November 19th 2007
I bought some advertising with a blog I follow for That College Kid because he was running a special and I wanted to try it out. His site doesn’t really have anything to do with mine, so it’s obviously not doing that well, but I’ve learned and it does bring a good amount of traffic. So anyway, since I bought that ad spot, I’ve had two people email me asking if I want to buy an ad spot from them, which isn’t bad itself - I like that idea. But their sites are shit.
TCK is PR3, and one of the sites was PR2 and the other was PR 3. I’m not frowning on the PR3 site because that’s nothing to scoff at for a few month-old blog, but their RSS count is 37. TCK has three times the subscribers. Beside that, my other stats were better and their layout just sucked. So my whole point is - why do these site owners think I would pay them for a link? They’re not John Chow…they’re blogs aren’t very good. It’s people like this who put ads before content and these are the people that are ruining the web. There’s nothing wrong with making money blogging, I’ve done that for a few years (Adsense mostly, now I do some paid posts). But building a website simply to make money is…sad. It makes me sad thinking about my web history and how long it took me to build up to where I am today and how people are gaming the system and just trying to make a buck. Bah at them.
October 31st 2007
One of my biggest pet peeves with professional designers is their invalid coding. If you’re offering your designs, especially when you want to get paid for them, they should be valid. It goes to show that you’re either ignorant or you don’t care. These days, with the multitude of browsers, it’s hard to make sure a layout looks good in all of them, but the easiest way to tell is to make sure it’s valid. You take out the errors and in almost all browsers, it’s not messed up. Except for IE of course, but they’re never going to get on the bandwagon of not sucking.
I’ve been thinking about putting up a portfolio site. I bought the domain months ago when XFluro had a sale to get a domain for $3.50 and I haven’t done anything with it except use it as a test site when developing new layouts. My next chore is to make that domain actually worth something, especially now that my mom’s new website links to my portfolio. SA Design shouldn’t have an index page saying “Coming soon” until it expires.
I also want to break into the Wordpress theme business, but I’m too lazy. I have this incredible lack of inspiration that is getting in the way of everything creative I’m trying to do. I also have a lot of extra stuff to do with this site and TCK. My todo list just keeps getting longer and nothing’s getting done. That said, I really should be studying for my test today…
October 27th 2007
I have a serious lack of inspiration all around. A few weeks ago, I needed to redo my stepdad’s taxidermy website, but I just couldn’t come up with a layout. And then it took me days to finally come up with an idea for the redesign of this website and now I’m onto my mom’s site. She’s a college professor and I’ve been doing her website for…maybe seven years. I remember the first layout I used on it was from Layout Land (or something like that). Seriously, I was like ten. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this stuff since then. It’s incredible.
Her university has this great new logo since they changed their name a few years ago and they’re very anal about its usage. You can’t edit/reproduce it in any way and you can’t resize it. WTF. I had this cute idea to use my mom’s name in place of the university’s name with the star in between, but apparently, I can’t do that. So there went my idea. Besides that, I didn’t know what else to do. So I went and played Nintendo 64 (seriously, I played Mario Kart) and then when I came back I had some ideas. So that’s what I’m working on now, although of course I’m procrastinating.
On a different note, I’m not sure the newest version of Wordpress is necessary for personal blogs like mine. I don’t use tags at all. I really don’t understand the need for tags when there’s already categories. I like categories better anyway, because I’d have way too many different tags. For That College Kid, I use tags, but only for my SEO. I still don’t entirely get all that I’m supposed to do about that. I’m getting visitors and making a little bit of money so that’s all I really care about.
June 14th 2007
While at work, I’m not allowed to use my beloved StumbleUpon because it’s blocked by our filters. I am however, able to view Digg. While I am not a big fan of Digg, I do want something to keep me occupied while I’m working. So as I was browsing, I found this article. This idiot commented on her article saying how right she was. I just wanted to rant myself about how stupid they both are.
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you would know that OS X came out long ago. And I mean LONG ago. Vista was just released and now the new Leopard, coming out later this year, has been accused of being a Vista copy. The features coming up in Leopard that Mary Jo Foley claimed are copies of Vista were almost all in Tiger. There are a few that aren’t included in Tiger, but that were mentioned before Vista was released, just in time for another one of Vista’s delays.
How interesting…
May 3rd 2007
If you think your website is amazing, you should join a community for other designers like yourself. Plus, if I refer enough people, I’ll get $10. It won’t hurt, right? 
Join Perfection
