The very start of my blog - encouragements welcome (in Off-topic)

Hi everyone, to introduce it fairly fast I have started working on my blog today and I want to give you the opportunity to read it before everyone else and also influence my project itself!!

I will be writing the future posts here. How does that work? Pretty simple, I blog before my blog is created and will move them there once it is all done. That will give you guys the opportunity to give your comments about my planning, my ideas and how it will be when it's put online. Plus it will certainly make me want to work harder on it (or well, I hope you will make me feel so).

What's in for you? Here's the deal: whenever your comment is useful, helpful or adding to the cause in any mean, I will copy your comment to the post it refers to giving you appropriate credits according to your CB username at the time of the copying (or to whatever you clearly ask me to) with a link to your CB referral link marked as the link of your website (or, again, to any link you state on your post(s) if it is from/about you).

Thank you all for your future great comments and for not posting anything discouraging :) My first blog post will now follow.

Starting the project part 1: The idea

I've been programming for a long time but I started to proclaim myself as a full-fledged programmer 3 years ago when I started to work on real projects and for serious clients. Since then, the portfolio has been growing but not as fast as I would have hoped. I have been looking for a way to show my skills to other programmers or potential clients and found that creating and writing a blog would be a good opportunity to distinguish myself from more programmers and increase the visibility for me and my company.

After putting the project on stall for a couple months from the lack of ideas, free time and content I have decided today to give it a shot with what I have planned so far. As a starter, I decided that the main purpose of my blog would be to share my knowledge with fellow programmers in any field I am comfortable in. I will essentially talk about PHP which is my strongest language but will also cover HTML and CSS as they go hand in hand. I want the content to revolve mostly around the workarounds I found to the problems I happen to stumble on. I would also like to give many tips and tricks on facts that I now naturally control but I don't think on having enough time to cover everything so I decided I would do that every now and then and I challenge myself to make such a post whenever I haven't posted anything for 4 days. That way I will be assured to keep my blog's content growing at a somewhat good pace.

That being said, I haven't decided yet about my interactions with readers and their comments or requests. Although I would like to be able to answer to everyone, it might not be possible. So I will have to decide of two imaginary lines that would separate the way I treat the requests and comments. One would determine the ones I ignore, the other would set what kind of request I answer to and the other would decide of which one I will only accept with an incentive.

Anyway, the major points are set and I know all I need to know to start the project...

When I find out how to do something new and interesting, I post it here on my wiki. Feel free to make me famous, if you want ;)

Alright, I have been a bit hyper tonight and wrote another article already... I will post it as you might help me out with my problem.

Starting the project part 2: The design

Today a problem with the phone line broke my internet connection and prevented me to continue the work on my current contract to the well being of my blog project. I decided to plan the design and if I was lucky enough, I would manage to get Photoshop to do what I want. I successfully created something neat but not as much as I would like but I am very bad at throwing what I imagine at Photoshop. After a couple hours I decided that it was enough and to accept the design as a good enough draft for now and started to integrate it into HTML. Everything went pretty good, I also took some notes with some of the mistakes I found when I looked at it with Internet Explorer 6 and I will make sure to make a post about them later. I don't really care about IE6 myself but people still use it and it would not be professional for a web programmer to leave a poorly looking website to these users.

I just finished a chat with my company's designer and I think I will be doing some major changes to the layout already. I saved a copy of the first try here. I feel it is lacking some joy. I added the colors in the article blocks so it would make the website better to look at but I think I failed a bit. Too bad because I really liked the idea I had about those, I planned to use a color according to the category of the post. I would have taken the colors from the logo of the respective language if they had any or else I would find a color that would differ from the others. I really like the idea of visually differentiating the category of the posts with a rapid glance; I will try to keep this idea without pushing it too much and limiting the options for the website to look great.

Woah I thought it would get a bit more comments... Please throw your two cents!

Here is a free bump. I don't have the time to read now, but I'll read when I DO have time, and would be happy to comment my thoughts at that time.