February 27, 2004
Design and Weblogs
I am a design junkie as well as a weblog junkie, so i especially enjoyed reading and seeing the list of Well-Designed Weblogs. If you're more of a text junkie, take a look at Well-Written Weblogs.
15 Rules for a Better World
Should be required reading for all designers, architects, web designers, typographers, and anyone who creates something in this world that will be consumed visually: 15 Rules for Rebuilding the World by Christopher Alexander. His rules are so simple, seemingly self-evident, so parallel to what art history has taught mankind and yet, if you look at modern architecture, certain magazine layouts, billboard designs (to name just a few examples) they are so deviant from these simple basic guidelines. If more designers incorporate these rules into their thinking, the world will be a better place, i think.
(By the way, he just published these rules in a 2150 pages long book series. See
February 21, 2004
Open letter to blog spammers
Dear spammers.
You may think that because this blog has a commenting feature and a Google PageRank of 5, you have found the perfect advertising venue and will boost your moneymaking websites' pagerank by posting irrelevant comments and leaving your URLs here.
FYI, here is a list of anti-spam measures that are currently implemented on this blog:
1. I have a plugin to weed out spam comments that not only enables me to delete them, but to add your URL to a blacklist that is shared with the weblogging community, actively distributed to enable others to protect their blogs from your comments as well. I am using this plugin very actively and I will not leave your comment up no matter how nice your message sounds.
2. I upgraded the CMS i use to manage this blog so now URLs are not posted as is, but through a redirect which will prevent your URLs from receiving a Pagerank boost via my blog.
3. There are a few other spam prevention features that i won't go into more detail about, suffice it to say that you are wasting your time, or your robot's time by trying to fool me into believing you're a regular visitor who left a positive comment on my blog.
Please leave me alone, and go build a few legitimate affiliate pages or use valid SEO techniques instead of trying to outsmart others (which you won't). There are better - and more effective - ways to make money on the net. Trust me about that. :)
Thank you. (on behalf of the blogging community)
February 20, 2004
3am coding session ... fun!
Holy cow, i haven't done this for ages.... it's 2.42am and i just forced myself to close all my HTML and CSS and whatever editor windows and go to bed. :) (Of course i am posting here before actually completing that task...)
I remember when i built my very first website (which was just recently cruelly deleted - without any warning - by Geocities, :(:( ), i did this for endless days in a row. The only computer we had back then was in my parents' bedroom, so i was coding the site there in the blueish glow of the computer when at random points of the night my Mum would wake up and try to get me to go to bed at last. Ah, the nostalgia!
This was 1995 ... and here i am, 9 years later doing it again... Good night!
