Similar questions you may ask yourself: Should I run a blog? Should I blog about my life?

No, you shouldn’t! It’s as simple as that!

Okay, that isn’t true but an example how people run a blog, they complain about things. They complain about the weather, public transportation, politics, bands, movies, pretty much everything there is. Controversy is a big thing in many blogs, extreme points of view are published and as a big audience isn’t much of a problem if you write about similar topics, these can have an impact. Statements like above make people want to comment and tell you how wrong you are. Actually they are very likely to comment if they disagree than when they agree.

In fact you can always consider to run a blog, if you have at least one of the following:

• time to produce great content  (visual art, music, poems or critiques and reviews of such)
• a sense for connecting occurrences in a way others don’t
• expertise or know how that could be helpful to many others
• an outstanding and extraordinary life
• writing talent that turns even very casual situations into great stories

Now these rules apply to successful blogs at most. Of course you can blog, twitter and such as much as you like without all that. I personally also use my blog to keep family and friends updated about my life and what is going on, trying to hand on the impressions I get. Nothing wrong with that. Let’s  take the rules one by one:

Great Content

Concerning visual art, I would like to put up stuntkid.com by Jason Levesque and crisvector.com (just portfolio, but anyways, releasing new works there) by Cristiano Siqueira. They are both top visual artists and people will visit their site to gather inspiration and find out more about them, their skills and how they work.

Connecting Occurrences

This is not the easiest one. Basically it’s a good idea to stay very much up to date with several news sites and specialise on politics, economy and social aspects, you’ll probably find interesting topics.

Expertise sharing

An outstanding example for that is blenderguru.com the sub-headline is Quality Blender Tutorials for a reason. Andrew Price is really distributing high quality stuff for the open source render software blender there. Another really successful blog about everything about (web-)design and related topics is The Smashing Magazine.

Outstanding Life

You are a top model, Greenpeace activist or the prime minister of some country? This is totally your way. People will listen to you because of your fame or the exotic life you live, no worries at all Example for that is a model’s blog: Elyse Sewell’s Livejournal

Writing Talent

Consider yourself gifted and pick your topics carefully. You will probably attract people with your ability of expressing them in your way.

If you have any or more of the following just be sure that you can maintain a degree of quality and be original about it, don’t rip off content, it will never really work out. At last, you should try to keep some structure in your content, but this does not belong here, because this entry is dedicated to the content you might want to have on your blog.

If you liked this entry, please comment and others may follow, for example about technical issues of blogging.

Yeah, I couldn’t help it. Some more fall out of my typography class beneath.

First a little poster with a little critic about our set destination in life:

The second work is very (as in extremely or obsessively) minimalistic, focussed on used space (and the fonts):

Vocabulary

RSS (or atom) Feeds are a really powerful tool to either stay in touch with information you value, get updates real quick and spend less time on getting information you want. About every blog, online gallery or news site has its own feed. Here a quick sum up how to use this efficiently, both as reader and as a publisher (artist, blogger, or if you run a community).

Rss, atom feed = a stream of information divided into different parts like headline, content, attachment.

Aggregator = a synonym for feedreader, program that handles feeds

subscribe = you start reading a newsfeed, like signing up for a newsletter

For readers

Why use this technique in the first place?

Because it saves you time and makes managing your inputs of information easily. You don’t want to visit every site you like, where there could be new content daily. You have a chance that there is no new content and you leave again, without any gain. Further, you don’t have to remember all the places for valuable information around the internet, you just subscribe to the feeds and will be noticed when there is new content to see or read.

How do I use it then?

Many programs support feeds, browsers (like IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome) mail clients (like Thunderbird or Windows Live Mail) or dedicated feed readers (like Shrook for Mac, Liferea and Akregator for Linux or Feedreader for Windows). There are also online services that collect your feeds in your browser window, accessible from everywhere (example: bloglines, google reader, netvibes).

Just look out for this icon: it will support you with information or the feed URL from that site. For this blog it is: http://geronimo89.dk/feed/

Example how to subscribe to a website with Firefox:

For writers

Why you should run a website or use a service (countless, like deviantART, flickr, blogger, blogspot, livejournal, wordpress) that supports feeds is because you reach your readers fast and you have a better chance that people that like what you do will come back or stay in touch through this feed. They might want to subscribe to your feed, but not visit your website manually every day to check if there are updates. If you post content (like photos, poems, blogposts) irregularly it will increase the number of your readers.

How will I know if people use this feature?

Simple: if your sites views go up, minutes after you have submitted new content, people have very probably subscribed to your feed. I see it myself, when I promote new content through links with bit.ly I have more readers online than clicked the link that lead to the article. These are readers that have subscribed. Another option is to use a service like Feedburner to monitor readers. Also there are plugins for most content management systems that show referrers or count hits on your feed-url.

But I want people to visit the website!

No problem, you can distribute a short summary of the article and not the whole content through the feed, which only gives the user a headline and the summary, if they want to read the whole article, they have to go to that article, by clicking the link. If you are not depending on advertisement on your website, I recommend you distribute all the content though. Below a screenshot of the wordpress rss settings.

Links:

• feedicons.com for graphics in various colours
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators Wikipedia list of feed readers

After testing Chromium / Chrome I never really switched back to Firefox. Still I keep discovering new cool or useful plugins for it.

Turn off the lights is just fading out everything but the video on pages like youtube. It reduces distractions to the eye and gives it a little more cinematic look. Since youtube supports high definition, why not enjoy a little?

Scene from Asylum by Disturbed.

A more practical extension is the iReader. A feature that actually was implemented in recent versions of Safari. The extension pops up a window on any webpage with proper markup if you read an entry on a blog or news site to make the reading experience better.

Below you see the options and how you can customise the appearance of iReader, like how much the background fades, which hotkey starts it, which font and so on. If you like me read a LOT on the net, on sites you don’t have in your feedreader, it’s really worth it!

Recently, one of my teachers generalised people with high IQ and a bad personality as sociopaths, which often is used as a synonymous for the Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). I think this is a flat description of it, so I decided to make a little something for my typography class about it. I wanted to go for an informal, yet dark theme and keep it simple stupid, like informal material, only with striking sub-headlines and another colour scheme. The text are the official criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical a of Mental Disorders. Final word: I don’t judge people suffering from ASPD, it’s a mental disorder, nothing they just do because it’s fun.