Results tagged “dashescom”

While I'm still hard at work at responding to all the requests that have been made, I had to take a moment to mark the tenth anniversary of this blog today.

I could ramble at length about the many ways in which writing this site has enriched my life, but suffice to say that every part of my personal and professional lives has been utterly transformed by the connections I've made through this site. I am thankful every day that some number of people read the things that I write here, and even more appreciative that so many of you find enough value in it to respond, reply, refute or just return over time. I'm particularly thankful to the few of you whom I know have been here from the beginning

To my surprise, many of my most popular and best writings have happened in just the past year or two of my site. In my mind, I always see the peak of my site's popularity or quality having come at some fabled time in the past, but it's my sincere hope that I actually haven't done my best work yet on this site.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for the inspiration. Hopefully these archives are just the first ten years.

(Thanks to Merlin Mann for the photo.)

In two weeks, I'll be marking the 10 year anniversary of blogging on dashes.com. I'm celebrating by making a simple request: Tell me what you'd like to see me blog about. I can't guarantee I'll get to every request that's made, but I am going to try to cherry-pick the best ideas that fit into what this site is all about. (If you're curious what that means, check out my Best Of, or just view the Most Popular things I've written.)

To support the effort, I'm taking off the next few weeks to focus primarily on writing and researching. While it might seem like a weird way to spend a "vacation", running this site over the past 10 years has been among the most fulfilling and rewarding things I've done in my life. So it only seemed natural to me to dedicate even more time and energy to it.

And to that end, if you're in the NYC area and we haven't had the chance to meet up in person, or it's been too long since we've caught up, drop me a line to anil@dashes.com or give me a ring at (646) 833 8659 and if I've got time, I'm happy to grab coffee or a drink with anybody who's a reader of this site. (I'm also open to suggestions of things I should check out in NYC that I might have missed — the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel is already on my list, but I'm open to anything. And you know, parties and meetups are fun, too.)

Thanks to everybody for helping me celebrate my site's anniversary in style, and I look forward to getting even more ideas and inspiration from all of you!

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.

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.

I guess I should have caught this back on the 20th of last month, but I've been blogging here for six years. And living in San Francisco for a year now. I don't think I could ever have imagined how much life could bring me just by me taking the time to write my thoughts here sometimes, and to listen to what people said in response. In all, it's been 2031 posts, 4541 comments, and well over 12,000 links if you count my old Daily Links, and somewhere around 100,000 words, from what I've been told.

If you haven't been reading for the whole six years (and, really, nobody but me has...) there's a few posts you might want to check out that I think do a good job of showing what my blog is about.

There's my post on leaving New York, which might be the only bit of writing I've ever done that I'm really proud of. It was preceded by a post about why I decided to move, which was motivated in no small part by joining Six Apart as well as my love for New York.

(Bonus one here: A post from two and a half years ago with the quote, "My list of companies to whom I'd trust my identity right now only includes Google and Six Apart." Still half true!)

It's not always that serious, of course, or at least it wasn't always. One of my personal favorites (I'm biased, of course) is simply about taking a shower. It's good if you pair it up with the one about razors and shaving. And I don't even know how many times someone's forwarded me my own rant about annoying forwards. Nothing's better than a lazy listicle, so to meet those needs there's how to watch a marathon, tips on celebrating Thanksgiving and a really lazy set of Christmas shopping tips.

Perhaps worth remembering is that diamonds are for never and a similar tirade about bottled water. Less weighty was the lament about barley's undeservedly low profile. Truly marking my nadir was the debate on bendy straws, in which I argued both pro and con. Oh, and for your reference, a quick review of Michael Jackson's children's names.

I like some of the longer, more thinking pieces like Stories and Tools. It's pretty dated now, but I guess I was agitating for what's now called Ajax. Funny, because they ended up winning: I was praising Oddpost effusively, and the new Yahoo Mail I got to look at recently is Oddpost reborn. On a decidedly more serious topic, I also had a long piece on being an American that I wrote for my hometown newspaper a year after 9/11. People seemed to like the idea of privacy through identity control. And one of my all-time favorites, because of the great participation in the comments, was the post about geeky uses for Microsoft Excel.

Finally, the one piece I'd probably gotten the most responses to over the years appeared on my (now-dead) blog for longer pieces, called "magazine". I archived it on TypePad, but you can still read Introducing the Microcontent Client. It's been almost three years since then, and some parts of it are obvious now, but I'm still waiting to use that app.

So, thanks for indulging a bit of retrospective navel-gazing, and for reading over the past few years. I'm hoping to keep (or start!) writing some stuff that's worth of revisiting at future milestones.