Every once in a while one needs to make some important observations in order to be able to really progress. I guess it's all part of the great learning experience that life is. It's about change. One can actually change very little. Much less than we think.

Let's start with a metaphore. Just look at XHTML, CSS, web standards and quality web development. One can learn all these techniques and live by them. After this learning experience one can build great websites that excel in beauty, usability, elegance and many other things that seem important to truly dedicated web developers. However... we can't change the web development world as a whole. A lot of people will never see the change, or even value it's importance. A large part of the world won't even take any advantage of the change because they keep using inferior browsers. They'll never see a difference. In fact they might even think nothing at all changed.

The same thing is true for life. Again there's surprisingly little we can change. Some people say 'success is a choice', as if it's up to oneself to be rich, famous, healthy and happy. It's a load of crap usually coming from people who've never had to deal with much trouble to get where they are now. Hard work! Work hard and you'll be rewarded. Another misconception. My uncle worked hard. Very hard. In a factory. Right until his back gave up and he couldn't do a thing anymore. It sure as hell didn't bring him very much except for enough money to survive and... a permanently damaged spinal cord. So screw the hard work thing in an attempt to change things. Some people get lucky, some don't. Life isn't fair. I'm sure people living in the Third World can tell you all about it.

The last couple of weeks have been a hell of a ride. I'm working fulltime on a project, I'm teaching a Linux course and in the background I'm trying to get some deals to kickstart my freelance design and development career. And then there's the personal stuff I won't bug you with. This is all nice and dandy but... one needs to relax at times as well. A great way to relax is watching some quality TV shows. If there's one remarkably great show I've seen in a long while besides the current best show on the planet (Battlestar Galactica) it's got to be Firefly. This TV show is a couple of years old already and until I saw the movie 'Serenity' I had never heard of it.

Now I have... and I just had to share with the world how much this show rocks. So here's a warning in advance: fanboy material ahead! But if you love truly original shows and you haven't heard of Firefly yet you might want to read on. Yes, even if you don't like science fiction all that much...

Christoph Boecken mailed me this weekend to let me know he finished porting my rather popular Typo theme Lush to WordPress. This news made me very happy! Porting the Lush theme to WordPress is something I've always wanted to do but never really got to it because it takes quite an effort to do this right. Christoph has done an exceptional job at porting the theme. Not only did he port the looks of Lush, he also ported all AJAX candy! Live commenting, AJAX comment previews, AJAX live search, it's all there in full WordPress glory. So if you like Lush but you don't want to run Typo, now is your chance to run it on the world's most popular weblog tool of choice!

Head over to Christoph's website and check it out! And Christoph: There was no need to make any apologies anymore but since you did: They're of course accepted. Thanks for doing this great job for the WordPress community! I'm quite sure many people will love you for this!

Update: Since Christoph doesn't have one I thought I'd throw in a demo site so you can see it for yourself!

In my previous posting I promised to join the $10,000 blog challenge by John Scott and explore non A-List weblogs that deserve my readers' attention. This posting marks the beginning of a journey along excellent weblogs you might not know yet because they aren't among the 'big ones'. In the next six months to come I'll try to make at least one 'Exploring the Blogosphere' posting a week. That means we're going to look at a lot of great sites!

The first site to get the honor is Stoyan Stefanov's phpied.com, a most excellent weblog about all things PHP, Javascript, AJAX and other web development related technologies.

Take a look at the interlinking of the top fifty blogs. Take special note of the incest happening within the very top.

The blogger aristocracy can deny it until they are blue in the face, but the fact remains that many in the Technorati Top 100 only link to others in the Technorati Top 100.

I’m not going to name names, but go through the list, take special note of the search related blogs, and the entire lack out outbound linkage. Some blogs in the list contain no outbound links in over 75% of the posts. Isn’t blogging supposed to be about community? How can we have a community that doesn’t link to each other?

John Scott

Now here's an interesting statement. I agree with John wholeheartedly! I've wondered about several blogs in the Technorati top 100 before (what's so great about them and why is everybody linking to them?). It seems I'm not the only one. John makes an interesting proposal in an attempt to crush the 'A-List'. Being the cyber anarchist that I am, I'm game!