Last year Chris Shiflett attempted to start a blogging revival with The Ideas of March, my post from March 15th 2011 can be found here, and yesterday emailed a bunch of us to remind us of the Ideas of March and see if we might like to join him in a new blogging revival.
I thought I’d have a look back over the last year of blog posts here, and I am glad to say that I did post much more than in the year before. It was really interesting to look back over my year of posting and to see what I happened to be thinking about at different points that made it onto the blog.
In March I raised my concerns about StartUp Britain and in April explained why I do not want to be called a Mumpreneur.
In May 2011 I mused over the tendency of people to choose one tool and use it for everything however unsuitable in “If all you have is a hammer…”, then asked readers to Stop turning contact form spam into a user problem and also wrote up my post-FOWD thoughts.
In June I posted a roundup of things people need to know when starting a business or going freelance in the UK, in response to answering that question many times on forums. I realise that I often use my blog in this way. Instead of saying the same thing to lots of people I will write up my thoughts and point them to it – which also gives a place where people can add to my thoughts in the comments.
In July I spoke at the Highland Fling conference in Edinburgh, about content management. This helped me formalize a lot of thoughts I had been having around the subject and I wrote two posts. Your CMS as Curator of your Design and Content discusses how a good CMS can help inexperienced content authors to preserve the content strategy of a website. Your WYSIWYG Editor sucks explains why they suck, and what we should be doing about it!
In September the theme was very much online payments, and the two posts where again very much in the spirit of sharing things that I’ve had to figure out in regard to the thorny issues of taking payment online – How to move your online sales away from PayPal and Complying with PCI–DSS when using a hosted payment page.
In November I posted my thoughts on the startup “bubble” in Setting people up to fail – why I am afraid of the bubble. I also got annoyed with flashing and rotating banner ads and wrote Include your advertising policy when considering website accessibility.
In December I pointed out that there were other ways to do business than the working every single hour, sleeping under your desk start-up culture might have you believe. In response to a high-level of industry snark I asked people to be kind to one another and also thought about how so often “lucky” people are just the ones who say yes.
I started 2012 by presenting at an online conference, talking about our product Perch, and then posted my thoughts on the conference and on presenting online. In February I posted some tips on writing tutorials for a beginner audience then I rounded up this year of ideas with an announcement of my new book – The CSS3 Anthology.
For this next year I’d like to share more of the interesting things we have been doing at edgeofmyseat.com – including work on Perch and also client work. Looking back over the last year shows that people do still comment on blog posts, many of my posts got more than 10 comments and sparked responses on other blogs too. That to me is the great thing about blog posts. I ponder on some subject that interests me and then see the comments and response posts come in, all giving me more to think about and other insights into a subject. That collated knowledge is then out there and available for other people to think about. In an industry where many of us work alone for a lot of the time, blog posts can help us debate and share information and ideas.
If you would like to revive your blog:
- Write a post called Ideas of March.
- Write about why you like blogs.
- If you don’t already blog regularly, pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
- Share your thoughts on Twitter with the #ideasofmarch hashtag.