Recently I noticed that my colleague, Steve Todd, has adopted a consistent signature to his blog posts. This seems like a good idea, especially as one who’s been “syndicated” elsewhere without my approval.

While he’s a TypePad guy, I favor WordPress. Fortunately, WordPress has rich plugin ecosystem, and there are already plugins that support automated signatures.

Although not yet listed in the codex, I adopted DDAddSig for my needs.

Once I activated the plugin, I simply went to my WordPress dashboard Settings | DDAddSig panel, edited my Primary Signature and checked the Usage box “Display on posts.” Voilà!

Not including this post, I posted 50 blogs this year, which received 67 comments. Clearly, I’m not prolific (!), but I’m happy to see more comments than posts, and I’m content with roughly a post-a-week average for 2008. (For those with a young, active families and with jobs that aren’t centrally about blogging, I’d love to know how pull-off a higher posting average without impacting your quality of life and quality of work. )

Blogging is a discipline, and it’s something I intend to continue pursuing in the coming year. So, with that in mind, here is how things online ranked here in 2008:

Top 10 posts written in 2008

1. DFS tutorial
2. CMIS – Content Management Interoperability Services – received the most comments this year
3. DFS best practices
4. Download PDC2008 presentations – i.e. essentially a public service post
5. Blue Ocean Strategy – i.e. one of my book reviews (and not the one I expected either)
6. Documentum 6.5 with services in mind
7. DFS Object service consumer #1
8. DFS Object service consumer #2a – second most comments this year
9. DFS Object service consumer #2b
10. DFC, Microsoft developers, .NET and DFC PIA – i.e. a post about pre-DFS development using Documentum in a Microsoft environment

Top 10 posts (ever)

1. Documentum Foundation Services (DFS)
2. DFS tutorial (see above)
3. CMIS – Content Management Interoperability Services (see above)
4. Ruby coding conventions, standards and best practices
5. Spell checking Java source code
6. Great NASA observatories
7. DFS best practices (see above)
8. Download PDC2008 presentations (see above)
9. The Starbucks Experience- i.e. another book review of mine
10. What’s new in DFS 6.0 SP1

Top three pages in 2008

1. Music – i.e. over 3x the number of visits versus #2
2. About
3. Books

As 2008 comes to a close, I hope that you have a safe and hopeful new year.

Since reading Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, I’ve been looking forward to Malcolm Gladwell‘s next book. Outliers: The Story of Success didn’t disappoint, and I recommend reading it yourself.

As the book’s title suggests, Gladwell’s text is about success and outliers; however, he engages the reader from the get-go by starting with a definition of outlier expressly to follow-up by quickly suggesting a concrete redefinition of what is truly an outlier and what determines success. Gladwell challenges the reader to think in less-conventional terms (e.g. thinking about health in terms of community–beyond just the individual): “…there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.”

Outliers has two parts, focused on opportunity and legacy, respectively. Part one emphasizes “from-ness” (i.e. from where (e.g. birthplace), from when (e.g. time, era, norms), from how (e.g. culture, legacy), etc.). In doing so, part one indicates by one example after another why merely personal explanations of success don’t work.

     Where are you from?

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of the those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play–and by ‘we’ I mean society–in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.

Gladwell states, “Achievement is talent plus preparation.” He then goes on to uncover patterns of achievement and underachievement as well as patterns of encouragement and discouragement. He focuses on the work ethic of those who are purposeful, single-minded, intentional–who achieve success by working much, much harder.

• Adversity presenting itself as opportunity
• Developing skills amidst obscurity
• Meaningful – complexity, autonomy and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work
• “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”

For example, the “10,000 hour rule” is discussed (i.e. its typically takes 10K hours of deliberate practice to develop true expertise and world-class mastery). The point of the discussion is not to admire those who earn such mastery as much as it is to understand the kinds of obstacles most of us encounter in the pursuit of such commitment. Furthermore, it concerns the creation of (more) equal opportunities for practicing in order to reach greater common potential: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

     Are you regularly practicing what your core profession requires
     (e.g. modeling, design, coding, testing, writing)?

