I’m at that point where my blogging has calmed right down. I used to write several blogs a week, either for work or for myself.

But of late, I’ve been struggling to get the inspiration and I’m not sure why. To defend myself on how slack I’ve been, I love writing, as you can probably tell by the way I’m waffling now. I always have enjoyed writing, and I also love helping people review things they’ve written to help them target their audience better. Be it for a client, internal procedures, technical explanations or even personal documents like CVs.

That’s just the way I am, and I enjoy it. So what happened?

I’m using Twitter a lot, and talking to people getting links, re-tweeting and sharing dialogues with people. Maybe that’s the problem. I also still have my large number of feeds attaches to my Newsgator account – I check that on my work machine, home machine and my iPhone. Maybe I have too many feeds and am overloading myself and can’t focus on things.

At Amnesia Razorfish, I’m a project manager, but have involved myself in a lot of other projects. This has seen me moving away from my technical role, where I was quite a pioneer in researching and documenting things for the various companines I work for.

In my personal life, I’ve not been travelling much of late, and I like to keep my more personal adventures to my close friends on Facebook - I’m sure a lot of people understand where I’m coming from with that.

So what’s happened? What’s gone wrong? Maybe I just don’t have time anymore. My trip to work is now a walk, so I’m missing out on that hour of travelling a day that used to let me watch numerous podcasts.

I just don’t know, and I feel like a part of me has gone.

But then on re-reading this blog, maybe I just need to start writing again… Just sit down with a computer, see what happened on the day and write. Maybe that’s what a good personal blog is all about.

There’s just so much I want to write, and but sometimes I just can’t get the inspiration. does anyone else find that? You spend so long work, with your friends, and reading everyone else’s Blog that it’s hard to find the time to indulge in life’s little pleasure of writing for fun for yourself.

I’m a project manager at the moment, and that sees my day filled up with organising people, writing technical documents and ensuring that projects make money.

Tech writing is fun and challenging, coming up with solutions and describing them in a way everyone else on the project will both understand and find useful, whilst still solving the problem. But, it’s for work, and good as it is to get positive feedback, it’s just not yours…

I mean it is yours as far as you researched it, you decided what it should do and you wrote it. But, most of the time, it didn’t come from something you read or did that inspired you. If it did, that’s a good feeling, but a lot of the time it doesn’t given the satisfaction of just writing because you want to.

Now Blogs are a different story. They’re usually based on something that really pipped your interest. Perhaps something you read, or an encounter that got you thinking. Perhaps something on telly or in the news. You know it when it hits you, and you know you have to write it.

Next question. When do you do it? That’s the real trick. My best time seems to be sitting in front of the telly in the evening. That sounds odd, but it gives me the time to just drift dreamily in and out of what I write.

It’s strange, but the background noise and distraction seems to help me focus. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the comfort and familiarity of the surroundings. Maybe the telly gives off some kind of weird aura. I don’t know.

But I know I enjoy it when and I do it, and I really need to do it more. Both at home and at work. With the internet as my inspiration, I don’t really have an excuse not to, do I!

I was tagged by Cheb 2.0 to write 8 little things about me. The meme is basically defined with the following rules: Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Following on from my recent post, My concerns about Web Developer’s skill sets since asp.NET came to be, I thought I would justify why I think developers need to know more than just how to code a part of a website.

Lets start with coding itself. A lot of back end (ASP.NET for example) developers don’t care about front-end (presentation layer) code because they believe it is below them for some reason. Unfortunately, what they fail to understand is that knowing the basic principals of how to code the presentation layer can actually be influenced how you do certain things on the back end. It’s OK to rely on the built in controls, they work, that’s why Microsoft put them in, but they also put a lot in to give you that choice and flexibility!

Think about that for a second. Is there a chance that they are too generic and slightly bulky? Is there a chance that one may be quicker to implement, but another will actually give you far more control over the aesthetics of the site (the presentation layer). If you can control that, it will allow the designer to express themselves better, and the client to be more impressed.

The same goes for front-end code. Would making an element a user control or list speed things up, or frustrate the developer that’s got to plug-in the code that will integrate the presentation code with the CMS back end?

But, why stop there? Why not think about how those objects will then affect the performance of the site in terms of speed, longevity and marketing (SEO, SEM, analytics, campaigns, viral, RSS, etc.). If you construct a page in a certain way, you can maximise how Bots for example, index the site. If you build forms and databases in a certain way, you can collect data in a way that makes utilising it for profiling and targeting emails.

OK, so the data collection bit comes under a different area of the process, but it’s a very useful skill to know! If you look at a site, and see a missed opportunity, how good will that make you look? That idea to collect an additional piece of data, or make the user profiling module that bit more flexible suddenly opens the site up to a whole new world of selling back into the client, and in turn, maximising their return, and future spend! You’ve made you company money with an idea, that will hopefully ultimately see you rewarded!

Then there’s SEO and analytics. 2 very broad topics that I will only touch on, but 2 very important ones! If you have some down time, go and have a look at the stats, and see if you can spot anything unusual or useful. Perhaps a page isn’t appearing that you’re sure should be there. Has something happened that could be making that page less favourable to the search engines? Is there a page or particular area of a page that’s performing better than expected? Is there an opportunity to leverage that to drive more people to key information?

And one that amazes me, is how many people in the web industry still don’t know what a blog is, and how an RSS feed should actually work including ‘pinging’. For anyone that wants to work for me, there’s a very good hint as to one of my favourite interview questions!

