Gnapse: The Blog

Cuban bloggers being blocked by Google?

2006-03-01T13:00:00.000-05:00

In English
Some friend of mine told me about a possible situation between cuban blogs and Blogger, of which their authors were being banned access to view and update/modify their content.

I inmediately decided to try and see if I was still able to access this blog that I maintained before continuing my personal blog in the web site of the Opera Web Browser, and you could see that I am indeed able to update this blog as I am writing this post. Nevertheless this doesn't prove anything, since Google may have blocked some and not all cuban blogs. I am not aware of any cuban blogger in a situation similar to the one described above.

En español
Hace poco fui puesto al tanto por un amigo sobre una posible situación de los blogs cubanos en Blogger, cuyos autores al parecer estaban siendo bloqueados por Google tanto para acceder como para actualizar/modificar el contenido.

Inmediatamente me dispuse a probar si aún tenía yo acceso a este blog que hace algún tiempo mantuve antes de continuar mi blog personal en el sitio del navegador Opera, y de hecho pueden ver que incluso pude actualizarlo. De cualquier manera esto no prueba nada, pues quizás Google bloqueó a algunos y no a todos. No estoy al tanto de ningún blogger cubano de quien personalmente pueda yo dar crédito de estar en una situación similar a la descrita.

Update
I am able to access this blog both behind a proxy or without proxy.

Link blog

2005-10-15T20:28:00.000-04:00

I recently moved this blog to the Opera Community web site, as I explained in a previous post. But I've thinking, and I've decided not to throw away this one.

Is funny how you start blogging with doubt, moved mostly by the ever-expanding blogging tendencies in the web of today. You ask yourself, why do all these people (the bloggers) feel so attracted to this practice? There's got to be something special about it. Then, you decide to try out for yourself, and you spent about a month or two (at most) to find out that this is like smoking: you just cannot quit, at least not easily. But smoking is hazardous to health, and blogging is not (until physicians start studying it).

Why do I tell you all this? Because I suddenly felt the need for an extra blog, and what could be more logical than using this one, with which I started. I won’t be using it for the same purpose of my main blog, because it won’t make any sense. I’ll use it as a link blog instead.

Some of you might wonder: what is a link blog anyway? Well, instead of somewhat mid-sized or long stories or writings with my opinion on different subjects, I will post very small texts with links to articles, web pages, services, news, blog posts or anything imaginable that I find interesting, things I ought to share with you, because you might be interested too.

I you're still unsure why to do this, check out the reasons for Jeremy Zawodny to do the same. You should visit his link blog too.

So this is it, no more talking.

Feel free with Opera

2005-09-21T20:19:00.000-04:00

The Opera Web Browser is now free. Opera dropped the ad banners and the licensing fee. Go and read what I think in my new blog, which is (by the way) hosted precisely in the brand new Opera Community site.

Switching to Opera Community

2005-09-21T20:12:00.000-04:00

I think I will definitely move my blog to the Opera Community. I wrote there some days ago, before making this decision, about the pros and cons of switching. And I also posted there a few minutes ago about this final decision.

I will continue to write here, but not that much, and mostly redirecting to some interesting stuff from my Opera blog. Gotta get that PageRank up, don’t you think? Google Blog Search is still not indexing that other blog, but it does index this one.

September 11

2005-09-11T22:43:00.000-04:00

Today is September 11, exactly four years from the deadly attacks to New York City and Washington. I had nothing planned to post here today, but I wanted to remember the victims. I recall that day quite well, and not just like anybody else. I had family there that could have been in danger, and I have special feelings about the city of New York.

Certainly this date has proven to be deadly in human history. We should also remember the victims of another fatal event that took place several years before. On September 11, 1973 the elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by military forces led by Augusto Pinochet. This led to a bloody dictatorship that lasted for 17 years. To this date the very assassins haven't paid yet.

Opera Community

2005-09-10T20:39:00.000-04:00

Have you visited the Opera Community web site recently? If you have never been there, then you will like it, but if you are able to compare what I saw months ago to the new improved community, then you'll be amazed just as I am.

