i’ve been reading other people’s blogs for such a long time now that I can’t even remember when I first knew about blogging. I know I was definitely reading blogs about 3 or 4 years ago because that’s when I first started writing about them. Writing, offline that is. A lot of the time for my Masters degree.

For the last couple of years I’ve been reading blogs (well, really mostly RSS feeds) extensively. There are dozens that I try to keep up with on an almost daily basis (which is more or less impossible, I’m still working on strategies to manage all the information I want to keep up with!). In that time I’ve been reading a lot of blogs that I’ve found relevant to the type of work I was doing (being a web producer at an agency), but also ones that I followed personally – either due to my non-work interests, or because the writers of the blogs have become like virtual friends of mine – not that any of them would know it!

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Lots of linkage today – our creative team are working on a design review for the project I’m working on now and we needed some sites to review and potentially use as benchmarks. That meant that I got to play with some pretty gorgeous sites.

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i was reading Derek Powazek’s article on A List Apart this morning in which he talks about the mysteries and wonders of designing a site homepage. Its a well documented struggle, I think. In many cases, its really all your client is worried about. Derek’s clients must be either incredibly well educated in design process, or on copious amounts of valium, if he really does what he says and designs the homepage last.

I wonder if he really does that. I mean, I’ve been known to say that’s what I do, but most of the time what actually happens is that the homepage evolves iteratively as the rest of the site is nutted out in detail. I’d agree that the homepage is probably one of the last pages to be totally finished, but its certainly not, in my experience, the last one to be started.

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i’ve been doing some beta testing of ma.gnolia lately.

you know. I really wanted to like it, but somehow I don’t.

its very much like del.icio.us, in that its a ‘social bookmarking’ site.

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