The Whitehawk

Even though I claimed that I would be back in action, the past few weeks have been a bit too tiresome for me. It’s not that I haven’t had the time to write some articles, but between studying for exams, and writting for ForeverGeek, there is little room left for creativity or will to write.

I intend to change that, very soon. Therefore, starting from tomorrow onwards, I will resume the work I made on the next version of this website and from hereon, instead of discussing Anime or Manga I shall be making a sort of “designer’s journal” on the work being implemented.

Unlike my friend Bryan from AvalonStar (currently down) who was doing a live redesign, I will be posting bits and pieces of work. And try to explain the reasoning behind it. I will also be sharing my work with the friendly folks from 9rules, who already gave me some pointers that helped out in the early stages.

So look forward to that. Tomorrow I shall be posting the very first piece of the design, and hopefully you might help me overcome some design blocks that I will eventually stumble upon.

Over the years I’ve had about a dozen homepages/blogs but for the very first time, I’ve reached 10.000 visitors on a homepage since this one’s “foundation” in September of 2005. Although that’s not an amazing feature, given the time the blog’s age, it gives me a certain feeling of accomplishment.

When I made my very first homepage, I got really excited when I finally got 100 visitors, even though the counter tracked my own visits. And now I’m finally jumping into the thousands mark.

Hopefully, the 20.000th visitor will arrive before 2008 ends. And hopefully one day I’ll be able to surpass my girlfriend’s Cross Stitching blog’s visits

Yesterday, the Nintendo Wii was released in Europe, and since I had reserved one, I was (thankfully) able to pick one up from the only FNAC in Madeira. When I got home, I started playing right away, and even got my mother to play it a bit (unfortunately, only the consoles arrived, no Games nor peripherals arrived yet). I thought that those moments would be some of the best, if not the best, this Christmas.

Today when I turned on my laptop, and saw a message from David Peralty popping up and saying “CONGRATS ON THE 9rules ENTRY” I couldn’t believe my eyes! I rushed as fast as I could to their network blog and there it was, The Whitehawk is in. And now I have no doubts, this is certainly the best, and most surprising, Christmas gift so far!

Now I have the arduous task of choosing two categories to put this blog in… and I’m not sure about what to choose. But all in all, I guess that I’ll choose “Anime”, since it’s one of the things I’m certain that I’ll continue about. The second category will be “Personal”. Even though I like writing about technology, most of the things I put in this blog are opinionated, therefore, I think that’s the second category that suits it best.
Technology is probably one of the categories that gives me the most “leeway” since I can write about anything slightly related to it. Hopefully, I’ll finish Version 2.0 before the end of this year
and try to focus a bit more on those categories. But for all visitors, be advised that this blog will be mostly about myself.

If you look just below the blog’s title, in very light blue (yes, I know, terrible contrast), this blog is about: Marco Jardim’s and thoughts and hobbies: exposed.

And now, even though it’s not even 11am yet, I’m going out to celebrate!

When I was submitting this blog for 9rules’ latest submission round a curious question popped up when I was seeing which categories this blog should belong to. So which one is it?

I think that the categories I entered at the time were “Personal”, “Anime” and “Technology”, but are they all correct? Don’t get me wrong, I love to write about all those things, but does this blog really fit any of those categories? I think that I’m missing a general theme for this blog, or at least a tag line that can help people identify what this blog is about.

With this in mind, I decided to edit the almost invisible tag line of this blog from “Griffith’s Blog” to:

Marco Jardim and hobbies: exposed

Though right now the tag line is very irrelevant it made me realize how little I payed attention to one of the important aspects of this site and how “slim” some of the categories I created are. I think that in the beginning I got carried away making too many of them and now there are some subjects I can’t write about as much. Maybe I’ll separate the content and create two separate blogs, maybe not. But from here forward I will try to push this blog in a single direction, instead separate ones.

I can’t be a “Jack of all trades” if I want to distinguish myself from other bloggers.

Over the past couple of days, this blog has been getting quite a few references. First it was David Cubed, who then found the idea interesting enough to bring to BloggingPro and I guess that from there, Aron Putra from Weekly Weblog discovered this blog and invited me to exchange links with him. Unfortunately, due to the similarities between his blog and BloggingPro I had to refuse the invitation.

Though the article has nothing special about it, nor did it propel me to blogging “star-hood” or anything similar, it did (somehow) help me raise over 100 positions in blogtopsites.com and also helped to get my name across to some of the better known bloggers out there.

I can no longer remain in animosity much longer, because my visits are slowly rising again, and who knows when or where they will stop (rising). I’d like to thank you all who just started visiting this blog and I hope that I can continue to provide, and improve, my articles.

I was looking at the browser share chart for my blog’s visits today and I noticed that Firefox and Internet Explorer have almost exactly the same share. Which make the two of them combined look exactly like a Pacman Pie Chart. In case you’re wondering what a Pacman pie-chart is, here are the two charts, the browser share, and the Pacman chart side by side:

The left chart has Internet Explorer 6 & 7 in blue (the smaller share is IE7), and the yellow share is Firefox 2.0 and 1.5 (2.0 is the slightly smaller share).

Taking the comedy aside, it’s surprising how many people have already adopted Firefox 2.0 compared to the share of people that have adopted Internet Explorer 7, and they both came out at around the same time.

I guess it shows that most people that use Internet Explorer 6 don’t bother, or can’t, update their software as frequently the Firefox users. At least in the case of my blog visitors.

[tags]Pacman Chart, Pacman, Browser Share[/tags]

I recently submitted my blog for the 9rules network for the Anime, or Technology, or Personal, Communities. I must be out of my mind for doing this, but as friend of mine said: I have nothing to lose.

In case it happens to be Scrivs checking out this blog, I’d like to give a shout out to him and wish him, and the network, the best of luck. I don’t know if you readers are aware of this, but he was the person who gave me the first opportunity to start blogging professionally in ForeverGeek, a long time ago when he owned it.

If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be blogging today.

So thanks Scrivs, and best of luck with the “evaluation”

As of last month, the domain thewhitehawk.net no longer belongs to me. Turns out I was tricked or misinformed about how I should pay for the domain, and now I’m required to pay 80$ if I want to retrieve back the domain from my webhost, therefore, it’s unclear to me how longer they will allow me to use it.

It could be a month, a week, it could even be the whole year, but I honestly have no idea when. Their tech support, though always polite, helped me very little in the situation, and quite honestly, it felt like I was talking to an automated machine rather than a person who could really understand the situation.

Compared to the repair process I had to take with my Sony laptop, in which the lady that assisted me was really helpful and nice and took care of “me” from day one to the day of it’s return, I can only compare my webhost’s technical assistants to an:

A few days when I went to check out my statistics they felt like a slap in the face. During February my visits dropped to the visits I had during October. This means that I’ve probably lost some readers which is a shame really but also a good reminder that I need to blog more, and with more quality, if I even want to keep this site up.

Hopefully, this month I’ll be able to almost equal January’s visits, but more importantly, I must try to gain back some returning visitors since that number also dropped to almost none at all.

I installed the latest version of Wordpress today and… well, besides a few graphic glitches on the admin tool that were fixed I couldn’t find anything else, although I’m pretty sure that someone’s blogging about it and how great it is compared to the last version.

It’s a security release any way so I guess I shouldn’t be expecting anything else. But I’ll be sure to mention any nice new things I find out when I have more time to “play” with it.

The WYSIWYG editor still isn’t compatible with the google toolbar spellchecker, so I won’t be using it so soon.