“Success arises out of a steady accumulation of advantages.”
“Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.”
     Talent: intellect, “general intelligence,” innate ability
     Opportunity: imagination, savvy, “practical intelligence,” surrounding
     community, family background, demographics, virtues and values
     (e.g. frugality, initiative, sacrifice)

“General intelligence” and “practical intelligence” are orthogonal (i.e. presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other); therefore, keep clear and separate (i.e. don’t confuse one for the other).

Part two, moves from opportunity to legacy and starts by focusing on cultural legacies (e.g. a culture of honor, where reputation is of foremost concern). The focus becomes about teamwork and communication (e.g. “mitigated speech”). For example, understanding cultural legacy as a way to effectively combat mitigation (i.e. developing clearer and more assertive communication where both transmitter and receiver are not a afraid to speak up or to speak straight).

To bring cultural legacy into better focus, Gladwell leverages the Cultural Dimensions work of Geert Hofstede (e.g. IDV – Individualism (i.e. what Gladwell refers to as the individualism-collectivism scale), UAI – Uncertainty Avoidance Index, PDI – Power Distance Index). For example, the United States has the highest IDV score and the fifth-lowest PDI score.

Mitigated speech and high PDI influence communication, especially when the person speaking (transmitter) and the person listening (receiver) have different orientation. In Western cultures, communication tends to be transmitter-oriented (i.e. speaker is responsible to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously). However, in Asian cultures, communication tends to be receiver-oriented (i.e. listener is responsible to make sense of what is being said). For this reason, I believe that communication is both my responsibility and also a two-way discipline (i.e. if you don’t understand something speak up–I’m trying my best to be clear). It’s why I prefer more interactive sessions at conferences, etc.

As a mathematician by training, I was fascinated to learn that, as human beings, we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. When you compare the fairly transparent Asian number system with the highly irregular number system in English, it starts to become clearer how English-speaking (English-thinking) student accumulate a disadvantage. Stowe Boyd goes into more detail of Gladwell’s treatment of this cultural legacy. (I need to start thinking si instead of four, qi instead of seven, etc. )

Cultural legacy suggests to me that it would be naive to apply an American timeline to the future development of, for example, China. Rice paddies aren’t fields of corn or wheat (i.e. skill-oriented versus mechanically-oriented farming tradition). So why should it take the Chinese the same amount of time to “modernize” as it did take Americans?

You’ve likely heard or seen the business cliché “Your attitude determines your altitude.” Well, Outliers posits that success is not much about ability as it is about attitude. That is, success is a function of persistence, doggedness and willingness to work hard. Success is more about out-learning than it is about being smarter. School works, but there just isn’t enough of it (e.g. 180 days versus 243 days–American versus Japanese school year). Or said another way, school isn’t the problem as much as summer vacation may be.

In closing:

• “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities–and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
• Success is a gift.
• “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success–the fortunate birth date and the happy accidents of history–with a society that provides opportunities for all.”

P.S. I recently began a major revision of my Books page. You can now more easily see other book reviews I’ve posted herein. Soon you’ll be able to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein). Why? Well, if you’re nearby and you see something of interest, please ask to borrow books of interest. If you’re not (i.e. regardless of your location to me), I’m hoping that opening up my library will help to solicit feedback as to what the especially good reads are (and why). I typically have multiple books queued up to read; so, knowing what should be top-of-list from my readers would be welcome feedback. Cheers…

Update 12/26/2008: Today I was able to get to watching the second part of Charlie Rose’s show on performance where, after interviewing Malcolm Gladwell in the first half, he interviewed the author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Geoff Colvin. Mr. Colvin referenced the little known body of scientific work concerning deliberate practice, much like Mr. Gladwell drew upon it in Outliers. I appreciated Mr. Colvin’s belief, based on conversation with this scientific community, that the research frontier here is parenting.

Well, actually it’s a give away (as in free).

Recently I took my family to a “Deacon Dave’s” to see his Christmas light spectacular. (One of his assistants said the power line to serve draws 400 amps!) I took several pictures without flash just after dark, trying to capture the effect of all of the (250,000+) lights, especially in the trees.

Anyway, I’ve been using the Cutline theme for my blog for awhile now. Cutline works with 770 by 140 pixel images. So, for those of my fellow Cutline users, here are some banner-sized images of Christmas lights you can use in the future.

