wayne on August 9, 2008 

It's been a while since I've done my Saturday, start of the week recap of the prior week.  It's been nice to finally feel a little relief from my own self-imposed pressure to post every day.  I do that a lot to myself, and enjoy keeping the pressure on me to do more, achieve more, learn more and have fun the entire time.

I think at this point I'm pretty settled into the new design, and have received nothing but positive feedback on the new look and feel.  Thanks go to everyone that gave me some feedback on that.  I always find it nice to hear what others think.  After all, I know I don't have all the answers, and even the ones I do have may not always be the right ones. 

Lessons Learned

I thought I would share a few things I've learned over the past couple weeks.

1. Keep a record of all your 'non-default' blog items.  All those widgets and badges that you've collected over the days/weeks/years, what would happen if you had to start all over?  Our friend Gary is going through this right now unfortunately, and I know the frustration all too well.  When I switched themes, I forgot about all those little doo-dads that make my site mine. 
2. There is such a thing as over-helping.  Even though some may say 'nah, you're over-thinking it', I feel partly responsible for Gary's issues.  It was my posts that ultimately led to his frustration.  Of course curiosity can do some pretty bad things to you, again, I know this all too well.  The issues Gary has had has made me take a step back and assess how my posts could help to prevent that from happening to anyone else.  As a web developer and a friend, I was absolutely mortified when I had heard what happened.  No matter how valuable the lesson may be, I'd prefer they didn't come from imposed hardship.
3. Keywords - Yes, taking a step away from the pseudo positive/negatives of the first two, I've found that if you type in 'blogger.com help' I come up in the number 5 position.  The spots above that are all for Blogger itself.  If it goes any higher than #5, I'll be quite impressed.  This led me to think about keywords and how I'm using them.  All this time I could give a rats ass about any of that.  However, given my goals for waynejohn.com, I need to start looking at how I use keywords a little better, and start to target certain phrases.
4. I work too much - I routinely go! go! go! all the time.  I've been doing this for a number of years now, striving to constantly teach myself new things.  This isn't going to stop, but I need to keep reminding myself that 'all work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy'.  I enjoy it too much to stop, but I'll just keep reminding myself anyway.  Thanks for suffering through the last paragraph with me.

Not the longest list of lessons learned, and I know I'm missing many more.  And that is also another lesson for me I guess.  With all the news, tidbits, people, friends, visitors, comments, sites, social circles, work, traffic, music and all-around life, there are so many things that fall through the cracks.  How can one ever capture these things to remember when you are writing a post?  Notes.  I need to take more notes.

What lessons do you think I should keep in mind?  Be blunt, tell me things like they are.  Are you seeing something I may not?  I'll never know unless I find it eventually, or someone just cuts to the chase and lets me know.

I'm staring into another busy weekend with non-stop coding and sitting behind the computer again.  Why do I love doing this sooo much?

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