I’ve been tagged by Ann Arbor of 3.7designs to talk about the top five reasons I blog. Oh well, normally I don’t play the tagging game, but why not?

Reason 1: I wanted to keep a repository of what I do and feedback I get for it

This is actually how that started. I created a lot of scripts and stuff at onlinetools and got lots of emails (amongst the avalanche of spam) asking for add-ons, reporting bugs and asking me how much a commercial implementation would cost. As my email servers were not the most stable and the spam got very annoying (gmail wasn’t out yet) I started to blog instead.

Reason 2: I am constantly tinkering away with ideas

With new jobs I got less free time and didn’t want to write full scripts any longer but sometimes just jot down a nice thought or a half-baked idea. What better place to use than a blog?

Reason 3: I want to keep people updated of changes I did to products already released

In the past I played with mailing lists and of course these also got spammed quickly enough. Hence a blog with an RSS feed was the best option.

Reason 4: Networking

There is nothing better to connect to other people than having a blog, pinging them and trolling your own stats for links from other blogs. I actually found some colleages to hire that way. Flickr is also a great place for that.

Reason 5: Promotion

Having a blog that gets linked a lot is a great chance to promote your or other people’s stuff. It is just fun to use google as your bookmarks ;-)

These are my reasons. let’s tag others:

• Edward Eliot
• Stuart Colville
• Tim Huegdon
• Tom Croucher
• Mike Davies
• Gez Lemon

[tags]linkmeme,blogging,five reasons why I blog[/tags]

Can we please get a wheelchair person with a very long right arm for a publicity shot?

[tags]accessibility,redesign,building,toilet,wtf[/tags]

In order to test the title and meta information of a lot of web sites, some testers asked me for a simple way to get that information without having to look at the source.

I quickly whipped up a bookmarklet that shows the title and any meta information with a name attribute and their lengths in a dynamically generated “sticky note” overlay.

Simply drag the meta information link on this page to your browser link toolbar to have it for your testing needs.

[tags]bookmarklet,favelet,SEO,search engine optimization,meta tags,titles,testing,tools[/tags]

Just by chance I stumbled over a really cool idea and wiki, namely Make me a speaker. The idea of the wiki is to help people find mentoring and opportunities to give some public speeches about web standards.

The wiki also allows you to share experiences, give tips and connect to other people with the same interest. As the idea is simply great, a lot of known speakers have already signed up to offer help and mentoring, including Molly E. Holzschlag, Jeremy Keith, Derek Featherstone, Andy Clarke and Dave Shea.

Hopefully this site will spawn a new breed of speakers and get some more people come out of the woodwork as I for one would like to see more people talk about their experiences.

The wiki was originally created by Meri Williams, who blogs at Geek | Manager.

[tags]public speaking,make me a speaker,mentoring,presentation tips,web standards[/tags]

Again, a drive to find colleagues to work for the company that pays my rent and outrageous lifestyle:

If you are a web developer based in the Bay Area and you’d like to work for Yahoo! on one of our fastest growing and demanding products, have a go and contact me. We are looking for web developers with very solid knowledge in:

• CSS
• PHP
• semantic HTML
• DOM scripting

If you think you got what it takes, drop me an email or comment here (comments are moderated and don’t show up, so don’t worry about your data – don’t use any links) .

I am in Santa Clara / San Franciso this and next week, and will attend the Flickr birthday party on Saturday.

[tags]Yahoo,job,offer,webdeveloper,santa clara,bay area,san francisco[/tags]