So, what about those 2007 goals?
January 15th, 2008A year ago, I made a list of objectives for this blog. Not that I am a great fan of goal management, but a I need to know what I want, don’t I?
- “Stay alive”. Check. Piece of cake. Too many things demand writing about.
- “Keep my blogging friends”. Check. And I met a handful of new ones.
- “Avoid overwhelming popularity”. Check. (I got hit by a tsunami on my absidea blog, with 85,000 visits in one day in May, just because Carl referred an article to Reddit, but that won’t happen here).
- “Fix the theme for IE”. Missed. I wish Microsoft fixed their browser instead.
- “Add a navigation sidebar in the single-post view”. Done, and then lost when I moved (see 8). To be continued in 2008.
- “Answer comments individually”. Check (see previous post).
- “Produce an integral pdf version for the blog”. I am not so sure. Raise your hands those who need it; “and if I am bold enough, an audio version for my big posts” No way. If you be nice, you’ll hear me at LibriVox. In French.
- “Move to www.wisemandarine.com”. Check. The cheapest hosting company is infinitely better than the free system I was relying on.
- “Quit checking my e-mail compulsively for new comments every ten minutes”. Missed. It’s even worse now.
- “Write shorter posts”. Not really. The objective was to make reading easier for readers. In fact, I write fewer long posts, but I could not get round to squeezing them or chopping them.
That’s it. No dwelling on failures, no bonus for achievements, no promotion, no raise, no warnings. Hey, this is blogland, not mandarine GmbH.
Thank goodness you admitted to 9. That means I can put up my hand and join you in the “addicted to comments” section of blogland.
Looks like you’re doing pretty well, otherwise.
I wasn’t going to bother to revisit my pathetic “accomplishment” of my goals, but maybe I’ll re-think that having read yours. Mine will probably read, “Nope, didn’t do that. Didn’t do that one, either. Nor that one. Oh look, there’s ONE I can honestly say I accomplished!” Oh well. I’m not setting any this year. And I’m in that Comment Addicts Anonymous group along with you and Charlotte (and thanks to you, now have a comments file for others’ blogs set up in Firefox. You could have one bonus blogging accomplishment: taught me a lot this year like pen casting — of course, I haven’t been brave enough to try it a second time around, but I will one of these days –, Firefox comments folder, dropping “challenge icons” into my posts, etc.
Charlotte: it’s easy to be doing well when my objectives are what I intend to do anyway, and not abstract unreachable ideals like so many people chose to shoot for on January first.
Emily: I need to pencast some more soon, and you need to drop that self-deprecating habit of pretending you are a luddite. You are not credible anymore.
I’m with you all on #9 — must spend less time checking up on what’s going on in the blog …
#4. My blog is a complete mess in IE. But I won’t even try fixing it, because I figure that the more things look like crap to IE users, the more likely it is they’ll switch browsers. IE is such a poor choice in so many ways that I almost feel like I’m doing them a favor by giving them one more reason to stop using it.
But good job meeting so many of your goals!
Dorothy - we commentaholics should probably impose ourselves fixed hours for comment-checking. How about only allowing visiting our dashboard at: 6:15, 9:45, 11:15, 13:15, 14:30, 15:15, 16:45, 17:30, 18:45, 19:15, then every 15′ between 19:30 and 22:30?
dew - I have worked on CSS themes for other sites. From the tutorials and forums on the net, I have found there are two levels to any CSS instruction: what it is supposed to do according to the international standard, and what IE chooses to do with it. The difficulty is therefore not to find one CSS instruction which achieves the desired visual effect, but one that IE actually manages to understand right. However, I know too many people who could not even install firefox to want to have something that is at least readable and navigable under IE.
There are blogging objectives? I’m staying well clear of that.
I am also an obsessive comment checker but I am weaning myself off spending every evening at the computer.
As for how my blog appears in IE, I can honestly say it never occurred to me to check. To all intents and purposes I have forgotten about the very existence of IE.
I cringe if I pull up my blog at work and see it in IE. It looks so awful! One of my employees did an internal web page recently and that cruddy CSS messed with the fonts. Unacceptable, I said. I’ll have to go back to figure out how she fixed it, and maybe it will work on my blog header.
Obsessive comment checker — check. That’s me too. Do we all suffer from this?
Becky: I’d love to be allowed to forget IE, but I have found that many older people never get past what comes out of the box with their PC.
Cam: maybe you could install firefox at work. It can even be executed from a usb thumb drive. Just find the proxy settings in IE and copy-paste them in the firefox settings (don’t tell your IM guys…)
Getting late to the party (you know, my life is all about “the boob” now)…
Regarding 9: My husband calls me a “comments whore”. Enough said.
Regarding 7: Not sure about all your readers, but at least for you, you may want to keep a written archive of (all or some of) your posts. One of my friends made me realize that I would personally like to keep a written copy of all my blog or several of my posts. In my case, my blog has become a living chronicle of important moments in my life. My purpose is to write so my child/ren and others in the future who may want to know me better after I’ve died, can read me first-hand. In your case, the purpose is different, but I suspect you also may want to keep an old-fashioned copy of your very clever thoughts. Kind of like a work portfolio. Every once in a while I need to browse my web design portfolio (specially on days when I feel less than accomplished… it helps remind me that I’m not so bad).
Maria: I do want to keep some sort of readable archive, but I guess I find that a local copy of my blog(s) (running on a local Apache) is adequate. However, you are right that I should think about the long run. In that case, I will be needing a plain-text version to ensure robustness to software evolutions, or even a hardcopy to ensure robustness to hardware misshaps.
Thanks for the advice on IE, Mandarine. I do have Firefox on my laptop(work) , but find I use IE more frequently at work because of some MS software that won’t run on Firefox. If I dash over to my blog (sshhh! at work!) I notice how horrible it looks for those who only use IE. As for telling my IM (IT here in the States) guys, well, they work for me so no problem there! We all like Firefox so much better!