Vos Virtual Network

Posts Tagged ‘blogs’

Internet marketing slides from today’s HubSpot webinar about Inbound Marketing.

How to combine SEO, blogging, and social media for powerful marketing results.

Reading for personal growth and professional development -  While writing in my architectural journal, I started down the path of trying to describe my personal reading program for professional development. I documented some of the most important magazines (Byte Magazine was on my essential reading list — 25 years ago), books and blogs for a computer systems architect. That got me wondering about what books or blogs I was missing out on. Was I missing something really important? To be a great computer systems architect, one needs to read great books, magazines, and blogs — and go to great conferences — and keep learning every day. So I kept wondering… Was there something missing from my essential reading list?  I started asking a few friends about their essential reading list. Uh-oohhh…  Some friends don’t really read much… (maybe they learn more by attending conferences, etc.) and the ones that do read,  might be on a different career path, so they have different professional development goals.

Context is Everything – For architects, computer programmers, lawyers, philosophers, and theologians – context is everything. The essential reading list for a lawyer is different from the essential reading list of an architect, physician or pastor.  I’m also searching for common themes, and patterns to reuse…

Is there a book (or a blog) that should be essential reading for architects (who build large buildings)  — and for computer architects (who build large computer systems)? I think there might be… and I’m getting to that… hang on a minute…. Are there books and blogs that every designer should read, whether they are designing websites, bikes, book covers, or baby-clothes?

The quest for the best – There are a lot of dead end streets on this quest. For instance, sometimes you find a really cool blog, but alas — the blogger quits blogging. Example: Loosely Coupled – a great blog for software developers and systems architects (covering SOA) – but the last entry appears to be from May 2006.

So, I sent emails to a few friends, saying:

What do you consider essential reading each day, each week, each
month? Books, journals, magazine, blogs?
What technical journals to read each month?
What do you read that keeps you going and growing?
I’m interested in your thoughts.

So, that’s the long contextual explanation as to why I’m building an essential reading list for various professions. Then I want to see if there are common themes — books, magazines, journals, and blogs that are considered essential reading by a lot of people from various backgrounds and professions.

So here’s a few books and blogs that my friends suggested, and guess what? Some of them were already on my blog roll, or books that I’ve read. This is not the distilled list of essential reading… yet… but here are some suggestions that are coming in from my initial survey of computer geeks and web designers…  not a comprehensive survey… (It’s kind of a list from A to Z – with the middle part still missing).

Suggested blogs:

1. 456 Berea Street – A blog by Roger Johansson. A Swedish web professional who has been working with the web and other interactive media since 1994.
2. AlertBox – Jakob Nielsen’s Newsletter on Web Usability
3. A List Apart – A List Apart Magazine (ISSN: 1534-0295) explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
4. Authentic Boredom – A blog by web designer Cameron Moll.
5. UXMag – The User Experience Magazine – Elevating user experience one article at a time.
6. Zeldman – Online since May 1995, “Jeffrey Zeldman Presents” is the personal site of designer, writer, and web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman was one of the first designers, bloggers, and independent publishers on the web, and one of the first web design teachers. We’ve mentioned (and reviewed his best selling book), Designing With Web Standards, several times before.

To be continued…

60 second video explains how to use Google Reader to find and subscribe to the news feeds you like. You can also publish your favorite news-feeds for your friends (or the whole world) to enjoy.

Sometime in the past several weeks, I totally lost my blog roll. How long were they missing? A couple weeks maybe? But everything else was OK, or so it appeared…

A total blogging bummer…

So, I have to find a backup of my old blog, and re-create it, and find all you wonderful people again. I say I lost my blog roll — really not sure when — sometime during the past several weeks, because I’m not sure when it happened, or why it happened, but a lot has been happening. I recently moved my website and this blog to a new hosting company. I think everything was OK then. Then I backed up my hard-drive on my PC and downgraded my PC from Vista back to Windows-XP pro. I think everything was OK then, however, I did backup all my old backups to DVD and CD’s before downgrading to Windows-XP. And Windows-XP is running much nicer than Vista was. (Vista really sucks on an Intel box with only 1GB of RAM.)

So anyway, might need to dig through a box of CDs or DVDs to find an old backup of a backup.

But then I also upgraded from WordPress 2.2 to WordPress 2.3 and finally to WordPress 2.5, and also tried out a few new plugins, and everytime I always tried to make backups before I installed a new plugin, or a new theme… but like I said I need to look through the box of backups of the backups… or could it be the WordPress Import/Export feature that bit me.

You might recall that I wrote a few articles about Managing Your Blogroll, and Refactoring Your Blogroll, and now it looks like I wrote an article about Losing and Recovering your blogroll.

Man, I really miss my old blog roll. If you are out there, I am looking for you … again.

Update (6:00PM Saturday night) – I did find a February 2008 backup of an SQL dump that contains my total blogroll – assembled from 2006 to 2008, so no one is missing — and I’m adding those blog links back on my blogroll.

As long as I’m restoring and refactoring my blogroll, I’ll compare it to the list at WebLog Tool Collection called The 25 Most Valuable Blogs, and see if I should add anything new to my list.