• New header/footer look & feel
• Changed the width of the content to fit into a 960px grid
• Reduced the size of this WordPress theme
• Did some code improvement by removing not used code

Things that are still on the drawing board are:

• Make this design xhtml 1.1 strict compliant
• Move the graphics to sprites
• Increase the speed of the site
• Enable caching

That is it for the new stuff. A while back I found out about the way back machine. This website indexes(copies) websites and stores them in a huge archive. Of course I directly checked this url and since 2000 I have a presence there. Check out how my site used to look. Actually the design of the site is really nice.

I also found some really old pascal code. It is funny to see how programmers do things when they don’t know how to use arrays(this is almost 15 years back). I would store the data in a file and then would read it back line by line. I solved this issue of not having(knowing about) arrays by reading and writing in a file line by line How cool is that! Wow 15 years… A lot has happened since then:

• Got several diplomas, degrees and thank you’s
• Owned several cars
• Spent time in Indonesia, Suriname, Singapore, Malaysia
• Visited even more countries
• Used up a lot of girlfriends
• Had dinner over 5000 times
• Went about 45000 times to the toilet

For the next 15 years. What I’ll do I don’t know, yet. Here is a Youtube video which is inspiring.

I wonder what will happen in the next 15 years(I’ll be really old then)… One thing that will happen soon is my graduating. For the rest it is up to life!

Don’t publish – What are your insane? blogs are all about publishing! What I meant was that when writing your post don’t hit the publish button but instead save your post first as a draft to review it the day after(a few hours is also ok). Of course you just spend some time writing the post and are anxious to publish but when you wait one day you will reflect on what you have written the day before in a more fair way. Therefor don’t publish (directly) and also try previewing your post on your site before publishing.

People love structure – So use this! Paragraph your text to make it more readable. This will also structure your text in such a way people can skip it when they find it boring. Also be not afraid to use lists of any kind because somehow people like reading lists.

Extend your content – You can only make up so much crap therefor try to involve other peoples information as well. Link to other blogs that share or disagree on your opinion, make use of media like youtube and wikipedia. Also include a link to anything you reference in that text itself.

Summarize – Add the end of your blog post ask the readers a question, state the moral of the post, Reflect or express your opinion in one short sentence. This will bring a good ending to the story and might even invite people to post comments on your blog. But never ever end with a question to asks your readers to drop you a comment if you liked this piece of creative(read crap) writing. Comments should be about content. The title & introduction of your post should also give an explanation of what the post is about. The title should be one catchy sentence and the introduction should be one paragraph.

Improve – There will be times when you posted a story which contains errors. The first thing you should do is fix them. There is no need to put update tags on a post where you only fixed some minor spelling errors. If you change the content of your post dramatically you might want to consider this and inform the users of the update in the beginning of the post and at the end.

Of course I often make mistakes myself and do not follow this 100% but it is a good guide to measure your posts. I try to always hit at least four out of five points before publishing my post. This way I make sure the blog post lives up to at least some degree of expectation.

Reality Check quotes and talks a lot about other books. The book iWoz by Steve Wozniak one of the founders of Apple is one of them. This is the next book on my list I plan on reading. I just hope I can find it here in Puchong. After iWoz I will hold of on the Apple related books for a while… I might start reading some thrillers or mafioso books since reading next to being informative and fun should also fuel your imagination and business books for a big part take away a large part of that imagination.

Two days ago I released the first version of Inscorta and I plan to work on this a lot during Chinese New Year. Another New Year? Time for another New Year’s Resolution! Any suggestions for a good New Year’s resolution?  Also my birthday is coming up(It’s already tomorrow) and this again is a New Year. Damn those New Year’s resolutions. Who was the idiot(I am just kidding) that had this great idea to put three New Year’s in such a short time span?

I have better things to do then to worry about New Year’s resolutions all day. I am busy with work and I cancelled my trips for this New Year’s Holiday to work on Inscorta, Launch poetsplaza.nl and write a report(which I almost forgot about) for my school.

My tipping point top 10:

1. Learning Mandarin. After a few months with Chinese people I am starting distinguishing and perceive more sounds. When I first arrived at this place I never had a clue what they were talking about, nowadays nothing has changed except: I hear more, A lot more… Somehow before I was deaf for this Chinese language. I did not experience this with German and Bahasa Indonesia.

2. Dropbox, Twitter and Jaiku for being great services but with lousy business model. Don’t get me wrong these are all great services and they should be cheap. But they have no way to get paid… Almost nobody minds paying for something good but these services have almost none or no payment plans at all.

3. Digsby and Google Chrome for almost being great applications. You guys will be great when you are available for OSX(and Linux). How can you expect to bring something revolutionary when you bring it only to windows? Hurry up with the versions on OSX…

4. My fellow blogger Saiful Rizal with his plan to inspire us all. He is a bit late with the twitter thing but this also tells us twitter still has momentum. He made a list of youtube videos that I found motivating, this made me check his blog once in a while.

5. The book Reality Check of Guy Kawasaki. It is the book I am reading now and it is really good so far and if all the books were this interesting and fun to read at the same time the next point won’t be a problem at all.

6. My plan to read one book a week. My New Year’s resolution, it’s HiDef

7. Arie.nl werkkleding & werkschoenen, Poetsplaza.nl, Baliday.com and some other projects I am working on.

8. Inscorta is the name of an open source project I am starting. It is actually the code behind Arie.nl & Poetsplaza.nl. Until now the development has been done solely by me. It turns out to be a great software package but further development is slow and difficult since I am do it all. That is why I decided a long time ago to make this software public so everyone can use it and help to improve it.

9. Me turning into something usually named blogger. This is not a New Year’s resolution, I just enjoy it. 

10. Me turning into an Apple Fanboy! Like the attack some M*$*&*F*#^%*rs did on my villages in Tribalwars, I am afraid there is no stopping to this Bill and Steve.

Ok, this is not exactly a tipping point list.

“Whaddaya gonna do, life goes on” (My favorite quote from The Sopranos)