They've been doing some sort of personal web manager, in which users can create an account, with a homepage and several other services. There's a community around all this, with forums, sharing of information and what I liked the most: a blog.

I am seriously considering moving this blog to their platform, because Blogger doesn't give me some stuff that I like about blogs. I haven't decided yet, because I have to evaluate Opera's offerings, but in a glimpse I saw a couple of things that I liked: a calendar with links to the days in which I've posted, and the possibility to categorize my posts. All of these makes it easier for readers (and for me) to find the information they want.

Among the rest of the services they are offering, there is a bookmarks managers, which is good although it's not better than del.icio.us or any other similar. Links can be categorized, but categories work more like folders than like tags, so you cannot have a bookmark under more than one category. Anyway, for their purposes it is fine, because they're clearly not aiming at the big ones.

And to continue comparing to existing services, they also have a photo manager much like a mini Flickr, in which you can store albums of pictures. Pictures and albums can be tagged, and you can also share your pictures selectively to friends or to anyone, or you may keep it private. One of the Flickr-killer features is that you can have as much albums as you like for free, only limited by the account disk space, which is 300Mb overall (pictures and blog). In Flickr you are limited to three albums for the free account, and you need to purchase the pro account to be able to create more albums.

It might be an illusion, but I see Opera going in the right direction: becoming an online service provider with deep integration, and a browser, which could become a second place in their business strategy. Then they could afford to give the browser for free, which would probably boost its percentage of the browser market share.

Let the competition begin!

How has Katrina changed the US?

2005-09-09T19:09:00.000-04:00

Or should I restate the question as How will Katrina change the US?

I thought of writing about this after reading comments by readers of BBC News. I visited the page and apparently the submitting form was not appearing, and they were accepting no more comments, but I felt I had a few things to say about it. And what do I have a blog for anyway?

It is amazing the number of US residents that felt that the rest of the world is enjoying with all the suffering and the destruction caused by Katrina. This is not true for most of the people in the world. Here in Cuba where I live, I see people talking everywhere, horrified by the disastrous conditions in which New Orleans is today, and amazed on the estimates for the time it will take to recover, as well as on the (still incomplete) number of deaths. We are also happy to see how many countries are offering aid in this harsh moment, putting differences aside.

I agree with all of those who say that this is not the time to blame, but to start doing anything at hand instead to help those who are bearing all the weight of the devastation. However, I think that eventually the entire disaster-planning system should be revised and modified, and those who did not act as the circumstances required, should take some responsibility on something that could have been far less damaging, mostly in terms of human lives. You can eventually recover anything, but human lives are irreplaceable.

And in the middle of this dreadful situation, is good to see that at least just a slice of normality is maintained in some places of the city. Johnny White's bar at the French Quarter was at the brink of being closed for the first time in 17 years, but those usual to the place were determined not to do so. Also the Zoo did surprisingly well through the storm.

I want to finish quoting (with minor orthographic fixes) one of the comments from the BBC comments page with which I feel strongly identified. I should credit Kaitlin from Minneapolis for these observations.

I truly hope when the dust from Katrina settles that my fellow American will wake up from their sleepwalk. We are walking on thin ice bearing the very, very heavy load that is the American lifestyle. Katrina has brought all eyes back home (where they should be) and many questions are being asked. The tragedy has revealed weaknesses and vulnerabilities not only in our government but in our image of ourselves. It has also revealed great strengths, causing people to rely on their neighbors for support. I know many will never be the same after this, and I deeply hope that my country will also change for the better.

Comments on the Katrina disaster

2005-09-07T23:00:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia has shown in the last few days the reasons for the fears of most of the other major proprietary online encyclopedias. Their coverage (or should I say our coverage) of Hurricane Katrina and its effects on New Orleans and other areas is simply awesome and impressively up-to-date, taking into account the huge amount of accurate information provided and how recent these events still are.

