As most of you will know, I'm Dutch and as everyone of you will know, I'm running a tech blog. I was just thinking about the amount of blogs I know that share these characteristics with me. Being Dutch and blogging about technology, design and internet issues in general. I also like to think my blog is a quality one (har! har!) so let's add that to the list of criteria. I guess this posting is mainly for my Dutch audience when it comes to commenting but it could be nice for the English speaking bunch as well when it comes to discovering nice new blogs. So here goes:

What blogs do you know that are:

• about technology / design / internet
• run by (a) Dutch blogger(s)
• of high quality

It doesn't matter whether the blog is in Dutch or in English. I myself choose to blog in English to reach a larger audience but it's fine to list blogs that meet the above criteria that are written in Dutch.

I'll kick off with a few good ones I know myself:

• Anne van Kesteren (en)
• FrankWatching (nl)
• Faruk Ateş (en)
• Dutch Celt (en)
• Peter-Paul Koch's 'quirksmode'

There's gotta be more of 'em. Let's hear it!

What are your plans? Let's hear it!

2005 has been quite a year. It's been a year of ups and downs in my personal life and I'm happy with the fact that I can honestly say things look very good for 2006 at this point. When it comes to my professional activities (which include this weblog) the year 2005 has brought me many good things. I've accquired an enormous amount of new knowledge in the field of design and development and this weblog has grown from a virtually 'non-existent' little place on the web into a respected weblog with an ever growing amount of visitors and RSS subscribers.

Of course that's all nice and dandy but it doesn't mean I plan to sit back and relax in 2006. I guess that makes this rainy second day of Christmas a good day to write down some plans for the year 2006!

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Just before I'll dive into the christmas days I finished a special christmas present for all of you Pivot webloggers: The Pivot Live Archive Explorer. With this new Pivot plugin your visitors will be able to browse your archives in true Web 2.0 style with some nifty AJAX love! Of course an example says more than a thousand words which is why you're invited to try out my Archive Explorer page to see what this plugin can do.

The Plugin is powered by Backbase community edition. As far as I know it might very well be the first Backbase powered weblog plugin. The code is fairly clean and I've done some nice testing with Simon to iron out some last wrinkles. Like with any first release however there might be some loose ends here and there.

In the near future (when the Pivot version is completely finalized) I plan to release a WordPress version of this plugin as well. Stay tuned for that on my WordPress blog

last updated: 03-01-2006. current version: 1.0 beta 3

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If you've been experimenting with AJAX techniques you'll probably know the name Backbase unless you've been living under a rock. Backbase is an innovative company from Amsterdam offering the most advanced Ajax framework on the planet. Besides being highly advanced, Backbase is also impressively feature complete and very well documented. Just about any gui component you can think of is available for use in fully AJAX savy web applications. Since Backbase Community Edition is a pure Javascript solution you can use any programming language you like with it.

Probably a bit less well-known is the fact that Backbase is offering it's full client edition at no charge at all for non-commercial applications. That's right, it's free, as long as you don't earn any money with your software or website. In case you do you're required to purchase a license. This means most bloggers like me can do interesting things with it such as spicing up their weblogs. This is exactly what I'm doing as a first experiment with Backbase.

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Despite the enormous odds that exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation that devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man. Harold Pinter in his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature

Political rants are rare on this weblog, but sometimes I need to get something off my chest. That good fellow Harold Pinter really got me thinking.

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Today the results of the Typo theme contest came in. I must honestly admit they hit me like a slap in the face. Big time. Lush, my entry ended at a very disappointing 8th place. I've been staring at the final results for at least 15 minutes before it really got to me: My serious shot at a top 3 position was a total, utter failure. This unglorious defeat got me thinking about some things. Besides being a developer I've always liked to call myself a designer as well. But... am I really?

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My bank recently came with a really kick ass idea. Customers get the unique opportunity to design their own bank card! You can send in any design you want to create and receive a working bank card with your design on it. Does that rock or what? They're offering iPod Nano's for the design of the week and a Vespa scooter for the best card of them all. I'll be pimpin' mine next week for sure!

Typo is probably the newest kid on the block in the blogosphere when it comes to the tools that enable us to run our little weblogs. Powered by Ruby on Rails and packed with fancy AJAX goodies it sure is the most buzz compliant weblog software one can possibly get. After playing around with it for over a month I must admit I kinda like Typo. Even though it's still young and even though it doesn't have the rich feature-set and plugin community that other tools such as WordPress, Movable Type or Pivot have it looks like a rather promising little blog engine. If you're a regular reader of this weblog you'll know I've been very busy creating a theme for Typo last month because a powerbook and an ibook were up for grabs in the Typo theme contest. At the moment of writing I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for the final verdict of the jury.

What I do know already is that my submission Lush received a fair amount of positive comments. I've seen it in use on quite a lot of Typo powered weblogs already which tells me I at least succeeded in providing something nice for a part of the Typo community. This week I was invited by Piers Cawley, a member of the Typo community, to write an essay on the process of creating a theme for Typo. I figured this would be a nice subject for a new weblog posting which is why I accepted and which is why you're reading this posting. So here we go. Let's have a look at what it takes to create a cutting edge theme for Typo.

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Being quite an avid gamer I've been looking forward to the launch of Microsoft's new xbox360. It looks like they've delivered a fine piece of hardware able to crank out more polygons per seconds than many expensive PC's people may have. A harddrive, a triple core G5 CPU, plenty of RAM and excellent graphics hardware will surely manage to impress a lot of gamers. Apart from being too late to get one immediately because I didn't sign up for a preorder I do however wonder why I should bother at all at this time. The 360 sure as hell has very impressive specifications. But is that all it takes to be a truly ‘next generation console'?’ (continue reading...)

I'm starting to get that tickling, itchy feeling again. It's been quite a while since I last touched the design of this weblog. In fact I'm still quite happy with it. But, like everything in this world, there's room for improvement. Therefore I'm planning a 'realign'. And I really mean a realign because I still love the overall look of this blog. Whatever I'll come up with, the (in my humble opinion) quite unique feel of what it is now will be preserved. At some point I may totally revamp the site but I didn't quite get bored with what I have now yet. So what's next? I guess a little call for help might bring in some inspiration.

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