"Goodnight Sunflowers" by Michael Thurber

benbarden.com, my personal blog, has reached the end of its life. This post is designed as a quick recap, a look at why things haven’t worked out, and what I’m doing next.

An Abridged History

If we ignore this blog’s life before July 2010, which is logical as any posts prior to that aren’t online anymore, this is the 156th and final post.

In that time, the blog has had over a dozen taglines, before settling on the multi-topic concept that hasn’t changed the blog itself too much, but has ultimately concluded with what I’ve always felt about this blog. It’s a bit of a mess.

On Post Quality and Consistency

Some of the posts have done quite well, others have been ignored. The lack of consistency is clearly a factor here: perhaps some of you don’t mind this, but regular readers are few and far between. Most people are only interested in a couple of the posts here.

In contrast, Quick Blog Tips has been doing quite well recently, with some readers even saying they read every post. The blog has also spawned my blog newsletter – Weekly Blogging – which is doing OK so far.

Meanwhile, when I show my personal blog URL on social networks, in my email signature and as my “main” blog, it’s started to feel somewhat embarrassing. It’s not the greatest blog.

What Happens Next?

In terms of my existing blogs, Quick Blog Tips is definitely not going anywhere. In fact, February 20th will mark its one year anniversary. The fourth issue of Weekly Blogging will be sent on Monday morning.

Anyone who remembers my other blogs, Spam Comment and TV in Quotes, may already know that they haven’t had any new posts in a few months. I might do something with them someday, but in the end I don’t think they worked too well.

As for potential new blogs – I’m currently in the early stages of setting up an entertainment/reviews blog, to provide an outlet for my love of music and movies. This is going to be a group blog, so if you’d like to have a regular slot, please let me know. I’m also thinking about a social media blog, but would like to focus on the entertainment/reviews blog first.

In the near future, I’ll be closing down this blog and replacing it with a static website, containing links to my various blogs and social media profiles. I may keep some of the best posts online in an archive. Or I might rewrite them into newer posts on my other blogs.

Besides Quick Blog Tips and Weekly Blogging, the best way to keep in touch with me is to follow me on Twitter, add me on Google+, or like my Facebook page. Or why not contact me?

Thank You

Thanks to everyone who’s read my blog, commented, retweeted and so on… I appreciate it!

I took these photos – if you’d like to share them, please include a link back to this post. Thank you!

"Links" by {m.photography}

Here are seven links that have caught my eye in the last week. This week: social media automation, top-aligned form labels, awesome ways to build website wireframes, and more.

Another way to see these links

If you’d rather not click all of these links in one go, follow me on Twitter as I’ll be posting them over the next few days. I use a free tool called Buffer, which allows me to schedule my tweets. Join Buffer and start scheduling your tweets.

Today’s Links

#1: Should We Always Deploy Content Management Systems?

Is empowering the business owner with a CMS always the way to go? Sometimes leaving tasks such as website maintenance and system upgrades to a professional leads to better results for the owner.

- via Six Revisions

#2: Goodbye Social Media Automation, Hello Conversation

Online influence metrics are changing the game again, and for the better. Solid strategies – the ones that take time to take full effect and require a lot of thought and hard work – are going to win out over shortcuts.

- via Dempsey Marketing

#3: Another Case for Using Top Aligned Form Labels

By now, most designers should know that top aligned labels allow users to fill out forms faster than left aligned labels. This makes sense when you read and understand why and the research that verifies this fact. If that reason alone isn’t enough to convince you to use top aligned labels, here are a couple more reasons why they work best for most users.

- via UX Movement

#4: Awesome Ways to Build Website Wireframes

I’d like to share a couple of cool tools with you that I find extremely useful when building wireframes of existing sites as well as creating new wireframe mockups for sites to be developed.

- via John Doherty

#5: Office Music — Yay or Nay?

There are always two sides to an issue, and listening to music in the office is no different. Although this seems like a somewhat simple problem, I have discovered through my research that employees are constantly complaining about office music rules.

- via Work Awesome

#6: Sugar: The Bitter Truth

Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin.

- via UCtelevision / YouTube

#7: Olly

Olly takes services on the Internet and delivers their pings as smell. Whether it’s tweets, a like on Instagram, or just your train running late, Olly will be sure to let your nose know about it.

