Do numbers matter?

Posted on April 26, 2011 | Leave a comment
Flickr Stats

Flickr Stats

Daily we check the page impressions of our website in my office, the dashboard tells us which articles had most clicks, sometimes it seems quantity is more important than quality. At least, it is a lot easier to measure quantity. Does this also apply to private websites? Occasionally, I check the web stats of my Flickr pics, and I must admit I was quite pleased to note that I hat hit the 40.000 yesterday. More important than numbers is that sometimes people use my photos to illustrate their sites:

Sometimes, people tell me they use my photo, others just download the photo and (using the CC license)  make the attribution.

Attaching a Creative Commons License to pictures makes them usable to many who would not buy pictures from commercial agencies but are happy to use photos for free from amateurs like me.Is this part of the everything-for-free web culture? Or does it make amateurs feel appreciated because someone likes and uses their work?

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Less is more? Getting started with a Blog

Posted on April 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

Mies van der Rohe is known for the motto “Less is more” to describe his aesthetic goal of arranging the numerous necessary components of a building to create an impression of extreme simplicity in architecture. I feel the same could be true for selecting the features and choosing the options for my blog.

I wrote my first post nearly a month ago. Instead of writing more posts,  I tried to set up my blog properly. I have changed the WordPress theme a couple of times, selected a special font, changed it again and again, and arranged the widgets in the margin, rearranged them for I do not know how often, until I finally decided to leave everything as it is and start writing…

What will I choose as the focus of my blog? I have my ideas but will I be able to follow them? Or to I keep some ideas better private instead of publish them in a blog? Blogs change the concept of privacy but do I really want this? I wonder if I should better use a pseudonym and be free in expressing myself. I have to think about this before I write more.

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Hello world!

Posted on March 20, 2011 | Leave a comment
Program in the Piet programming language, prin...

Image via Wikipedia

If you learn a new programming language, the first task is to write a program that prints “Hello World” on the screen.

“Hello World” is also the title of the first blogpost that comes with the WordPress installation. It is quite reassuring to already have a blogpost which you can edit (that is what I am doing now) and better than starting totally from scratch.

Before editing this first blogpost, I had to make a couple of choices.

With the installation,  I had to decide on the URL of my blog.

I was happy that my online name was still available as Dot.EU domain (all other top level domains were already taken).  I wonder if the EU is so unpopular or if I was just lucky. Using a Dot.EU domain, what does this mean for my blogging? Does the EU domain lead my thinking in a certain way? Is using my online name as a domain  name already a program for the content of my blog? I don’t know but I will see what I will blog about.

Then I had to decide which language to use (actually, it was two decisions, the interface language of WordPress  and the language in which I blog), and I switched from the default language English to German and then back to English again.

I had to decide on a theme and a design (I modified the header uing my Flickr photos).

Now I got my WordPress blog running, I am surprised by the many built-in features, my Twitter feed and my Flickr feed are now in the right margin. At least, I got some content of my own now.

But I am still left with the question what to blog about, let’s see how this blog develops….

I got some ideas (otherwise I would not have set up this blog) but I do not have a definte plan.

And I wonder who will read theses lines: Hello World!

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