November 2007 Archives

email exists to stay on top of things,… I am much more interested in getting to the bottom of things

Via Adventures in Home Working

It is good habit to add a personal note when inviting someone to connect through LinkedIn to explain how you know the other person and why you want to connect. However, lately I noticed a small inconvenience with this approach: I invited a few people with a personalized note and instead of the acceptation of the invitation I received a reply to my note.

It is no big problem, as I simply reply back and ask them to accept my invitation. Maybe LinkedIn could think of a 'Reply & Accept' button?

As I have been blogging for 10 years now, I thought it would be a nice idea to look back at almost 1000 posts on my sites. Today an overview of the year it all started: 1997.

Though I already had a personal web page for some years, I didn't spend a lot of time on it. My main interest these days were Jong Nederland and Fimcap. In November I had a great weekend with all JN volunteers on a national level, and in December I joined a Fimcap meeting in Rome. Though the meeting was only a weekend, I spend the entire week in Italy.

On November 9, 1997 I added a new section to my personal web site: a news page. The word weblog did not exist yet, but my news page (though updated manually in FrontPage) did have some aspects of modern day weblogs; it showed the entries in reverse chronological order, but did not allow for comments.

The first entries are written in Dutch, but as I got more foreign friends I changed my personal site to English. The old news however, always stayed in Dutch...

A lot have changed in those ten years. Not only in my life, but also the weblog. It went through several designs, three domains, two content management tools, and had both active periods and inactive periods.

As I had very few readers in the beginning (I still remember the day I had 10 visitors) I doubt there is anybody who have been following Brain Tags since those early days. It doesn't matter whether you read this blog recently or for a long time, I wouldn't have continued that long without my readers. So I would like to use the opportunity to thank you all!

The coming days I will look back in more detail on the pas ten years.

Two years ago, reflections were cool and something new. Reflactions gave your web site or your application a crisp look. Nowadays, even the big operating systems and television stations have reflections and thus reflections as a design element are outdated. I am surprised, even irritated, by the big number of startups still using reflections in their logo or their screendumps only to look 'cool'.

Get over it. Reflections are soooo 2005.