- via Olly

Found a Great Post?

Please contact me and I’ll be happy to check it out. Thank you!

"handmade • so.colorful" by origamidon

Back when blogging first started, I remember hearing loads of people criticising it for allowing people with “nothing to say” to have a say. The criticism usually included a comment along the lines of, “nobody cares what you had for dinner”.

When Twitter started to get popular, I remember hearing exactly the same comments.

So – let’s talk about whether you should tweet (or blog) about food.

I can see why you might not, if it’s only to say “Tonight I’m having stew.”

However, I think it’s more interesting if some out of the ordinary happens. Like this:

Just having a Minted Lamb Big Soup. Love it, except they appear to have forgotten to include any meat. Not so big soup.

— Ben Barden (@benbarden) January 11, 2012

Or is that just as mundane as any other food-related tweet?

How about if you’re a chef?

Discussion

What do you think, do you tweet what you eat?

"malady of modernity" by Will Lion

Do you ever feel as though there are simply too many places for you to go and post new content?

Here are some social bits and pieces for you to ponder:

• Facebook fan page – I use my fan page to share new content from my two blogs.
• Facebook profile – Now that people can subscribe to Facebook profiles, I’m a bit lost as to whether I should post content on my profile or on my fan page. The fan page is named after me, so I guess I could set up pages for my blogs.
• Google Plus profile – I’ve attracted quite a few followers on Google Plus, mainly due to the “shared circles” feature. However, I don’t really post there much.
• Google Plus fan page – I have a fan page for Quick Blog Tips, but don’t really use it.
• Twitter profile – I love Twitter – it’s the social site I use the most. However, I make life a bit more difficult for myself by having not one, but two Twitter accounts. One is my personal account, the other is @quickblogtips.

There’s also LinkedIn, which I don’t use for posting new content. Some people also record videos and post them on YouTube. This is an outlet I’m not currently using. I’m sure you can think of more sites, too.

How much content do you post on social media sites? Unless you only post “metacontent” – such as posting a Twitter tip on Twitter, or a Facebook tip on Facebook – I don’t see how it’s possible to come up with original content on every social site without some degree of automation. And I’m not keen on automation – it feels so impersonal.

Traditional content outlets

If we look beyond the social sites, there are other places where you might publish content.

• Blogs: in my view, there’s still a place for blogs. I think it’s really important not to neglect your blog and only post on social media sites. Historically, social media sites haven’t provided us with a good way to trawl through a user’s archives. This is where blogs are brilliant: you can browse by category, or by date. Try doing that on Twitter.
• Guest posts: writing content for other sites is a great way to get your name out there – fast. I’ve only recently started writing guest posts – the results have already been excellent. Of course, you do need to come up with new content for your guest posts – you can’t just copy your existing blog posts to other sites. Well you could, but you shouldn’t.
• Comments: whether you’re commenting on someone else’s site or replying to comments on your own, discussing the content you’ve just been reading can lead to wonderful things. Sometimes it’s simply a case of having a chat and sharing some views; sometimes you might make a minor breakthrough and come up with a new post idea for your blog, or a business idea that you could run with. Comments that further the original topic are of great value.
• Forums: take any method of communication that’s been around for years, and you’ll probably find plenty of people who say it’s dying out. Maybe the best times for forums are in the past, but I still use a couple of forums and I think they’re well worth looking into.
• Newsletters: I just set up a blogging newsletter – Weekly Blogging. I’ve opted to use it as a weekly round-up, with a recap of content from the last week, some classic content, some useful links and a short editorial. This isn’t a huge amount of fresh content if you read my blogs as the posts go up, but it’s a great option for those who want a weekly digest of blogging tips and resources. If I was writing one or two completely new articles for the newsletter, I imagine it wouldn’t last very long – or my blogs would be affected as I’d run out of ideas.

How to find old content

Earlier, I said that social media sites haven’t provided us with a good way to trawl through a user’s archives. However, this may be changing with the introduction of Facebook’s Timeline. This feature provides an interesting way to go back through a person’s life and see what they’ve been up to. Of course, it relies on manual intervention to insert the events that occurred before you joined Facebook.