As Daffy Duck said to Speedy Gonzales in Bah-Humduck!, “Fleas and eggnog!”

Update: I see that Cutline 2.0 has increased its header image size from 770×140 to 896×163. So, the above images are natively sized for Cutline 1.1. If you want me to produce 2.0-native images, please let me know (via a comment). Thanks.

While I’ve never been a prolific blogger, I managed to find time to post at least once every month last year. However, total posts this year (64) were down from 2005 (74). I believe this was due to two primary factors: having a family with two kids now and having a high, sustained workload as a software architect.

I started last year off intending to write more from my gut (i.e. what I’m passionate about). I faired decently but not spectacularly in this regard.

Easily the most significant post I made in 2006 was one of my shortest: Beautiful evidence.

Other posting highlights include the following (in chronological order–most recent is last):

• Content attractors
• Get out of context (i.e. my review of Dealing with Darwin)
• Content islands and dominoes
• The Success of Open Source (i.e. my review of this book)
• Free content now!
• An idea to set content free
• The Long Tail (i.e. my review of this book)
• Round-trip content engineering
• WS-*? Stop. Think. REST
• I’m starting to see red (i.e. Ruby)
• Open source Omea!

Since becoming SOA architect for the Content Management & Archiving business unit within EMC, I’ve been focused on SOA, web services and ECM service standardization. Since I realized this role on 1/1, 2006 has been about services, services, services; so the third to the last post above was made both seriously and as an attempt at humor.

The last two posts above hold perhaps the most promise entering 2007. Ruby is a language on the rise, and I’m interested in seeing how dynamic languages in general and Ruby in particular can well-serve content management needs (among other uses).

Omea is a unique resource aggregator that includes support for feeds, newsgroups, email, bookmarks and files, and is also accessible. It also happens to be my feed reader of choice. Given the business I’m in, I’m anxious to understand Omea at the source level to see how it can become integrated into content management solutions.

Looking back on 2006, I am reminded that the best laid plans can dissolve with little notice. WinFS, for example, was going strong until Microsoft decided (wisely) to remove it from what will publicly launch soon as Windows Vista. I’m also reminded that opportunity can knock without expectation (e.g. becoming a Microsoft MVP as a Solutions Architect).

Looking ahead to 2007… Happy New Year!

Given that I rely on WordPress for my blog and have made a few tweaks here and there, Matt’s announcement of WordCamp in San Francisco on 8/5/2006 sounds appealing to me…and a lot of other WP end users and developers!

I’ve thought about leveraging FeedBurner for awhile now but have been too busy to research the fuller benefits of such usage as well any potential switching costs in order to make a decision…until now. Thankfully FeedBurner is both listed on the WordPress Codex (here) and supported by a useful plugin that makes the cost to switch (from WP to FB) trivial. (Thanks, Steve Smith.)

You should now be automatically redirected to http://feeds.feedburner.com/craigrandall when accessing http://craigrandall.net/feed/. Please also feel free to cut over directly to my FeedBurner-based feed if you wish: http://feeds.feedburner.com/craigrandall. Of course, if you encounter any issues from my move to FeedBurner, I’d be grateful if you would kindly take the time to let me know.

Cheers!

2005

About a year ago, I acquired the “craigrandall.net” domain and set out to employ WordPress as my blogging foundation. Both moves have paid nice dividends. My domain has been easier for contacts to recall and WordPress has allowed me to focus on creating content rather than maintaining infrastructure.

Looking at the year’s content creation, I’m pleasantly surprised but also motivated to change my emphases a bit in 2006. I benefitted greatly over the past year by the writing of others, averaging over a solid read a month. I had more inspirational posts than posts about my site. Still I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time posting about my site.

Seventy-four posts in 2005 is an OK pace. There were only two months where I didn’t average a post per week. But I’m less interested in quantity and more interested in quality. Compared to 2004, I did post more about my thoughts in 2005 and less about aggregating the thoughts of others. However, in 2006, I intend to carry this trend further by writing more from the gut and perhaps somewhat less in quotes.

