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Next action: plan some posts for Brain Tags.
Let's continue our trip through the history of Brain Tags at 1998, my second year of blogging.
I celebrated my birthday party in De Jeugdhof, and after cleaning the floor we forgot to close the fire hose. The next morning when we came back to finish cleaning we encountered a swimming pool instead of our cleaned floor. Oops...
I also went to Africa and visited the very interesting country of Lesotho. Of course, still being a rookie blogger I only slightly mentioned this instead of writing a post with high Google juice. Missed change indeed.
I also had the worst skin problems I remember and had to stay home for several days because my face was severely infected. I still don't know what caused it (allergy?, stress?), but fortunately it didn't return after 1998.
Then there were of course some stories about Jong Nederland, such as kaderschouw, the Night of 16+, planning the EuroContact and the famous volleyball tournament of the Utrecht district.
You might also be interested in Looking back at 1997.
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.
As Ai-No has its own blog which I will use for meta-blogging, there will obviously be less meta-blogging going on over here. So this blog will concentrate more on technology, web development and my life in Spain.
Thanks for your patience, and stay tuned for more....
pos.braintags.com. There is also an old blog about my web hosting adventures, which I haven't updated in ages, called Brytenet weblog and just as the rest of the Brytenet site managed with eZ Publish. And finally I have my successful Spanish productivity blog El Canasto maganed with WordPress.Quite a mess, isn't it? Add to that the fact that I have been experimenting a lot with non-public weblogs, and you'll get an idea of what things look like.
So I decided to clean things up, and do it well. You'll notice from the links in the side bar that I have presented my blogs as The Brain Network, a name I never have been satisfied with. Anyway, I acquired a new short and flashy domain name (of course hosted by Brytenet) and made a fresh MT4 installation. This will be the home of Brain Tags, The Wizard of POS, El Canasto and a new network blog (I still have to decide whether I want to continue with the Brytenet Weblog). Until now I have re-created The Wizard of POS, imported all existing entries, comments and trackbacks, and tweaked the default template. And by the way, I gave it its own domain name, pos-wizard.com.There is still a lot of work to be done (and I have little time), but I already feel good about the new home for my weblogs and am looking forward to being able to manage all my blogs from a single screen.
Most of you know that I also write in Spanish on my other weblog El Canasto, and you might even have visited it to see what it looks like. I just remembered that two months ago I published an entry in both Spanish and English, participating in a meme about my 'killer' GTD set-up. Basically I describe how I work and what productivity tools I use. If you're interested, just head over to My Killer GTD Setup, which might also help you learn a little bit of Spanish as the translation is right next to it.
30 minutes after updating this site to Movable Type 4.0 RC2, I read this. Back to work...
Whenever I had an idea for a blog post, I used to create a new entry on that particular blog, jot down my idea, and save the post as a draft. As soon as I had more time, I checked the list with draft posts, chose a draft, and finished the post.
What had worked perfectly for a long time, lately became a burden. The problem is that over the time I have collected a great number of interesting themes to write about, resulting in a big amount of drafts. Some of those drafts only contain an URL, while other are more elaborated. In short, it became too difficult to find out quickly what was what.
So now I have changed my blogging workflow. I transferred all my ideas to Google Notebook, where they are nicely ordered per blog. On that page I can see all ideas with their actual content at a single page. One glance on my Notebook, and I can quickly decide what to write. Furthermore, with the Google Notebook Firefox extension I am able to select a text on a random web page and copy it together with the address of the page to my Notebook.
From now on, drafts in my blogging software are actually pieces I already have started to write, which usually are only a few. This set-up keeps things clear, and speeds up my blogging workflow.
Every once in a while when I log into Movable Type, I am happily greeted by the following message:
If I press the 'Begin update' button, Firefox will crash. So I open good ol' Internet Explorer, and update the database. After that I switch back to Firefox and go to phpMyAdmin to fix the mt_permissions table.
I love beta software!
