Just a small rant here really to get something off my chest I've been wondering about lately. The issue I'm trying to address seems to be especially true for design related blogs but I see it everywhere really: top 10 posts and list-posts. With list-posts I mean posts that don't have some sort of top ranking but simply list something like '50 awesome porn themed photoshop brushes'. Honestly... is this all bloggers can come up with lately? Or worse: Is this all people want to read lately?

I'm starting to suspect it may actually be the latter. I noticed that when I write 'big articles' they seem to get less attention than they used to get one or two years ago. They definitely attract a lot less comments than they used to. Does this mean people are so busy these days that they cannot take 10 minutes to read an article? Does it mean all people want is bite-sized chunks of ready-to-digest information without having to think about what it is they're reading? I don't really get it. Maybe this is a great time for bloggers to post a 'Top 10 of brain farts I pulled out of my arse in the past 4 years' in which they link to the good articles they wrote during that time. Chances are though that nobody is actually gonna click any of the posted links but at least the top 10 list may make it to Digg. Yay! Traffic!

Look, I'm not saying I've never posted a top 10. I have. But only very few. I did find that they tend to attract traffic like a 3 days old pile of dog excretions attracts flies. Writing such a post takes little to no effort because all you need to do is find a bunch of links. I'm not gonna turn this blog into an endless stream of top 10 posts or lists of awesome resources posts. I'm not doing it, no matter how much traffic it may attract.

So what do you all think? Are people really so A.D.D. these days that all they can digest is 10 items in a bulleted list?

You tell me!

Here's a little PHP code snippet that allows you to create your very own Twitter image badge with your latest tweet. You may have seen this functionality on twitstamp.com. This service however doesn't (yet) feature custom badges with your own image, font and colors and some people rather host things themselves than using a hosted service. In my case the main reason to create this bit of code was the fact that I wanted a stylish looking Twitter badge on MySpace, both for myself and for Pam. MySpace and many other services don't allow any Javascript to be used by users which is why they have to revert to ugly 'applications' or flash based badges. These hardly pass the verdict of the style police which is why I wanted something better.

During some online discussion with Ben about the pros and cons of the new MySpace customization Facebook inevitably entered the discussion. It reminded me of how much I dislike Facebook and I figured why not write a small blog about it. Facebook fans: Bring on the flames!

Facebook. Why do people like it? I can honestly say I never did and my dislike for Facebook seems to be growing every time it comes in the news either with new 'features' or because of their latest mess related to privacy or content ownership. So why do I NOT like it? Here's five main reasons.

Like I wrote in my previous post I've recently built two MySpace profiles, one for bookalicio.us and one for myself. These profiles were built with the new Profile 2.0 features that MySpace rolled out late 2008. While I was overall quite happy with what's possible in terms of profile customization and design I've identified several weak spots that I think can be improved fairly easily.

Obviously these improvements are of little use to 'joe user' who just wants to 'pimp his profile'. However for professional web developers and especially those who create commercial templates and / or free templates for everyone to use these things would both make life a lot easier and allow for even more awesomeness in MySpace profile creation. So here's my suggestions to the MySpace staff!

In the past few evenings I've been building ... [cough] a MySpace profile. The profile is intended to be a social media promo companion to Pam's bookalicio.us which we're currently pimping like there's no tomorrow. This whole pimping endeavor is an interesting adventure of it's own about which I'll probably write later once we've gotten it to where we want it to be. I never thought I'd EVER blog about MySpace to be honest. However since I got a fair amount of attention for this profile on Twitter I figured it may be an idea to blog about this.