Ten typographic mistakes everyone makes (link via Lifehacker)

This is part 1 of a series of posts outlining my goals for the year. These are posted in no particular order.

People make resolutions every year, and many are doomed to fail. Last year I wound up not making any concrete resolutions, mostly out of laziness; the previous year, I wrote an überlist.

In lieu of making resolutions or a 108-item list, I decided to set a few goals for myself in 2008. Yes, there is a difference between resolutions and goals. Resolutions are promises you intend to keep; you’ll feel guilty for breaking them. Goals are more flexible; they’re marks to aim for, but not necessarily reach.

One of my goals is to give this site the attention it deserves. I don’t mean by posting more frequently, as I’ve been sustaining that for the last several months. Rather, performing some maintenance I’ve neglected to do in the last couple of years.

November was National Blog Posting Month — NaBloPoMo for short — and it ended a couple of days ago. So, how did I do?

All told, I wrote 38 entries throughout the month. If we were going by averages, that’s just over 1.25 entries per day (38 entries ÷ 30 days = 1.26666… entries/day); but we’re not. The goal was to write just one entry every day and in the last month I missed 8 days. Most of them were Wednesdays (the 7th, 14th and 21st); missed Saturdays came in second (the 10th and 24th); and Sunday, Tuesday and Friday tied for third with one missed day apiece (the 25th, 20th and 30th, respectively). One of those Wednesdays (the 14th) wouldn’t have been missed if I hadn’t neglected to save an entry in advance for it.

Chalk it up to several factors: unusually busy days at the main job; days floating around the Gulf of Mexico without a reliable net connection; plain laziness, and so forth.

Writing is something I like to do, even if my efforts are a bit hackneyed at times. And I imagine that those of you with weblogs of your own like to do the same thing.

That said, I signed up for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) a couple of days ago. The idea was inspired by NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but requires a little less effort in the sense that there are no word counts involved; just one blog post per day, every day, for the month of November.

My goal in this is twofold. First, to write a quality post every day; something that engages my readers (all three of you) and (hopefully) elicits comments. (Not that I’m a comment whore. If I was, I’d be posting nothing but naughty photos of myself… and those wouldn’t be very flattering.) Second, to keep from breaking the chain.

I do have a few entries in the hopper that I haven’t finished yet, including that 100 More Things list I have yet to even start.

It also just occurred to me that I could turn this into a charitable fund raising thing. I’ll have to think that one through, though.

These are my links for 18 Jun:

• Daily Blog Tips - You don?t need to know much about SEO to realize links are the golden road to blog promotion.
• Fluther: Tap the Collective - A new twist on social question and answer sites.
• 25 Web Sites to Watch - The Internet is evolving in new and inventive ways thanks to mashups that pull data from all over the Web and to AJAX-based interfaces that give sites the same degree of interactivity and responsiveness that desktop apps possess.
• The great iPhone hunt of 2007 | CNET News.com - Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently gave free advice to a columnist asking how to get an iPhone when they go on sale: head to an AT&T store, Jobs suggested, rather than Apple’s own retail outlets.
• Mozilla exec calls Apple’s Safari plan ‘duopolistic’ - Mozilla’s chief operating officer, John Lilly, is calling Steve Jobs’ plans for building Safari’s market share “out of date” and “duopolistic.”
• Dell apologizes for remove-this-blog-post-or-else nastygram | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - A blog post at Consumerist.com offering tips on buying from Dell drew a nasty cease-and-desist letter from the company’s attorney and then, in quick succession, a chastened apology from a Dell manager.
• Microwave popcorn warning memo - Unedited memo sent out to City of Seattle employees.
• 15 Best Game Show Hosts - TIME Magazine ranks 15 best game show hosts; Bob Barker comes out on top.

These are my links for 25 May:

• Did Alanis Morissette Get Irony Right?