Blog on Dan Goldin

Blog posts are now tagged

Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Turns out that tagging and categorizing blog posts is more difficult than I thought. I start with one set of tags but as I go through my posts I realize that my initial set of tags no longer make sense and I need to restart. The challenge is finding the set of tags that are specific enough to categorize a single post yet general enough that they can be applied to other ones. I haven’t found the perfect set of tags yet but did manage to go through and tag each of my posts. Over time I hope to improve the tag taxonomy and update the existing posts. I’d love to hear suggestions on how to effectively organize my posts and examples of other blogs that are doing this well.

Why I manage my own blog

Sun, 02 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Given the recent news of Medium raising $25M and Svbtle opening up to the public I thought it would be an appropriate time to explain why I’m not using either of them. They’re both simple, clean products that allow writers to concentrate on their writing rather than configuring the dozens of options available in other blogging platforms. They’ve also done a great job with the typography that makes the content enjoyable to read. Compared to the other content websites out there, they’re incredible fast - they have a minimal structure and don’t load a ton of external content - especially when compared to the major publishers out there now such as the news sites and the social networks.

2013 blog stats

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Now that I actually have over 100 posts for the year I can actually follow the trend and highlight the most popular ones as well as share some data from my Google Analytics account. This is the first year I’ve seriously committed to blogging and didn’t think I’d enjoy it as much as I did. I will continue to write at least twice a week in 2014 so it will be interesting to see how next year’s data compares against the data from 2013. Thanks for reading and definitely let me know if you have any topics you want me to write about.

Blog analytics (blogolytics?)

Tue, 26 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Every time I launch a new website one of the first things I do is add Google Analytics to start gathering data. This blog was no different but I’ve recently been wondering whether Google Analytics is the right way to measure a blog. It’s great for tracking the total number of visitors, where they’re coming from, and how long they’re staying but I wish there was something that was optimized for blogs rather than something that was designed as a general solution.

Blog updates since November

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In November, I migrated my Tumblr and Wordpress blogs over to GitHub pages and have been making a few tweaks here and there. I started with the awesome Jekyll-Bootstrap library but wanted to share the changes I’ve made. It’s all hosted on GitHub so feel free to fork it.

Design changes
- The version I started with didn’t have the Bootstrap responsiveness library so I added that in
- Since I’m using it primarily as a blog, I updated the design to emphasize the blog aspect
- Consolidated the pagination and social sharing widget to fit on one line
- Incorporated some best practices from Kaikkonen's blog typography guide
Backend changes
- Small improvements to SEO by giving ability to add keywords to each page
- Added Open Graph meta tags to control what’s displayed when people share the page on Facebook
- Made a few tweaks to the way the sitemap was being generated

Github Migration Notes

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

After a few hours of solid work I was able to get my new site up and running on Github pages. I got frustrated with having too many blogs and decided that I should finally get it together and consolidate everything. Within a few hours I was able to get it up and running on Github pages up and migrated my old Tumblr and Wordpress posts. Hopefully this encourages me to write more.

Hello, Github!

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to work on migrating my posts over from Wordpress and Tumblr on to here. Let’s see how it goes.

Welcome

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So I am porting this blog over from wordpress.com to my own local hosting. Please bear with me and I'll hopefully have more things to read soon.

Edit: I did a rough job changing the dates in the database so the posts should all have the actual post date now.