I also think that blogs require careful organisation if you want people to find the oldest content in the archives. Although date-based navigation may facilitate this, it’s not much use for a how-to site or anything that isn’t really time-relevant. Categories and static pages can help to point people in the right direction.

How to manage your content outlets?

So how on earth do you keep up with all these places to post new content, without simply writing a comment once and automatically posting it everywhere else?

I think you have to make a choice how many sites you’ll use. I’ve read so many blog posts that recommend one or more of the above sites. Between those blog posts, if you followed everyone’s advice, you’d be posting everywhere, everywhen. That’s simply not sustainable in the long run.

Find the sites you like. But also know where your audience is. If you’re just getting started, you probably don’t have an audience yet. This means you can probably pick and choose your content outlets. The main one for me is Twitter. When I do post on Google Plus I get replies, but I just don’t think of much that I’d want to post there that I’m not already saying on Twitter. The same applies to Facebook.

I’m not keen on automatically cross-posting content across sites, mainly because there’s a good chance people will see the same content more than once. Thinking about it some more though… advertising is all about saturation – I’ve heard that people may not click an ad until they’ve seen it more than a dozen times. So does it follow that people may be more likely to click your links and read your content if it’s everywhere?

I’d like to my content to travel everywhere, but I don’t have time to write original content on every social media site in existence.

Discussion

What would you do? How do you manage your content outlets?

"Links" by {m.photography}

After a couple of weeks off, Seven Links for Saturday is back with some great articles for you to read.

The previous link image was getting a bit overused, so this week I’ve used a new one.

Another way to see these links

If you’d rather not click all of these links in one go, follow me on Twitter as I’ll be posting them over the next few days. I use a free tool called Buffer, which allows me to schedule my tweets. Join Buffer and start scheduling your tweets.

Today’s Links

#1: Why you should do your homepage wireframe last

When building websites, I always recommend developing the home page last because the purpose of the homepage is to highlight content within the site. You need build out the site so you have something to highlight before you build the homepage. Over the past year, I have started to realize that the same advice holds true for design. In fact, I now feel even stronger about that rule for design. Here are four reasons why.

- via Content Here

#2: How To Make Forms More Usable With HTML5

Forms are how we interact with websites. We use forms to contact site owners, login to applications, reply to comments and so much more. Forms generally don’t inspire love. We don’t like filling them out or creating them. html5 forms want to help change that.

- via Van SEO Design

#3: Plugins vs. “… Without a Plugin”

I started seeing quite a lot of tweets and posts on how to do things “without a plugin” in WordPress and 99% of them involve writing snippets in your theme’s functions.php file. Now, how does that differ from writing a plugin?

- via Konstantin Kovshenin

#4: 4 ways to prototype faster

The best way to speed up your prototyping efforts is to start with paper. One of the tenets of Agile is that working software is a key measure of progress on a project. Sadly, developers sometime interpret this to mean that they should be creating computer-based prototypes right from the start.

Here’s the best kept secret in prototyping: the biggest mistake you can make is to start prototyping in front of a screen.

- via  Userfocus

#5: What does having your own website or blog do that a social media platform doesn’t?

Why build your own website when you can just use Facebook and Twitter? In one word: control.

- via Adrian Graham 

#6: The Content Frustration

At a recent social media breakfast, almost all the attendees agonised over how hard it was to get the resources to create content and get others (read: upper management), to realise that content creation (or at least curation) is an important part of digital strategy.

- via Unique  Frequency

#7: 2011: A Year in London

My resolution for 2011 was to do at least one London-based activity a month and I have to say, it was a resounding success. In 2011, I fell in love with London all over again and I can begin 2012 knowing that I will continue to explore, research and marvel over this wonderful, quirky, historic city.

- via Emm in London

Found a Great Post?

Please contact me and I’ll be happy to check it out. Thank you!

"TAB - Facade" by Xin Li 88

Do you have an Aweber subscriber form on your blog? Do you have it in more than one place, such as in your sidebar as well as in your footer? There may be a small problem that you need to fix.

What’s the Issue?

This is an issue I discovered when I visited Get Paid to Write Online. I read a post, left a comment and decided to subscribe to the email newsletter. However, in doing so I found a rather odd problem.

