the site.