But not only Wikipedia gives good analysis of what is happening there, or what the implications are for the US economy or its political system. I came up to this article which deepens into the historical and geopolitical values of the city and the consequences of its virtual destruction, and the time it will take to rebuild it.

I also regret the many mistakes that are being made in relation with the relief efforts and the alleged slow response from the government. I was very shocked to read a testimonial written by some physician as the first comment on this post from Phil Windley’s blog. How is the most powerful nation in the world, with huge amounts of resources at their disposal, having this kind of problems of organization? Why are there many other additional resources being offered by several countries and international bodies, and most of them are waiting for the White House to swallow their ego? Is this the prize the people of New Orleans must pay for the political implications of accepting foreign aid? Are the lives of this people worth it? I don’t think so. Is there a crisis of leadership? I do think so.

Internet OS (V): Google OS again

2005-09-01T03:26:00.000-04:00

I will go on in these series with something else, I promise. But everybody out there is talking about it and I couldn't help to write again about Google and the concept of an online OS.

This article at PC World speaks for it self. I wont comment much, so that you can go and read it. It's fun to see how a bit of facts and some speculation can give so much to talk about.

African Americans?

2005-08-31T21:01:00.000-04:00

I don't know why black people are called African American? Shouldn't you call a lot of people European American then? Or Asian American? Why do they always give statistics in terms of the percentage of African American from the total? After all, the only people that should be called Americans without any prefix, are the so called Native Americans.

On the other hand, aren't Canadians from America too? Or Chileans? Or Venezuelans? Or Brazilians? Last time I checked in a map, America was a continent spanning from the artic circle to southern Chile, almost touching the Antartic continent. Why is that the people from the US call themselves as if they were the only country in the hemisphere?

Internet OS (IV): Google OS

2005-08-26T21:26:00.000-04:00

This wasn't the intended next post for the Internet OS series, but after the recent events with some Google services, briefly commented on the previous post, I found an article which expresses my point of view, and relates all this to the Internet OS concept.

I've mentioned the ever growing presence of Google as some sort of Operating System within the Internet. It's all about two things: identity and integration. This article by Phil Windley, who blogs on Phil Windley's Technometria, portrays the situation very much as I see it.

It is one of the few pieces of texts that I've found making a realistic analysis of the implications of the new Google Talk service, mainly regarding its foundation over the Jabber IM environment. Who cares if the current first version of the program doesn't have lots of bells and whistles? Who cares about emoticons, webcam support? All of that will come, and perhaps some new stuff too. But that's not the issue.

And all this, as you can see in the article, tributes to a higher goal: to give meaning to a Google Identity (or GIDs, as Windley call them) and providing an integration between all Google Services through these identities. And what is an Operating System after all? As he said, ask Microsoft.

Google Desktop and Talk

2005-08-25T11:30:00.000-04:00

I couldn't help to make a parenthesis in between the Internet OS series of posts. Anyway, this is it, and the series will continue.

If someone ever reads this blog, it will surely believe that the author (that would be me) is some kind of a Google hooligan, or they can even think that the author is promoting Google and it might be receiving payment for this service, but that is not the case, although I could use some extra money. The fact is that I like almost any service made by the search giant, with a few exceptions. Their services are cool, their pages are uncluttered and easy to read, their web interfaces are incredibly enhanced with AJAX, they are gradually increasing the integration among the different services, and I could mention several other cool features. You can always say that I am biased, but the more I compare, the more I am convinced.

There are indeed a few vendors which are great competitors to many Google services. For instance, Copernic Desktop Search is a wonderful Desktop Search environment, considered by many (including me) the best. But Google's recent update to their Desktop Search software has leveled the competition. Perhaps the other greater competitor (IMHO) is Yahoo! Desktop Search, but for me, the download is too big, and it uses more memory space. Yes, I know, it's a matter of personal taste. What can I do about it?