Clicking in the “Name” field, I typed my name and hit the Tab key. Instead of being taken to the “Email” field as expected, the cursor jumped down to the bottom of the screen. I was now in the “Name” field for the second email subscriber form.

What’s the Fix?

Aweber has an FAQ explaining how to fix this issue. You can find it here: Why Does Hitting Tab Switch Me Between Forms?

In Brief

Third-party scripts can cause weird problems with your website. This particular issue was isolated to the two Aweber forms. It might have been a different story if another script on the page used the same tabindex values.

If possible, it’s worth doing a bit of testing whenever you add a new script to your site. Tabbing between fields is a good thing to test.

Discussion

Do you use Aweber? Do you test your site when adding third-party scripts? If not, I might be able to help. Contact me with your requirements.

"Smooth Reflections" by Jim Boud

Here it is: the final bloggy instalment of 2011, and the introduction to 2012 – according to me, anyway. Twitter is already running incredibly slowly, Sydney has already celebrated the start of the New Year, so I guess there’s no turning back now…

Reflections of 2011

#1: Work, Work and More Work…

This year has been a very big year for my career. In April I started working full-time for printed.com (formerly The Digital Print Partnership). I’d already been working on the site for nearly a whole year when I joined the team properly, but I was also working on some other projects.

By far the biggest change to the site was when we moved from digitalprintpartnership.com to printed.com. But this is really just the beginning. I just hope I find a new developer to help me with the site early next year, as there’s already way too much for me for do. If you’re a skilled PHP developer with knowledge of Zend framework and you’re in the London area, check out the printed.com Careers page – I’d love to hear from you.

#2: Blogging Like Crazy

In my Review of 2010, I listed all of my blogs and came up with a total of 299 blog posts written in 2010. Other than benbarden.com, the only surviving blog from the list in that post is Spam Comment, which has been on a break since November 2011. I’ll come back to that blog later in this post.

I started Project 365 and launched a photo blog, but quit partway into March due to so many of the photos being quite poor. I found it was better to have a day out and take lots of photos from that day, than take a random photo either during my commute to work, in the office or out on my lunch break. Invariably it was the midweek shots that ended up being the most pointless.

I merged all of my blogging tips into a single blog – Quick Blog Tips – continued posting at Spam Comment, and launched TV in Quotes – another blog that is currently on a break.

Some quick stats to show how many posts I published in 2011:

• benbarden.com: 87 (including this post)
• Quick Blog Tips: 154
• Spam Comment: 184 (not including 43 posts written by other authors)
• TV in Quotes: 51
• Total: 476

And if that sounds like a lot, bear in mind that my photo blog is not included in these stats – and if the posts and photos were still online, they would bring the total to 549.

Phew!

#3: Closure of CMF Ads, Launch of Floor15

In June, I launched Floor15. To date, the site has not really progressed as far as I would’ve liked, partly due to a lack of clear direction and the fact I haven’t dedicated enough time to developing the site.

In September, I announced the closure of CMF Ads. The site closed at the end of October. Since that announcement, another ad network – Adgitize – has also announced that they will be closing. It just goes to show – online advertising is a tough market to operate in.

Plans for 2012

I already have quite a few objectives at Quick Blog Tips, so I don’t want to over-extend myself. However, I do want to set a few general goals:

#1: Write 12 New Tracks

Aside from the a short demo I shared earlier this year, I haven’t written music for a long time. I’d like to change that. The last time I felt I needed a kick up the backside with writing music was in December 2004, when I decided to write one track every month throughout 2005. I didn’t always hit the deadlines, but I did write a total of 12 new tracks that year – resulting in my first album of original music.

I’d like to do something similar in 2012, with the main goal of completing my sixth album by the end of the year. And maybe I’ll put all of my older music back online, too. But for now, the objective is to write 12 new tracks in 2012.

#2: Watch 52 Movies

I’m not well-known for watching movies. I want to get on and watch some new movies, along with some old classics. The arbitrary goal of watching 52 movies is so I force myself to watch one movie every week, thereby taking some time away from the computer and having the opportunity to relax.

I’ve already started this objective with a bit of a warm-up, although the ones already listed won’t count towards the 52 I’d like to watch in 2012. Track my progress here: Movies in 2012.