2006

“Resolution” is a bit strong; so, I’m going with “intention” instead… Having just reflected upon 2005, I intend to focus moving forward on the following subjects (in no particular order):

• Areas of personal expertise and/or passion
• More reflections on the books I read
• Services and SOA
• WinFS – Microsoft’s next-generation integrated storage
• Enterprise content management (ECM) – including email archiving, identity management, basic content services (BCS)
• Open source projects of note

I’m sure that I’ll still take some space to share aspects of my life outside work and to describe how my site continues to evolve. However, I intend to tip the balance in favor of professional content. Perhaps in the process I will benefit from more interaction with my readership, but I know what is in my control and what I can only hope to influence.

My intention stated here is motivated in part by my recent read of The Success of Open Source. That is, open source credits its membership based more on creation (evidence of skill) than it does on credential. It’s still always a good idea to have an up-to-date resume and to leverage tools like LinkedIn, but blogging is living and evolving evidence of being “fit for purpose.”

More on The Success of Open Source in a subsequent post…

“Resolution” is a bit strong; so, I’m going with “intention” instead.

Looking back on 2005, I intend to focus during 2006 on the following subject (in no particular order):

• More reflections on the books I read
• Enterprise content management (ECM) – including email archiving, identity management, basic content services (BCS)
• Open source projects of note
• WinFS – Microsoft’s next-generation integrated storage
• Similarities and differences between .NET and J2EE
• Services and SOA
• Areas of personal expertise and/or passion

I’m sure that I’ll still take some space to share aspects of my life outside work and to describe how my site continues to evolve. However, I intend to tip the balance in favor of professional content. Perhaps in the process I will benefit from more interaction with my readership, but I know what is in my control and what I can only hope to influence.

My intention stated here is motivated in part by my recent read of The Success of Open Source. That is, open source credits its membership based more on creation (evidence of skill) than it does on credential. It’s still always a good idea to have an up-to-date resume and to leverage tools like LinkedIn, but blogging is living and evolving evidence of being “fit for purpose.”

It’s fair to say that Peter Gabriel‘s Up CD artwork inspired my brother to create my current theme imagery. I grabbed the link colors from his latter two-disc Hit release. Appropriately, the teal is from the second “Miss” (or not-yet-visited) CD; the magenta is from the first “Hit” (visited) CD. Like I said in my previous post, WordPress upgrades are so dead-simple that they yield time for other things.

WordPress 2.0 was released this week; so I upgraded my site to it from 1.5.2. The steps provided for a 1.5.x upgrade were straightforward and accurate, allowing me some extra time to update my theme imagery–thanks again to my brother.

As noted now in my page footers, my brother has again supplied my blog with unique holiday cheer based on this–oh yeah, and MERRY CHRISTMAS!! (Holiday trees…grief!)

Before and after images:

I really enjoy Glennz‘s style; too bad (for me) that several of his T-shirts are regularly sold out.

Time flies regardless of whether or not you blog, but it’s fun to see the subject matter posted over the past two years.

While I’m a proud registered licensee of Photoshop CS2, I’m no match for my younger brother. We’re both architects–he sketches in AutoCAD (i.e. traditional architect) and I sketch in UML (i.e. software architect). He’s never turned me away when I ask for his creative support; in fact, he typically goes beyond the call of duty. Tonight is just one profound example of what I’m talking about.

Witness the following before and after images:

Enough said. Thanks, Brent!

P.S. Wait until you see what he cooked up for me come Christmas time.

For those of you who have used my OPML file in the past, I’ve just finished uploading a new version that reflects new feeds, removed feed and a significant amount of restructuring and annotation. Enjoy!

You may have noticed that my front page is a bit bent out of shape with respect to its two-column layout. Apparently I now have too much content in my sidebar for my current style to support. So, I’m in search of a plug-in or other technique to trim down the amount of information found there today (e.g. use of something like and for each section of links shown). If you know of anything for WP 1.5.2 in this regard, please let me know. Thanks in advance…

9/15/2005 update: Kudos to my Dad for suggesting a lurking markup error as the root cause. Dead on right. Argh! Guess I need to activate a spell checker and a markup checker soon. Sigh… On the other hand, the experience has caused me to rethink the way I present meta information in the sidebar, and I’m still committed to using or building something a bit more sophisticated in the sidebar to trim down the amount of information there on first glance.

