I've spent days perfecting my blog.
Many times.
But sooner or later it starts to look shabby - or just not me - and I want to redesign it all over again. Now I'm in a phase where I can hardly bear to write a blogpost because everything just looks all wrong.
Lately I realised I'm not alone. Ahmed Bilal in Performancing writes about not being so hard on yourself when your motivation dips because of "all the things wrong with it". And White African talking about Blog Envy or "the feeling you get when you go to a blog and start getting those feelings of inadequacy." And I see Nancy highlighting the blogs that inspire her or that she loves.
So, here's the beginning of a list of blogs that in one way or another encourage me to improve my own...
Web2forDev, "Participatory Web for Development", is bi-lingual blog in a relaxed take-it or leave-it way. Things get messy when you design bilingual pages, but this blog is just neat, even with all the feeds, posts, comments and categories in two languages (not translations).
37 days, by Patricia Digh, is full of little corner treats. Everywhere you go or click there's another interesting visual, snippet or saying. She is inspiring with her blogpost titles and the names of her categories. Her straightforward links to "My other sites", making me wonder why I never thought of something so obvious.
Kinkless by Ethan Schoonover has transformed the way I organise my desktop and manage my files and I'll be using his blog for more ideas when I get round to doing my own. He makes things look so simple. Please let that be me.
Webreakstuff, Fred Oliveira's blog on design, development and strategy is one that gives me ideas - even with the blog's pyjama background (sorry!) I look longingly at all the design stuff from Webreakstuff, which is so elegant and how I would love my own things to look.
Victoria Ward's blog, Taste the knowledge, has absolutely no visual or design features. Neither does it have any clever side-bar widgits or whatevers. But her writing itself is so full or visuals and design features, with nests of metaphors and analysis that I aspire to be able to do myself. In fact she makes me wonder if I should forget the visual aspect of my blog and just focus on the writing.
Excellent list. I hadn't found the 37 Days site before, so thanks for that link as well!
Posted by: Hash | Monday, August 27, 2007 at 08:27 PM