Another month another milestone here on Samir Bharadwaj dot Com. This monthly report is a bit special because it makes this blog 6-months old. With milestones comes a natural process of looking back and planning forward. In the last six months I have made many mistakes and learnt a lot of new tricks, so it is natural for me to want to make some changes.
Refactoring
I have nothing drastic in mind, but I know of a lot of things that aren’t working well on this site, and many things that could be working better. In the coming months the plan is to do a comprehensive rethinking and refactoring of this site and blog, mainly on a coding and technical level. There are browser compatibility issues to be ironed out and cleaner SEO techniques to be employed. All of these things will make this site better, faster and more effective in the long run.
Not only will this process give me immense personal pleasure and satisfaction, but it will make for a better browsing experience for my readers, which is always a goal to aspire to. In addition, I think a series of articles that describe all the changes I make and the techniques I implement will make for some educational reading, and it should be fun to put together once this is all done. Subscribe to my RSS feed and watch out for those updates.
Environment Series
Blog Action Day, 2007 is done, and my series on The Environmental Movement and Why It’s Not Working also came to a close this last month. But not before leading me in a new direction in my interest in the environmental movement. As elaborated in my final post and announcement on Blog Action Day, I will be working on a new site on the environment soon, one that should bring a new and refreshing twist to the subject matter.
Blog Carnivals
I wasn’t very active on the blog carnival scene this past month. So much so that I might have lost track of one or two carnivals that did link to my posts during this phase. Sorry folks, I usually link back to all you kind people who include me in your listings but I’ve slipped up a bit on this occasion. I will make it up to you in the future.
ToDo
Rethink, redo, and reengineer — that is what is in store for this site in the near future. The (hopefully) interesting content and the look isn’t going to change, but the inner workings should be changing for the better
Keep visiting, keep commenting and keep the conversation going.
Samir
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I have enjoyed this blog a lot since I joined a few months ago.
I am reaching a simialr stage too where I need to prepare my blog for moving forward and start some new blogs too.
I am seeing some amazingly designed WP blogs out there and I really need to make sure that the next personal blog I start employs a good design.
I also need to start getting onto blog carnivals but I still have not quite worked out how they work!!
Forest, thanks for the kind words and your regular contributions to the discussions here. They are much appreciated.
I guess we all need to reevaluate and improve at some point, and I figured this was as good a time as any. As you mention, blog design and template is a very important part of the mix. It might not be more important than good content, but it certainly encourages people to read the good content, so I can see your point of choosing a great layout for your future projects.
As far as Blog Carnivals are concerned, they’re actually quite straightforward and forgiving. So, I present:
The Blog Carnival Mini Tutorial
– Decide on one or a handful of your posts you want to “publicize”.
– Go to BlogCarnival.com. I like to use their master list of carnivals available here: http://blogcarnival.com/bc/clist.html
– Once there I usually sort the list based on “Next Edition”, which lets you submit to the upcoming carnivals quickly.
– Go through the list and if your chosen post seems related to a particular item, click on it (opening in a new window or tab makes things faster).
– If after reading the description page you still think your post would fit, click on the orange button which says “Submit Your Blog Article to this Carnival”.
– In the form, enter your post URL and when you TAB out of that field the site will try to fill the other information automatically by looking at your site. Fill in the missing bits and submit.
– Wash, rinse and repeat. Simple.
Hope that helps and looking forward to seeing what you have in store for your future blogs.
Samir
Thanks very much.
I shall do some blog carnival entering today š