Published in General on Sunday, February 19th, 2006
Some things are going to have to change around here. As many other bloggers have found, the format of your site can affect how much you write.
I think Dave Shea put it best when he wrote I was no longer writing quick posts, I was writing “articlesâ€. Any time I sat down to write, why, it had better be good and in-depth.
I'm finding the same thing - not that I write as well as Dave, mind you, but I do try to write well. I have the resources to post resources, but short yet significant things like this are something that I would like to write about but oftentimes don't because it just won't fit the format.
So, with that out of the way, there's gonna be some shuffling around here (I can't believe 'gonna' just made it thru my spell checker…).
Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:
I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.
The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.
Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..
Comments and Feedback
Just to let you know something is wrong with the titles on your archive pages. This isnt the year 2001.. or is it? Good luck with the shuffle.
Man, this site is falling apart! All sorted... Damn templates falling behind the times (ouch, honestly no pun intended)... Appreciate the heads up!
it's funny but indeed, it works that way. My current site is much more quality, much more "articles", not just "posts", while in the past, all I did was linkdump and write short "posts". I also feel much better, much more confident, about my site.
Though the way this site looks, definitely would make me feel inspired to write "articles" as well :)
Thanks stefan. It wasn't so much the looks, it's the layout of actual posts that make it hard to write a few sentences and link out to something. Not that I want a link blog either, it's just that some of the shorter posts look lost in this layout (example).
That's one thing I took into careful consideration when redeveloping my personal site Mike. I definitely know how you feel now that you've got it set up to where anything you write it just "looks like" it's gotta be A+ material. I took more of Steve Smith's and Roger J's approach to featuring articles. With that approach you can keep up your featured article up front for a while, but still continue to blog about smaller things and those will appear on the side bar or something like that. It's findable, but not always featured (which IMO is a good thing).
Good luck with the site patching.
Thanks DD.
That does seem to be the best approach, and is likely the one that I will follow. Something inside me, though, harkens back to "the good 'ol days", when an entry was for a date, and you could have multiple updates on the same day... I'm feeling this strange pull towards date archives, maybe it's laziness (towards categorizing)... I doubt I'll go that way tho'..
You're spot on with this Mike. I find it much easier to make small, informal posts instead of pressurising myself into writing longer stuff. The current setup of my own site makes a clear seperation between short and longer posts; and because the first page you land on is my "Longhand" (longer posts) section I feel constantly under pressure to write... oh well, time for a re-think about the design I reckon.
Exactly how I feel, tho' maybe not so much pressure as the bigger ideas for posts are few and far between, while the shorter blurbs seem to come around more often.