#3: Write 2 New eBooks

There are a couple of blogs I’ve thought about launching, but they never really got off the ground as I didn’t want to write content for them indefinitely. However, the topics are of great interest to me, and I’d love to write something – just not a blog.

So, I’d like to write two new eBooks instead of building more blogs. In case you’ve already read my objectives at Quick Blog Tips, this is not the same two eBooks I’m talking about over there. That means I’m actually planning to write four new eBooks in 2012. But if I’m being realistic, I’d be happy if I wrote one eBook from each camp.

#4: User-Generated Content Engine

Something I learned in 2011 is that not everything should be a blog. I still think that Spam Comment and TV in Quotes are great website ideas – they just don’t work quite so well as a blog, and if I’m the only one writing for them.

Of course, this wasn’t true of Spam Comment, as I did have some help there. The main issue was that the best posts never found their way back to the homepage, as the blog moved too quickly. As for TV in Quotes, it was fun to read the quotes, but it wasn’t much fun writing down the quotes due to the amount of pausing I had to do.

To that end, I’d like to build some kind of engine that could power both of these sites, cutting out all the unnecessary stuff that most other systems provide, and instead building all the things that would actually be useful for that type of site.

I think this is reasonably achievable, as the system I want to build already has a clear purpose, there’s content waiting to be plugged into it, and in theory I should be able to use the same system for both blogs (and maybe more in the future).

And no, I won’t be using WordPress. It would technically work (much as it does currently) but it wouldn’t be much fun to use – it would be a clunky mish-mash of components. Not everything works as a WordPress site…

Discussion

So – that’s it for another year! Have you set any resolutions?

"music" by phil h

2011 was the first year that I really got into music downloads. Instead of buying CDs, I mostly bought MP3s. After going back through my order history at Amazon and Juno Download, I found that I purchased just over 1 album every week.

So if anyone’s interested, here are my music purchases in 2011. Not all of them were newly released this year.

January 2011

Late Night Alumni: “Of Birds, Bees, Butterflies Etc.” (2009)
Michael Cassette: “Temporarity” (2010)
Fierce Angel – Beach Angel IV (2010)
Hed Kandi – The Remix 2011 (2010)
Samantha James: “Rise” (2007)

February 2011

Late Night Alumni: “Haunted” (2011)
Basement Jaxx: “The Singles” (2005)

March 2011

This is the only month when I didn’t buy any new music.

April 2011

Armin Van Buuren: A State of Trance 2011 (2011)
Anjunabeats Worldwide 03 (2011)
Paul Oakenfold The Goa Mix 2011 (2010)
Doctor Who: Series 5 Soundtrack (2010)

May 2011

Solarstone: “Electronic Architecture” (2009)
Solarstone: “Electronic Architecture 2″ (2011)
The Mash Up Mix 2006 (2006)
Doves: “Lost Souls” (2000)
Doves: “The Last Broadcast” (2002)
Willis: “Come Get Some” (2003)
Afterlife: “Simplicity 2000″ (1999)
Essential R&B – Spring 2011 (2011)
Bliss: “Quiet Letters” (2005)
Katy B: “On a Mission” (2011)
Matt Bianco: “The Best of Matt Bianco” (1990)
Astrix: “Artcore” (2004)
Fluke: “Progressive History XXX” (2003)

June 2011

The Mash Up Mix 2008 (2008)
The Mash Up Mix 2009 (2009)

July 2011

Super Breaks Vol 1 (1999)
Adele: “19″ (2008)
Adele: “21″ (2011)
Hed Kandi Serve Chilled: Electronic Summer (2011)
Above & Beyond: “Group Therapy” (2011)
The Mash Up Mix 2007 (2007)
The Mash Up Mix 90s (2010)
Fabriclive 19: Freestylers (2004)
Freestylers: “Raw as F**k” (2004)
Corona: “The Rhythm of the Night” (1995)
Corona: “Y Generation” (2010)
DJ Yoda – Clubber’s Guide to Breakbeat (2004)

August 2011

The Chemical Brothers: “Exit Planet Dust” (1995)
The Chemical Brothers: “Dig Your Own Hole” (1997)
Jamiroquai: “Emergency on Planet Earth” (1993)
Jamiroquai: “Return of the Space Cowboy” (1994)
Jamiroquai: “Travelling Without Moving” (1996)
The Prodigy: “The Fat of the Land” (1997)
Wings: “London Town” (1978)
Paul McCartney: “Ram” (1971)