And even more recently Google made the move I've been expecting for months. The logical and inevitable move, just after getting into the email business: entering the IM market. I am aware that most of the opinion articles in the news about Google Talk are focused on comparing the newborn service with the 800-pounds gorillas (Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger and AOL's AIM), but I honestly think that most of them are missing the point. They mention that Google Talk is based upon the XMPP protocol that powers the Jabber Instant Messaging Standard, but most of the articles I've read fail in providing an understanding of what this means, and how does this make the service radically (and positively) different from the big ones.

I couldn't express it better than Michael Robertson and thus I am quoting him:

Imagine if the telephone system worked in a way that prevented a Verizon customer from calling an AT&T customer, who in turn couldn't call a T-Mobile customer. It would cause chaos, high prices, and slow innovation. But this is exactly how instant messaging and early net calling networks, like Skype, work today. Friends on AIM can't communicate with others on Yahoo or MSN. I've written about this in the past and how it's detrimental to global communications. We need communication systems based on global directories, which requires companies to set aside the competitive drive that compels them to want to control the entire system and agree to cooperate.

I wonder why the public does not think about IM just as they are used to think about phones? Perhaps most of the people don't know the alternatives. What do you think?

Internet OS (III): Pictures

2005-08-20T01:39:00.000-04:00

With the advent of digital photography, digital imagery has invaded our lives with rage. We no longer send extensive email texts describing those mysterious statues we saw on Easter Island last summer, or the fun we had on that party at the beach. It is definitely easier to carry on a digital camera, grab the moment, and then email it all around.

But email has turned out to be inefficient in terms of photo sharing. Several tools have appeared all over the net that let you store your pictures online, organize them, and share them with whomever you want. Flickr is definitely my favorite in this regard, although as with del.icio.us (discussed in the previous post) there are several similar tools around.

Another common feature with del.icio.us, is the tagging system as a means of organization. It also supports the creation of photo albums, although in the free account you are limited to three albums only. Photos can have different levels of visibility to other users: public photos are visible to anyone browsing flickr; private photos are visible only to you; whereas photos can be shared with other people holding a flickr account, which you can categorize as friends and/or family, and specify for each picture who is allowed to see it, on a friend/family basis, not a per-user basis.

Pictures in flickr have a title and a description, set by the owner. People can post comments on any photo they see, as well as read comments posted by other users. The site also hosts a series of groups, where users with common interests can share and show from a single place, a photographic work related in any way. For instance, one of the most interesting and successful groups is the B&W, which hosts artistic photography in black & white exclusively.

There are lots of other cool features, which you can find out yourself by visiting the site. You can upload photos directly from your camphone, apply a licensing policy to your pictures via a Creative Commons license scheme, and many other things. They have even published an API so that third parties are able to develop applications that interface with flickr. Finally, I forgot to mention that the web site, originally developed by Ludicorp, was aquired a few months ago by Yahoo, and just a few days ago Yahoo unified the login process of flickr with Yahoo’s own authentication system.

Internet OS (II): Bookmarks

2005-07-31T00:04:00.000-04:00

When I discovered del.icio.us it was heavenly. I was tired of having my bookmarks configured in my browsers (home and work) but not having them at some friend’s box. Even maintaining home and work bookmarks synchronized was a daunting task. I also use several browsers, each of them having a separate set of bookmarks, and this makes it a bit more complicated.

Del.icio.us filled this gap just fine, and it turned out to be even better because of the labeling organization scheme. Browsers tend to organize bookmarks in a tree-like structure, which has proved to be insufficient to categorize items.

Another nice feature is that everybody’s bookmarks are available to everyone. You can easily see how many other people have bookmarked the same addresses you have, and see what other cool stuff they have. I have already found lots of new articles and web sites about web development, space exploration, cool blogs and many other things I like.

Although a bit late, I became aware of a del.icio.us tool call del.icio.us direc.tor which is literally delicious. It’s an AJAX-based client-side broker utility that loads all your del.icio.us bookmarks and lets you browse them easier. One other tool I loved is Foxylicious, a Firefox extension that loads del.icio.us bookmarks into a folder within the bookmarks. It uses tag names as subfolders.

