spf13.com

I wanted to polish up my javascript coding so I decided that the best way to do that was with a project that I’ve been wanted to do for a while anyway, my own identity site, or my online business card, or my online vcard. The idea was inspired by Tim Van Damme’s website.

To accomplish this I wrote a jquery plugin to handle the navigation, animation etc.. The site itself is rather simple, a single html page and a few images. The markup is written in such a way that it works perfectly (minus the hiding and animation) even when javascript isn’t present.

I’ll write a separate post on how I wrote the jquery plugin and would be happy if anyone else could use it. I just ask that if used that people provide proper attribution both in the code and with a link back to stevefrancia.com.

Today marks the last post of my blog-a-thon. It has been a learning and growing experience. I have blogged more time in the past 4 weeks as I did the prior 52. It was challenging and rewarding.

I feel I have developed as a blogger and having 3 posts a week has brought the blog to the front of my mind. Not only did I write many articles, but I’ve started a bunch more and have ideas for even more than that. Needless to say increasing the frequency of posts actually increased my depth of topics and ideas.

Towards the end (this week) I started to run a bit out of steam. It was a combination of a bunch of external forces that really squashed the time I would have rather been blogging. Sometimes life is like that though. Besides, this isn’t my day job. It wasn’t mission critical, it was intended as a challenge and for fun. All in all it was a good experience. I think I’d do it again, but probably not for a while.

I do think I will continue to blog more regularly, but probably more on a one or two a week schedule as with my current work and family responsibilities that seems a bit more practical.

Someone once said a goal is a dream until you write it down … in your blog and tell the world about it.

In an effort to focus on blogging a bit more frequently I have decided to start a blogathon beginning today. I will write a post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the next four weeks. I think this rate will permit me to continue to keep quality posts, while increasing the frequency and consequently the quantity. As usual my posts can be expected to be quite random, perhaps more so than ever. This is a major undertaking for me as currently I have been posting about once a month since I started this blog. The goal here is to embark on a blogging journey and hopefully create some great content along the way.