Exactly 7 years ago, on the 1st of March 2011 I started the colorblindprogramming.com project. Back then I saw this place as a knowledge repository, a playground and a place to improve my writing skills:

This blog exists because I needed a personal place to record my random thoughts. Also, a bit of a playground and a good way to improve my writing skills.
About me page, March 2011

I was aiming to continually improve, or, as the tagline and the video in the first post say, “moving on to better things“.

I just had a look back over the 7 years and 198 posts I am happy to see how I ticked all the 3 boxes:
– knowledge repository: I can clearly see my points of interest changing: web development (Flex, ColdFusion, CakePHP), front-end (jQuery, HTML5), user experience and usability, learning and development, personal projects and, more recently, web security.
– playground – I played with WordPress, CloudFlare or implementing security features like HTTPS, HSTS, CSP or SRI.
– writing skills – I think I am geting getting btter bettr improving 🙂

Overall, I am proud of a few posts, a little embarrassed by some others, but the most important thing was – I kept moving on to better things. And this is what this place is all about.

If you don’t look back at yourself and think, “Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,” then you must not have learned much in the last year.@RayDalio #WorkLife: https://t.co/ZEPV8Wv3Bc pic.twitter.com/xqsIkwsywl

— Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) February 28, 2018

More than 2 years and a half after the first post, it was the time for a visual change. For a long time I wanted to switch to a responsive WordPress theme, and Boston-Theme was exactly what I needed.
The goals for the new theme were:

• responsive
• minimalist
• 2-columns

Now theme is optimized for readability and is waiting for some useful content 🙂 I am only updating this blog now and then, so the Twitter widget in the left side is the part with the most frequent changes.

The before and after screenshots:

There are some parts that I still need to improve:

• the Syntax highlighter – not getting along very well with the theme default code styling
• the images of the existing posts – uploaded at full size, but shown at 558px with links to full size
• the Golden ratio (present in the previous version) is now gone, so I must thing about another geeky, subliminal feature

Update: The flickr widget is now one click away, in the right sandwich menu, while the CloudFlare is running smoothly in the background.

So, you know you want to start a new blog, you bought your domain, set up the hosting and are ready to go. You have a lots of ideas about how your blog will look like, what kind of articles will contain, what friends will be in your blogroll. What’s next?
Here is a quick checklist which you will find useful when setting up your blog.

Image credit: Trey Ratcliff – Morning Fog in Jester

1. The content

• The content is king. You probably know this already: the content is the most important part of your blog. No matter how cool it looks, how many likes you have on facebook – the content is the one that will determine the success or the failure of your blog.
• Bring value. Quality content doesn’t mean rewriting the same idea with other words. If you found an interesting topic somewhere, don’t write a post to duplicate the content. You have twitter for sharing. On your blog you must express your own opinion: be creative, think about the same topic in other ways.
• Know your audience. You need to know what is your target audience and tailor your style accordingly.
• Always spell check your posts. Forgetting or ignoring this is simply unacceptable.

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