No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:60d0d17a54d2eaca50300c2975a67b87

Prior to today, subscribers to my RSS 2.0-based comments feed may have encountered breakage due to the presence of » character entities. Googling for a solution led me to Kaf’s WordPress plugin, Entity2NCR. (It looks like Kaf is a fairly prolific plugin author.) This plugin, once I dealt with my initial activation hickup–thanks again to Kaf, did the trick. Handy!

Update 5/14/2005: Per Kaf’s own advice, I’ve removed Entity2NCR, since I’ve just completed my upgrade from WP 1.5 to WP 1.5.1.

I’ve just migrated my pages over to WordPress, too; so, I’ve removed all my hand-crafted pages, etc. from my site. Now that I’ve completed my cleanup, I’m looking forward to posting content (for a change).

It took me longer than I planned, but I’ve moved all of my posts into WordPress. In doing so, I discovered a few, minor rough edges in WP (e.g. no default handling of multi-level lists, relatively narrow columns that cause wider graphics to bleed, etc.). However, none of these discoveries was a show-stopper.

Speaking of the term show-stopper, I’m very pleased to say that we shipped recently–with no show-stoppers of course! Hopefully I will find the time to post in more detail about one of the new products to release with EMC Documentum 5.3: Application Connectors.

P.S. All of my “b4wp” based posts will be retired (i.e. removed) this weekend.

Still need to flesh-out most of my topical pages, but with the exception of “Development Toolbox” I have most of my topical links projected from my Links page.

All 2005 posts are now in WordPress. Most of my posting was in 2004, and that migration will take some more time to complete–but it will happen. I’ve retired (i.e. removed) my old feed. Finally, until I determine a way to make it more accessible/promoted, you can get my OPML file here.

I’ve updated the meta information in my dynamically produced HTML (i.e. via PHP) to be as rich as my previous XHTML site’s meta information was. I also submitted my site with Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search (beta). While I have no aspirations of anything close to a top 10 finish for a search on my name, I do hope to see it at least appear conveniently for those who want to find me. Next up, is the enrichment of my dynamically produced feeds…

After using the WP admin panel to create a new page (i.e. http://mysite.com/wp-admin/page-new.php for “mypage”) I saw the new link shown on my home page under Pages: http://mysite.com/mypage/. However, I received a 404 when I clicked on this link. I was forced to enter the following URL form instead: http://mysite.com/index.php?pagename=mypage. After fumbling around for a few minutes I realized that my .htaccess file wasn’t being automatically updated by WP (probably due to file access permissions). What triggered this thought was the fact that my posts and feeds both had “pretty permalinks” enabled, but my pages did not. (My posts/feeds solution was to manually create an initial .htaccess file whose contents were copied from the WP admin panel (i.e. http://mysite.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php).

Update 2/27/2006: I became aware of this excellent .htaccess tweaking resource (via Digg).

After visiting the “Using Themes” page in the WP Codex and downloading the Placid theme, it became clear that to derive a new theme from an existing theme–in my case Kubrick–involves changing the comment header inside style.css. And with such a vibrate WP community that likes to give back (e.g. a Photoshop template for Kubrick), it really can’t be any easier to personalize a WP site.

So far, I’ve found the WordPress support forums (and Google) to be helpful in getting me up and running past a default WP installation. After my previous post, I discovered that the default URLs were not to my liking; so, I decided to email Ryan Boren directly with my questions. How a software’s major contributors respond to questions–newbie or advanced–tell me a great deal about the software itself (e.g. is there a pride and a passion underneath the bits and bytes). Ryan did not disappoint and even hung in there with a few follow-up replies. (Thanks, Ryan!) His timely and helpful replies cement my decision to join the WP family of users.

It turns out that I simply needed to turn on permalink support and define how I want my permalinks to behave.

Of course, I ran into a few gotchas, but Ryan pointed me in the right direction. I ended up having to create my own .htaccess file, copy and paste the permalink code from the WP admin console into this file and upload it to my site. Windows Explorer on Windows XP wouldn’t allow me to create a file with this name–complaining that my file must have a file name. So, I simpy created a new .txt file then used a Command Prompt window and the RENAME command to arrive at .htaccess.