Of course del.icio.us is not alone out there. There are other bookmark management tools, most of which are very similar. I am only familiar with three of them besides del.icio.us: Yahoo’s My Web 2.0, blinklist and de.lirio.us. All of them organize bookmarks with a tagging system, just like del.icio.us.

Yahoo’s tool has a few cool features not present in del.icio.us, such as letting you import bookmarks directly from your IE favorites, or from an external RSS feed. This gives you the possibility to import your del.icio.us bookmarks, thus making it easier to make the transition. Yahoo also handles the concept of a community of people sharing and socializing their bookmarks selectively. You can have private bookmarks, only visible to you, bookmarks shared with friends, and public bookmarks, that every one can see. Finally, and perhaps the nicest feature that Yahoo’s tool offers, is that it caches the pages you bookmark. This solves one of my fears with bookmarks: having broken links.

The Internet Operating System (I)

2005-07-30T17:03:00.000-04:00

Imagine yourself accessing the Internet from a variety of systems in different places. That is my case, and I suspect it is the case of many of you out there. I get online at work, at home, in the university (where I am studying for my master degree) and occasionally at some friend’s house. Even when you are most of the time on the same town, not commonly on the road traveling all over the country or abroad, you need access to your data. In recent times more and more services let you have everything at hand wherever you are, and I am sure we are heading to an era where all you’ll need is a thin client to access your web box, with the Internet Operating System preinstalled.

The most ancient and common of these tools is the web mail. I have always preferred the use of web mail over a mail client installed locally, exactly for this reason. I use POP clients only at home to maintain a local copy of my mail, but I love it online, so that I can see it from everywhere.

Another approach with mobility and email comes from Portable Thunderbird. This tool allows you to run Thunderbird from a removable drive. The email client and the profile can be entirely self-contained on the drive and then used on any Windows computer. The downside is that you can only use it from a Windows client.

Anyway, I prefer solutions that are located entirely on the web, and this is what I pretend to cover in a series of posts following this. A laptop can crash, a flash memory can fail or broke, but Internet is always there for you.

One of the most complete set of Internet tools available from a single vendor is Yahoo’s. Yahoo includes web mail, address book, notepad, calendar, personalized homepage, RSS feeds reader, briefcase and a few more I am not familiar with. There are also some other vendors that are doing a fine job, promoting competition, which is always good.

I’ve been aware of most of these tools for a long time, but there are still some gaps: services I needed but no one provided. Fortunately for me (and for everyone) some of these gaps are being filled. Keep reading the next posts as I’ll explore some of my favorite web toys.

Discovery of a threat

2005-07-29T08:39:00.000-04:00

I felt very happy when, last Tuesday, NASA finally resumed its manned space program. It's been two and a half years since the unfortunate accident that ended the lives of seven astronauts, when space shuttle Columbia broke up as it attempted to re-enter Earth's atmosphere, on February 1, 2003.

Now, after a great effort (and a billion dollar budget) trying to solve the problems that caused this disaster, NASA has announced that Discovery launch presented exactly the same problems, being hit again by foam from the external fuel tank, forcing the agency to ground all the fleet, until this issue is better understood and solved.

But a major problem still remains: Seven astronauts are up there in orbit, and they have to come back to Earth safely. I am confident that the agency will assess the situation with the required professionalism, and bring them back alive no matter what it takes. As I am also confident that the US manned space program will eventually recover from this crisis. A new accident, and the consequent lost of seven more valuable lives, is certainly something not in the agenda, as it will pose a great threat to the future of the ISS and manned space exploration.

Birthday present

2005-07-28T21:04:00.000-04:00

I couldn't receive a better birthday present from Google than the improved personalized homepage unveiled yesterday, July 27. They have responded quickly to several suggestions, considering that the first version was out on May.

