The Future of Binh dot Name

January 23, 2008

I've been busy these few days and haven't post as many useful posts as I should. My apologies for that. I would like to restate a few reasons here and I hope to receive your suggestions. The reasons are:

1. This blog is being redesigned.
2. New sub domains or domains are coming up.
3. The URL structure is not finalized.

If you are kind-hearted, knowledgeable and give me suggestions, I will have rewards for you too. Don't worry, the minimum I could give you are some good keyword back links to your site from my PR3 blog. I'm not rich now so my pocket money is limited. I can make some nice award if what you give change my life.

1. This blog is being redesigned

Everyone who read my blog should know by now that this blog is under re-construction. The design work is totally delegated to Brain Purkiss from PlainBeta.com . For some reasons Brian has not responded to my email for a week already. Brian, if you are reading this I hope that's because you have commitment with college, not because you gave up on my hard requirements .

Brian gave me a sketch 9 days ago. I asked him if I could write a blog post and publish it. He said no. I respect his choice so until his Photoshop file is available I won't publish his progress. What I can say for now is that I like what it look in the sketch.

I hope Brian can code that before this end of month otherwise I will be in big trouble. I don't want to promote my blog only to see people visit it once and run away because it's ugly.

2. New sub domains or domains are coming up

Yes, I might have to buy new domains for each blog. I have a few passions and I want to make separate blog for each. Here I discuss about them.

1. Photos
2. Blogging
3. Web development
4. Computers
5. My life

2.1 Photos

I have too many photos waiting for upload. I have like over 10,000 photos for 2007 and few hundred for the past. I may keep it at photos.binh.name. However I might buy a new domain for that because that's a huge amount of photos and I need proper gallery software. Who would be kind enough to suggest me a perfect photo host and a perfect photo CMS?

Can anyone tell me their favorite photo hosting site? Flickr.com is out of my reach because apparently my ISP blocks it.

2.2 Blogging

I realized that not everyone is a pro blogger. And I realize not a single blog provide everything from A-Z to blogging. And I'm willing to take the challenge to make a blogging site/blog that help people from A-Z. If you want to contribute to my site than I will buy a new domain just for that. Otherwise I keep it at blogging.binh.name . the topics will range from high-technical approach for developers to money making.

2.3 Web development

Another word is Web Design but that's totally incorrect. I'm not a web designer, because that only involve in graphic and layout. I'm a developer from code to layout so I will talk about bottom to top. Especially I'm a SEO oriented developer so my service should be of somewhat unique.

I stumbled a lot of web design company who only provide you with beautiful website but absolutely no visitors at all. I admit I hate that and I would call them b..stards. For instant, I recently visit this of a new Facebook friend's work website Bella Sewing. The design company who did the site surely is some newbie who tried to make big some of money. Web design job for local companies always pay high. Look at that site and I wanted to vomit. He made at least 4 SEO mistakes that I will need to talk about in a separate post.

Brian suggested me to use web.binh.name for this blog and I think that might work. What is your own opinion on this?

While I will write a lot about stuffs like Webpage layout, website structure, ad placement, etc., etc. I might focus more on web programming aspect. I will keep it for broader adience by making use of least technical terms possible.

Does anyone suggest me to write those type of article in another web development site instead? Which is already well established and have many developers as audience and contributers? Like the codeproject.com?

2.5 Computers

I think so far only my Australian friends and my ex-bosses know and accept the fact that I'm a computer expert. I use the term expert and got a few very critism from fellows on Google AdSense Group. Which lead me to think ... what the heck, if I'm not an expert than are you? No, I'm not claiming I'm a better at computers than those guys.

Enough chatter about this topic. I want to emphasize it here because during the period of 7 years studying IT in Australia I was working part time as computer service technician. The term if you don't understand than let me explain, I repaired computers. People who suffer from hard-disk breakdown, graphic card not working, virus, too-slow, dead computer, software error, etc. etc. I have dealt with thousands of those cases. Sometimes I get things done in just 5 minutes, sometimes it take a day and cause me big headache.

Working as a technician was very fun experience and perhaps one of the most useful experience any IT student could get. I can tweak my computer at ease. I use the most useful software. I'm expert in detecting virus without any software.

Of course I won't write about what I did in the past. Instead I will confine them into useful articles and public on my website. My experience can't be described in this one blog post and if you seriously want to learn those real work experiences, you should subscribe to my computers feed as soon as it is out. For now here are some sample: computers tips.

Do you think computers.binh.name or computing.binh.name are good addresses? Should I choose a shorter address. I think I might make a separate domain for this purpose too? What do you recommend?

2.5 My life

Last but not least, I need to write about my personal life, too. I found out I'm very eager in writing about my love life, my travel, my everything so that I can make new friends online and keep my old friends and family members updated.

Who on Facebook would want to read my blog if the first time he visits he sees I'm talking about how to measure webpage's size? Wouldn't they be more interested in knowing what I did since I was a kid to find out our comment interest? Wouldn't they want to see my nice photos, cute dogs, scary snakes, big bears and sometimes my secrets?

What do you think? If what I think is true I definitely need to keep this www.binh.name my personal blog because that's what the domain says. Brian suggest me to put life.binh.name as the subdomain. What do you think about this? If that's the case I thinks diary.binh.name or memories.binh.name might work but they seem to bee too long to type. Of course I'm not going to buy a new domain for my personal blog, that's out of question.

3. The URL structure is not finalized

Uh! I'm feeling ashamed of myself for talking about this URL decision again.

Many bloggers have stripped of the yyyy/mm/dd prefix format for their posts. That works very well because the post look unrelated to time and shorter. I didn't use that because I thought my posts will be blog post and time dependent.

For my personal blog I might keep that date. But for my other 4 professional blogs I think I will strip that out. On the professional blogs I want to write articles not posts. Then that consideration make me think, why not make websites instead of blogs then?

In a comment on Why you should be using a framework, I said WordPress is giving me hard time and I'm considering getting rid of it. The current Category structure makes me feel too limited. I want to write some nice words to describe my categories, not just "Archive for "whatever' category". There are many more issues and I will write another post in relation to this later on.

What's next?

If you are new here, than I guess here is what you should read to learn about my Major Blog Building Considerations. That should give you some extra info about why I am writing this post.

I know this post is rather long. If you read it till this point please also give me some opinions. I will really appreciate your help because this stage is like the bridge to my new level of blogging.

Also... I didn't have enough time to fix my grammer and spelling. If you spot out any mistake please inform me with a comment and I will fix it. Thanks.

Tags: Binh, binh.name, blogger, Blogging, decision, dog, google, keyword, photoshop, SEO, software, url, Web design, Work, WP, writing

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