Foreign Perspectives

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Sometimes it seems like everyone who’s ever designed a website needs to run up a blog to write about it.

Most of the time they tend to fizzle out though or change topics so that they end up being a general blog rather than sticking to their original niche. One design blog does seem to be making something of a point of avoiding that degeneration through collecting rather meaty articles (also a pleasant change from the normal design blogs which generally end up having very short articles) and that’s Stylish (a very popular word to use these days).

What do I mean by “meaty” articles. Well, consider their recent one about the user accounts in Vista. That one is written mainly for techies as it goes on for quite a bit about a facility that you shouldn’t be disabling although, to be fair, many people would like to disable it. Why shouldn’t you disable it? Well, all those annoying little messages that Vista pops up about such and such an application wanting to run are there so that when a malicious piece of software gets installed on your PC, it too will have to ask.

Similarly with a high information content yet perhaps not so accessible as it might be is their article on the spyware community. Yes, it’s useful information to have, but I’d have liked to have had a paragraph saying why it was useful information for you to have and on the whole that’s the problem with this blog: they have a whole lot of really useful information in it but could do with adding a paragraph to each post saying what the information is for.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Whilst there seems to be a vast number of Wordpress themes around in reality many of them are simple variations of a single theme.

Consider for example the theme I’m developing over at SevaTeem. I’ve started using early versions of it on various blogs to see how it flies. If you didn’t know that, you might think that the theme at A Time of Magic was completely different but in fact the only differences from that currently on SevaTeem are that the text is white instead of black and the background is different.

All being well, I’ll be releasing the theme to the world in a few weeks time so you’ll be able to play around with it yourself and perhaps create variants that even I wouldn’t recognise.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Up until quite recently your choice was between paying $5 or so a month for a web hosting service or running with one that plastered adverts all over your site.

No longer. Take for instance PinkPaper. You get a quite respectable 300MB webspace (more than enough for many commercial sites and lots more than most individuals need), 10GB/month bandwidth (you’d need a lot of traffic to use that up), five addon domains (more than many paid for services offer) and all the usual stuff like MySQL databases and so on.

If you’re debating whether to go down the freebie blog route with something like blogger.com, this is a much better way to do. Your only cost would be $10/year to register a domain and you’d get a personal POP e-mail mailbox too.

Popularity: 15% [?]