The list of predefined news sources has grown, and one of the most useful improvements is the possibility to select among the different sections of Google News, not just the Top Stories. Also, if you have a news source syndicated, and not available as predefined, you can now include it. You can create custom sections with the address of any syndication feed (RSS, ATOM, or any other standard format in the ever growing family). I have included not just news sources, but also some blogs that I read regularly.

The new bookmarks section is also great, and it has room for improvement. You could also have other bookmarks sections if you have a del.icio.us account, by creating a custom section with the corresponding del.icio.us feed address.

Finally, some comments on the Weather section. It now allows more than one location, as many people requested, but it lacks international support. I am still unable to track weather forecasts from outside the US or Canada. But I am certain this will be solved anytime soon.

A little note from a developer's perspective: Google continues to bet highly on AJAX approaches to improve the user experience. I think they are doing a great job in this respect. I tested the interface in Firefox and Opera, and it works just fine. I just hate when people go IE-only, ignoring the rest of the browsers. At least Google is trying to keep up with a handful of the most modern and feature rich.

Googl.icio.us

2005-07-07T16:36:00.000-04:00

I found some nice GreaseMonkey scripts customizing Google search results. For those of you who do not know what GreaseMonkey is, it is an extension for the Firefox Web Browser that lets you install user scripts that modify web pages content and behaviour. This script adds a "Add to my del.icio.us" link to Google search results. You must also have a del.icio.us account to register your own bookmarks online.

On the same vein I found that Jeremy Zawodny published another GreaseMonkey script that does more or less the same for Yahoo's My Web 2.0. What I don't understand is that, Zawodny being a Yahoo employee, how come he didn't published a script for Yahoo! search results instead of Google's.

Norway is leading

2005-07-01T00:36:00.000-04:00

Norway has always amazed me a little bit with its role in world-wide IT, OSS and standardization. It is the home for one of the greatest pieces of software that has ever existed: Opera Web Browser. That alone is remarkable. It has also played a significant role in official Linux adoption, with Bergen, its second city, announcing last year its decision to migrate to Linux on the server. Furthermore, KDE, one of the most successful desktop environments in Unix platforms, is based on the Qt Application Framework, from Trolltech, a Norwegian company.

But some recent events are stressing this claim. A few days ago I read that the Norwegian Minister of Modernization declared that proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government. Certainly a clear signal inviting Microsoft to embrace the open document formats accepted as standards.

Now, Jon "DVD" Johansen, a young Norwegian who became a hacker hero for unlocking copy-protection codes in DVD's when he was just 15, modified the Google Video Viewer to play videos hosted on any server, just one day after it was launched in its beta stage. Google's viewer was designed to play videos hosted on Google's servers only. DVD Jon, as he is also known, is now 22, and he is a strong supporter of the Open Source philosophy.

Can you imagine what would this article had been if Linus Torvalds were Norwegian instead of being Finnish?

Google personalized search

2005-06-28T10:53:00.000-04:00

Today I was planning to post about something else, but as I went on to Google this morning I found that my Search History, which I have been actively using since it was launched last April, is now being used to personalize the results of my future searches.

I can see waves of opinion articles coming from everywhere, since this is a major deviation from Google's tradition of democratizing the web with its PageRank technology. Before PageRank, a web site's rank in a search result depended mostly on the contents of the site, but now, searches also take into account the number and importance of sites linking to you, as well as the text in those external links.

As Google states in their own site

Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult. And though we do run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank). A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search.

Although it is still true that they are not selling better PageRanks, some people might argue that the new personalized search results might be biased, albeit slightly improved in accordance with topics you search for frequently. I can't help remembering the recent Google's Autolink feature in its toolbar, and all the controversy that came along, or even the privacy issues and concerns in relation with their Gmail service's targeted ads based on email content being automatically processed.

What I think of this is, if you suspect that Google is giving you unfair results favoring the sites they would prefer you to see, then don't use Google at all. What makes you think that they would do something like this with Personalized Search Results and My Search History, and that they are not doing it with standard anonymous searches too? Go and search the web with Yahoo! or Microsoft instead, but don't complain if you discover that Google is not the only one. I am not saying that any of these or any other search engine is altering the results, but that if you believe someone is doing it, what makes you think that somebody else is not.

