Initially this whole thing was about communicating from Malaysia to Germany, to get my pictures from overseas online and to create some persistent viewable memories. So I started this blog project as my personal Malaysia diary.

I did never question, whether this was the right medium to keep my friends up to date. Guess some would have been happier to get individual emails or some monthly emails with reports about what would be happening abroad. From my personal experience reading such emails, I had decided that at least for me those mails were rather inadequate. When you finally invest the time to read through such mostly long summaries, the events which are covered are already ancient. There are also so many topics covered, that you just don’t know what to say. And if you read such a complex work, you will feel obliged to write back something rather highly sophisticated. Using a blog, you will have more short postings, and there are chances, that some friends would just write something less sophisticated.

Meanwhile I have learned, that blogging enables to far more than just an easier way of communication with friends. Actually it is only suited for this communication if your friends are willing to go this way with you – they need to read the blog and need to comment. I had to make the experience that the first of these requirements can be achieved. It is just a little less convenient. Although your blog might give the reading person many more features than just a simple email it is less convenient. The reason is very understandable – you can’t just force somebody to visit your website, but you can demand that somebody reads your emails. Anyway, if someone cares he will take his time to have a look on your blog from time to time. But the second requirement – to get feedback via your blog from these friends is a really invincible obstacle. Until today the majority of my readers has reservations against commenting on my blog. The number of people commenting on my blog, who don’t own their own weblog moves against zero!

But there are other users that can be motivated to contribute to your blog – people just like yourself – fellow bloggers. Initially I had hoped, that I could keep contact to my friends from Malaysia with the help of my blog – but not all of my friends down there seem to care very much about my writings here. But due to my blog I got new friends in Malaysia – bloggers like me

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Things to know, Web-Site at 09:18 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

Funny, the article before this one started with “40”.. Well, also the number at the bottom of the page tells you that this is my 397th entry, it is the 400th! The little discrepancy results from me, hiding some entries, which won’t appear at the main page (though they are accessible through categories – but I assure you, those articles are not worth searching for).

Yesterday it appeared to be quite a race. 1000th comment vs. 400th blog post.. but since the discussion slackened off the comments lost . Well.. so what will I do about this number now? I honoured my 100th Blog post but later I didn’t consider it as something special to write about me writing here.. I could bore you with some more statistics, talking about the number of visitors on my blog, or philosophize on me blogging in general, but paule requested something special –something new. All of the mentioned ideas wouldn’t be special at all..

To make it short, I have some interesting ideas about things to publish here on my mind.. - but I'm lacking the time to carry them out right now. So I have to put you off till... let's say some time later...

Anyway the person doing comment #1000 earns a free beer at the Sandkerwa Wake-Up Party!

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life, Web-Site at 18:08 | Comments (41) | Trackback (1)

Initially I planned for an euphoric post about finishing my first year as a blogger yesterday. Due to personal reasons I’m not very euphoric at the moment. At least not to write some great posts on all of those little things that made my last year of blogging to an exceptional experience. Atm those little joys are somewhat subdued. But I will try to get back to you with a report on those various aspects about blogging, after clearing my mind a little bit.

Anyway, gratulations for keeping up blogging will be appreciated.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 00:14 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

During the last weeks, and especially last week I managed to get some major updates done at both Blog script and image gallery. You might want to look for some of the features:

• Gallery: Fullscreen javascript slide show works
• Gallery: Latest comments to images can be viewed
• Blog: Switched to 3 column layout. Since almost everybody has a screen resolution of 1024x768 anyway, I decided, to get my blog a little more sorted. Unluckily, IE6 still has some problems with my style sheet.. I’m trying to get that issue fixed.
• Blog: Logged in edtors don’t need to put in captchas for comments anymore (ok, this is rather only an update for me)
• Blog: Pimped up my Blogroll. Icons for the blog language, and the country where the blogger resides in have been added
• Blog: Better comment spam protection
• Blog: Publicon-Style Link Icons + You are invited to link my Blog via this icon:
• Blog: Added Audio-Scrobbler-Plugin - You can see the music to which I’m listening now
• Blog: Started freestyle-tagging my entries and added tag-cloud
• Blog: Added my latest del.icio.us Links

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Web-Site at 20:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)