September 2011

Fraction Records Summer Collection 2011 Part 1 (2011)
Armada Trance Vol 13 (2011)
plus 18 tracks at Juno Download

October 2011

Trance Nation: The Collection (2010)
plus 19 tracks at Juno Download

November 2011

Anjunabeats Volume 9 (2011)
Trance Nation – Rank 1 (2011)
plus 24 tracks at Juno Download

December 2011

Now 77 (2010)
Bliss: “Afterlife” (2005)
Bliss: “No One Build This Moment” (2009)
Banco De Gaia: “Last Train to Lhasa” (1995)
Freestylers: “We Rock Hard” (1998)
Freestylers: “Adventures in Freestyle” (2006)
NRK: 10 (2006)
plus 17 tracks at Juno Download

That’s a lot of music!

Updated on January 1st, 2012 to add the release dates.

Discussion

How much music did you buy in 2011?

"Hot air in the cold air and early morning glow" by Let Ideas Compete

It’s been an interesting year. Next week I’ll be writing a full review of 2011 (at least in terms of my blogs) – for now, here’s a list of my most viewed posts in 2011.

Criteria for this list

I’ve excluded pages – such as the homepage, my About page, My Blogs (which no longer exist), and my Portfolio. There’s a separate list for any popular posts that were published in 2010 and that are still dominating my blog stats – see the end of the post for those.

Popular Posts from 2011

1. LinkedIn Needs To Let Us Opt Out Of Invitation Emails – I’m quite glad this post has done well, but disappointed it doesn’t appear to have changed anything at LinkedIn. It seems like many of you agree that we should be able to opt out when an invite is sent to an email that hasn’t registered with LinkedIn.
2. Fancy drop down menus work a lot better with HoverIntent – Zero comments, but plenty of pageviews. Looking back, this post should have had “WordPress” somewhere in the title so it’s clear what I’m suggesting. This was a brief post but I think it got the point across well.
3. What Makes Google Plus Different? – A timely write-up of a few things relating to Google Plus. Again, no comments on this one unfortunately.
4. Review of Triberr: The Twitter Promotion Powerhouse – I was an early user of Triberr, and this was a summary of my findings. Overall, I was pleased with the volume of comments and retweets that Triberr generated for my posts – despite being some way down the list of most viewed posts, this was one of my most commented posts in 2011.
5. They’re Not All Taken: How to Find a Great Dot Com – A good post, backed up with loads of great comments. This was my most commented post in 2011, thanks to Triberr.
6. The Overlap Between Facebook Subscriptions and Facebook Likes – A strong post; no comments, but plenty of shares.
7. Have Facebook fan pages replaced blog feed subscriptions? – I wrote quite a few social media posts in 2011 – I think this was the first. It set a trend for my blog this year: analysis of social media features, and how they are used. Perhaps this isn’t a bad topic to continue in 2012.
8. No More Alcohol – A rare personal post, this was perhaps my biggest achievement in 2011 and I’m happy to say I have not had any alcohol for the last eight months. Consider that your update

Still popular: Posts from 2010

I published these posts in 2010, and they’re still doing well in my stats.

1. Thanks to Akismet, WordPress isn’t quite as free as it used to be – A snarky post that’s attracted a lot of attention. Not bad considering it was really just a rant.
2. Smart Casual: the perfect dress code? – A quick rundown of my thoughts on “smart casual”. This gets a fair bit of a traffic from Google.
3. Software testing: between edge cases and the critical path – A lengthy rewrite of a post that pre-dates this version of my blog, the post is still doing OK.
4. Why is there always a new version of Java available? – I posted this just before Christmas 2010, so it just missed the 2011 boat. People seem to agree.
5. 10 things every social network needs – A recycled post from a blog that I closed at the start of 2011. Some valid points here.
6. Email, phone, face-to-face: which do you prefer? – A bit of a rant on different communication styles.

Credit

Thanks to Dan from TheWayofTheWeb for giving me the idea. Here’s the Most Read Posts in 2011 at TheWayofTheWeb.

Discussion

What were your most popular posts in 2011?