Altered or not, this new service only includes a new variable into the algorithm, in order to improve the user experience. I can't wait to do a search for words like ring, and find some nicely written articles about sets, groups and algebra, instead of some film reviews (just kidding).

Starting it properly

2005-06-27T21:56:00.000-04:00

Since yesterday, when I started this blog, I have been concerned about starting it properly. I never had plans of having my own, at least not seriously. Perhaps the idea crossed my mind at times, but suddenly, reading someone else's blog, I found a link to Blogger, which I knew already. I clicked it, configured my new account, and I was online in a few minutes. Then comes the tough part: writing a first post.

You see, here in Cuba where I live, access to Internet is just starting, and web logs are far from being popular. As a matter of fact I don't know of anyone here having one of these, and just a few are aware of this phenomenon. I am sure there must be other people already interested, but I just don’t know them.

Being partly experienced on reading blogs, but not experienced at all on having one, I went to see my dear friend Google to find out if someone out there has written something on how to start a new blog. I was amazed at the enormous volume of information I found, and I thought it would be nice to share some of my findings with you, and comment a little bit about it.

The most valuable essay I read about this subject is from Phil Windley’s Technometria. There I confirmed some ideas I already had, and I also liked a few others I haven't thought of. He recommends that you pick a topic and stick to it, which was a must for me from the very beginning. He also suggests writing about your own interests, not about what you think your readers want. This seems pretty obvious to me now, but I wasn't as convinced as I am. After all, it is your blog, and the readers' base you should manage to create over time will be built in relation to what you write about, and made off of people that like to read what you write.

I also found a good piece of work at the wikiHow, and yet another one at TechLearning. The former encouraged me to go on, as it made reference to one of my greatest fears: not being noticed. Today, this is no more a fear for me, because just writing this out is liberating. I now consider being noticed as a bonus.

Linking to others blogs you read is a must, as all the articles I found mentioned it. I guess I already knew this intuitively. I include below other suggestions I would like to reproduce here.

Syndicate your posts (using RSS or ATOM) so that people can be notified when you write a new post in your blog.

Give the readers the possibility to comment about your writings. Having a feedback is always welcome.

Show up some information about you, so people are able to know who the author is.

Don’t tell anyone about your new blog until you have at least a dozen of posts. If someone goes to your newly announced blog, and sees just a couple of boring initial posts, odds are that he will never come back.

Take care of the language you use when you write, not just to avoid obscenities, but also to ensure that people from other cultures can also understand you, mostly if their native language is not the one you are writing in.

Well, that's it for now. Visit the links I gave you as reference and find out the details.

My first post

2005-06-26T21:34:00.000-04:00

Well, I am just starting my newly created blog. I have never had a personal blog before, but I feel every day more and more inclined to publish my own thoughts and points of view. I suppose the first post in a new blog like this, should be some kind of introductory information about the blog and its contents, as well as some information about the author. Assuming this is so, here we go.

My name is Ernesto and I am 25 years old. I live in Cuba, and I am employed here by Mercedes Benz, as the lead developer in web projects for internal use. My experience with web development comes from my years in college, and there are lots of things I would love to share with anyone interested, things I would like to speak out.

Most of what I expect to write here is related to web sites design and development. Web standards; accessibility on the web; correct use of both server-side and client-side technologies; comparison between different tools, solutions and alternatives to problems; browsers and user agents in general (their differences and levels of standards-compliance). All of these topics have plenty of room to talk about.

Also in the field of technology, I might also write about the Internet, search engines and operating systems, just to mention some. Learning of past, present and future space exploration, also catches my eye, so this is probably something to talk about, too. And finally, I reserve to myself the right of occasionally writing about anything else I haven’t mentioned here, like a funny anecdote, a rare incident, or whatever.