Once the permalinks were working I ran into self-defeating index.htm files in my previous archives folder structure. So, to allow WP to process my permalinks effectively, I moved all my pre-WP content into my b4wp folder. Also, I still noticed a few odd “feed:” prefixes in my feed links so I modified the sidebar.php and footer.php theme pages to correct that.

Eventually I plan to create my own WP theme and post it for others to consider for their own use–give a bit back to the community. But I really appreciate how easy the transition to WP has been for me because it allows to return to the most important activity to me her: new posts and comments.

Installing this software really doesn’t take much more than five minutes. It’s fair to say that some of the time it took me to complete the installation was spent in disbelief that it couldn’t be as simple as I was being led to believe. It is!

I recently secured a new domain (i.e. craigrandall.net) and am working to establish a true blogging infrastructure upon it. (I’ve narrowed my choice down to Movable Type or WordPress. Every time I think that going with MT is a no-brainer, something pulls at me to look deeper into WP. So, I’m going to spend time during the rest of my current (much needed) vacation to better understand the reasons why each package was built, what goals each package is trying to solve, and where each package sees itself in the next 12-18 months (i.e. its strategy and roadmap).)

While I’ve certainly learned a lot through hand-crafting this site for more than a year now, it’s time for me to defer plumbing to someone else’s code and focus more on content creation. And because content is more important to me than plumbing, I will continue to post in traditional form here until all of my posts are being managed by a blogging engine.

Certainly, if you have thoughts on MT or WP, or another contender for that matter, please let me know. I’m all for learning from the experience of others.

As far as my MSN Space and my Wallop area go, I’m using these mostly as comparative laboratories and not as my primary content publication venues. All posts of any real consequence will be made here at craigrandall.net.

A few people commented to me that my previous color scheme was a bit hard to read; so, I hope that you find the new palette to be an improvement.

More importantly, I finally found the time to produce an RSS 2.0 feed for my blog. (It’s only been a year without one.)

OK, I realize that some of you (e.g. in my family) are thinking about saying bless you or gesundheit after reading an RSS 2.0 feed for my blog, but this means that I can simply state this fact to my family and friends and each person can decide for his or herself if it matters. If it does matter to you, having a feed means that you can now subscribe to my site using a feed reader. When I post something new, your reader will recognize this for you and deliver the new content straight to your eyeballs.

Need a reader? Here’s what I recommend that you do:

• Visit JetBrains web site and fill out a free Omea Reader license form (no later than 3/31/2005 if free is important to you) .
• Download the latest released version of Omea Reader installer to, for example, your local desktop.
• Install Omea Reader and enter the license key JetBrains sent your email address you specified on the form provides here.
• Launch Omea Reader and choose Tools | Subscribe to Feed… from its menu system.
• In the first field at the top, enter the following link after the provided http:// prefix: craigrandall.net/feed/ (i.e. the whole link should look like http://craigrandall.net/feed/).
• Click Next.
• Keep the default feed title I’ve set (a musing) or change it to whatever you prefer.
• Click Next and finish the subscription.
• Omea Reader should then grab the contents of my feed, which you can subsequently read.

I hope that you find my new feed valuable.

Update 3/21/2005: changed my feed link to reference my current WP-based feed rather than my hand-crafted feed at the time this post was originally published.

Update 12/22/2005: Omea Reader is free indefinitely. Simply use the key provided on its download page. You can also import my OPML file into Omea Reader (or any other OPML-aware feed reader) to get started (i.e. File | Import Feed Subscriptions…).

The past couple of days I’ve proven to myself that although I can picture in my mind a new site design, I cannot seem to express it in code–yet! Needless to say, this has taken me away from writing content.

So just how important is visual design to a weblog reading experience or general interaction? Do my readers care? (Does anyone else but me read this stuff? )

While it’s true that a statement is no more or less true based on font face, size or style–let alone what pictures might accompany it–a statement can have more or less impact. A site can linger in your mind with the right design. So can software.

All this to say that I’m going to struggle with pixels a bit more…and try to post some new content, too…soon…