You can see that there’s more to just coding a website for it to work. It is an area the web is still learning, and it’s only those web site developers that go to the effort of learning above and beyond one area of code, that will ever be a true legend on the web and let them make a name for themselves.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while. It’s been weighing heavily on me. I was one of those people lucky enough to have been at the original Macworld show in London when Apple unveiled the original 5gb iPod, and I was instantly hooked. There was something about the way it looked, the way it sounded, and how easy it was to use. I just couldn’t resist buying an iPhone. I’m just surprised it was so low-ley event.

But anyway, the iPhone. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Nothing really. Everyone’s talked about how easy to use they are. How intuitive the interface is. What a joy it is to use, and it’s problems. Well, I hate to sound boring, but I’ve come to the same conclusion.

It does have some problems. Like I can no longer type a text message while I walk – nothing major, just takes me 30 seconds of standing still. There’s the fact that the headphone socket is recessed so you can only use Apple headphones – got an adaptor for that. The polished good looks that you’re worried will get scratched – got a case. The GPRS was slow, did a bit of reading and found that Vodafone have 2 networks – one’s fast! And I did manage to get it to crash once – hold down 2 buttons and it restarts just fine. But that’s it really. Nothing else really lets it down.

So, the good stuff… Well, the most obvious thing is the interface. There’s just not enough you can say about it. Everything just flows. The way if you flick your finger list keep going, but if you slide it, the list stays with your finger. Each touch somehow does what you expect. A flick side-to-side takes you through the applications. Browse a web page, use two fingers, spread them and the page zooms in. Feels like that seen in Minority Report.

Then you start using the applications – all through touch. They all have that brilliant Apple simplicity. Your SMS’ keep track of each other – well near enough – like a conversation in iChat. The keyboard is very good, and even with my fat fingers, it manages to correct most mistyped words, but does miss some. Just slide your finger back over the text and a magnifying glass appears showing you which point in the text you’re over. Easy.

Emails, calls, you name it, all easy. OK, so I did like the feature on my Nokia where I could start typing a name and it would move to that point in the list, but I’m getting better at the flick and the jump to feature. Call reception is excellent, and I can now make calls anywhere in the flat now.

Wifi works well – although I did have to reconfigure my Wireless network to get it to work at home. Now it’s setup, it works perfectly at home. And now I have a network sniffer on it, I can pretty much get fast access anywhere. But now, after a little reading, I now have faster GPRS too – fast enough for Google maps. On that note, it shouldn’t but does work most of the time, and can tell you where you are – although sometimes only to within 100m, but better than nothing!

Oh, and it has the iPod functionality. That works as well as iPods always have. Only this time I get full screen video. Videos off the web play perfectly – not looked into playing other formats yet. And as everyone knows, when you turn the iPhone on it’s side, you get the video full screen – same with the web browser.

iTunes integration is as ever seamless, and my contacts are now much better organised through the use of Apple’s Contact application groups – not tried Exchange synchronisation. My calender is back on there courtesy of iCal – something that didn’t worked so well with my Nokia 6500 Classic. Podcasts, music, et al go on very easily.

With the iPhone Apple’s not really made anything new, all they’ve done is take some good things and made them great! And I love it! I just wish I’d got one sooner – and no, I’m not bothered by the 3G iPhone rumours as my Tariff won’t expire for a while yet, and I still think it’ll be 6 months till the new ones are out.

What I am really looking forward to is the iPhone version 2 software that makes your phone into a bit more of a mobile office through support for Cisco VPN and Microsoft Exchange. Having those on your iPhone will be interesting. Lets see what happens. I think Apple’s only just begun waking up the mobile industry from it’s sleep!

Ok, so I made the switch to having my site running completely on Wordpress. Originally it ran just my blogs, and I ran a custom front-end to pull that information out. But, since that site was built, Wordpress has matured a lot, and it’s now able to do a lot of what I wanted my site to do. There’s still a few bits missing, but that can be ironed out.

I’m going to write more on this, but it’s late, and this way I have more to write tomorrow. But so far, I’ve installed several plugins ranging from SEO to a gallery – only pain is having to bring all my images back into the new site.

Blogs were easy as they were already in Wordpress. But it amazes me how easy it was to set-up and install extras. The plugin framework is phenomenally flexible and really impressed me. It is more like a CMS now, managing pages in the same way it manages blogs – a sensible move and one I really wanted to incorporate into my new site.

Then there was the upgrade process. I had version 2.3 installed, and running happily, but then wordpress released version 2.5. Usually I will let a piece of software settle down before taking the plunge, but everything I’d read about this new version made me keen to dive in and try it. It was as easy as dragging files into your site. The next time you go to the admin section, it asks to run the upgrade script – makes some small changes to the database indexes – and that’s it. You’re up and running!

I looked around at several themes, but the Cutline 3-Column Split 1.1 theme from Chris Pearson over at personified.com was exactly what I was after. It’s a nice, clean, 3-column layout that only required a few small tweaks. The header images have been changed with some of my own, and the top navigation was amended.

I will be building my own theme over the coming weeks, but for now, I think you’ll agree, it looks pretty good.

Finally, some RSS Feed Readers for the mac that rival feedreader on a the PC

The humble fax. Our friend. Our enemy. The source of endless cheap printer cartridge refill offers. And still going strong.

My plea to trim the excess from Facebook and stop the decline. Remember and focus on what made it so addictive when it first came out. Please…