2007 is almost over. It's been an interesting and (at least for me) a rather turbulent year. But... it's been a lot better than 2006 in many aspects and I hope 2008 is going to be even better. I have never done this before but I figured it would be nice to do a little summary post looking back at the highlights for 2007 on this blog. I'm also planning a more philosophical 'end of year' post if I find the time to do so but let's start with one about the 'best of 2007' on this blog. In case you missed any of it, this post is your chance to catch up on it!

In the beginning of 2007, the life of yours truly was quite a mess. I was stuck in Sweden, going through some serious hell in my personal life and looking for a new professional challenge. To be really honest, back then I had already started the application process with Yahoo! but since that took a very long time I had to look at all possible opportunities, just in case things wouldn't work out with this application process. Luckily I ended up getting my best job ever as a frontend engineer at Yahoo! in London, UK where I still am today.

Let's have a look at what happened on this blog in 2007

Lots of design

After returning from the US where I met the lovely Pam things started to get better. I left Sweden to temporarily go back to the Netherlands where I waited for the application process at Yahoo! to complete and to regain some much needed energy. Whilst fresh back in Holland I discovered virb.com, a social community which pretty much is a web developers wet dream. Besides doing a big review of virb I also did several profile designs that showcase it's customisation power. In that same post you'll also find some of the other work I did during that time. On top of all that I also launched the all new Eurobands.us for my lovely fiancee. In the meanwhile I got offered a job at Yahoo! and mid April it was finally time to move to the great city of London.

In my first months at Yahoo! I dived into the fine art of client side performance tuning. This even resulted in a pretty nifty Wordpress CSS optimisation plugin which turned out to be pretty useful for a lot of people. It dramatically reduces the CSS payload on any Wordpress powered website.

Photography

Photography is still my most important hobby besides the geekier things I spend time on. I did some photography related stuff on my blog during the summer of 2007. First of all I shot a series of action-packed images at the Red Bull Air Race. I also did my very first series of promotional shots for a band: Animasola from Sweden. During the processing stage of these images I bumped into a great way to simulate analog film grain on digital images and wrote a tutorial about this technique. The comments in this article are highly amusing by the way. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out!

Getting back in the game

When it comes to the volume of articles on my blog, 2007 hasn't been the most active year. However things started to take off more and more during the last half of the year. Quite ironically that's when I decided to leave the 9rules network of which I had been a very proud member for quite a long time.

Then there was the first Yahoo! internal Hack Day I was able to attend. And guess what? I won 'Best of Show' with the team I assembled for this event. Definitely one of my web development related highlights for the year.

While activity on this blog was picking up, spam was too. While I still don't like it very much, switching to moderated comments became a necessity. While comments don't really seem to be dead it does seriously hinder the interaction. Us bloggers versus the spammers: 0 - 1.

As I said before, in the last half of the year I feel I'm seriously getting back in the game of tech blogging. Especially the last month has been pretty great. I wrote a lean & mean JQuery Accordion Menu, improved Google and refactored the javascript of this site using JQuery. I've even been guilty of doing one of those 'top ten' posts. In my case on useful 3rd party apps for your iPod/iPhone.

Getting ready for 2008

What 2008 is going to bring? I don't know yet! Hopefully a lot more blogging and new and exciting professional challenges. I'm diving in head first and we'll see where things are going. I'd like to thank all of you for your valuable comments on my articles and I hope to see you all again in 2008. Have a great New Years Eve and see you all in a brand new year!

All links used in this post

Here's a handy-dandy overview of all posts highlighted in this entry.

• Breaking the Silence (Jan 2007)
• Virb.com: Social networking with style! (Feb 2007)
• Eurobands.us goes live (Apr 2007)
• I've been busy lately - Design Extravaganza (Apr 2007)
• On a quest for ultimate website performance (May 2007)
• WP-CSS-Streamliner: CSS optimization plugin for WordPress (May 2007)
• Red Bull Air Race photos (Jul 2007)
• Realistic film grain for digital photography - a tutorial (Sep 2007)
• Leaving 9rules (Oct 2007)
• It was a good day (Oct 2007)
• Are blog comments dead? (Oct 2007)
• JQuery Accordion Menu (Nov 2007)
• 10 amazingly useful iPod/iPhone third party applications (Dec 2007)
• Improving the world's most visited webpage (Dec 2007)
• To redesign... or to refactor! (Dec 2007)