…are greatly exaggerated.

It turns out that some of you are quite worried about me. (They like me, they really like me.) Contrary to popular believe, I am still alive and kicking. I was doing some travelling. Then I was off the grid. Plus I’ve been trying really really hard to work on my PhD research. So, I’ve been avoiding blogging. If I blog too much, I don’t work enough ;)

But shucks, I missed you guys. :)

Here’s some of the stuff that I’ve been up to lately:

• Did a driving trip down to Tennessee and back up again. I have to say, Tennesseans are the nicest people I have ever met. And don’t forget, I’m Canadian, so that’s saying a lot!
• Flew down to Orlando for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Oh my, 1408 participants and I’d say something like 95% of them were female. All talking about computer science, technology, and other geeky things. What a rush!
• While in Orlando, I got the opportunity to take in Walt Disney World. This was a life-long dream for me. Unlike many of the Americans that I met, who seem to think that is normal to visit Disney every couple of years, making the trip from Canada isn’t easy as just hopping into the car for the day. But finally, I got to see it! And all I can say is WOW! I was a big kid for 4 days of my 4-day pass, plus the fancy Backstage Magic Behind-the-Scenes tour. Wow! Wow!
• Then I had another conference, this one in Canada.
• Then, I spent two weeks in a shack in the woods. Don’t ask. Suffice it to say that it was two weeks without running water, indoor plumbing, electricity, tv, or the Internet. I used it as a time to reboot, so to speak, and get over my Internet addiction a bit. I got some really good work done, and am hoping to continue in that trend.

During the past couple of months, I’ve done some good research, but never enough. I’ve also changed my GTD system, twice, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone who reads this blog. I’ll discuss that more later. I’m not (I think/hope) more into the floor of working and am plugging away at next actions on my list, plus the ever present NA, “Do Research”.

I’ve also been keeping up with my feed reading, although I’ve got my total feeds down to about 100. There have been a few interesting things that I’d like to blog about, and I’m hoping to get to them relatively soon.

Anyway, thanks for sticking around, and I’ll chat more at you later.

:)

So, I’ve been catching up on my blog email.  As of right now, I’m only one month behind!  Whoo.  So, anyone who has sent me email in the past month, i.e., August, and who hasn’t heard from me yet…I’m working on it :)

It’s probably a good thing that I’ve given up on most of my advertising streams. It turns out that you don’t read the ads anyway.

Not necessarily *you*, but people in general. There’s a very interesting essay over at Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox (he has the most amazing essays on usability) that discusses the concept of banner blindness.

The term “banner blindness” refers to the fact that when looking at a web page, users just don’t see anything that looks like a banner, including non-advertising elements mixed in with banners.

Here are some key points:

• Three design elements are most effective at attracting you: plain text, faces, and cleavage.
• The concept of banner blindness is not new; it just keeps getting confirmed over and over again
• The best ad format, in terms of getting you to click, is that kind of pop-up ad that looks like a system error dialog box. You know the kind. Most unethical, and yet, most effective.

What really drew me in during the essay was this set of images. These panes show a heatmap of how users look at web pages. The panel on the left shows where the eye focuses during a quick scan. The middle panel shows the eye focus for partial reading. The panel on the right shows where the eye is focused during a thorough reading.

I find it fascinating that, regardless of how closely we read a web page, we don’t look at the banner ads. At all.

Check out Jakob Nielsen’s full essay; it includes a much better write-up, as well as a couple of video clips, showing how a user’s eye movements track during an online task. Fascinating stuff.

Hello all! Welcome to my new blog platform. I’ve just completed the move from Blogger to WordPress.

A few things to note:

• The blog location is http://gtdwannabe.com
• If you go to http://www.gtdwannabe.com/index.html (note the www, and the index.html), you’ll find the original entrance page to my reference site. These pages are going to be removed in the future. I don’t know when, but don’t be surprised if something breaks in an old blog post. Some of the information there will be migrated into this blog (perhaps as a stand-alone page); most will be tossed - including the stuff on EverNote templates. It’s just too old now.
• The blogspot blog (http://gtdwannabe.blogspot.com) is no more. I’m going to leave the pages up, at least for now, since some of my posts refer to older posts. There will come a time, maybe, when I just completely remove all of those pages.
• I was able to import all of the Blogger pages into this blog, so if you’re looking for something older, just use the search in the left-column - you should be able to find it. I did delete some older posts, but that’s because they were time sensitive, and now completely irrelevant.
• The feed for this blog is http://feeds.feedburner.com/GtdWannabe. I’m using a plugin to make sure that everywhere that WordPress offers you the option of a feed, it’s this one. It’s the same feed I was using before (well, mostly using). There was an old Blogger atom feed that is dead.

Why Did I Switch?

Basically, I’ve been feeling more and more dissatisfied with Blogger. It’s not necessarily anything that’s wrong with blogger. “It’s not you, it’s me.” But I haven’t been happy with it. I haven’t been happy with my design. I hated the way that every time I made a comment on the blog, I ended up getting logged out of my primary Gmail account (since I don’t use my primary name for blogging). I was just tired of the whole thing, and even thinking about just folding up the blog altogether.

In addition, I’ve been eyeing other blogs out there, and there’s some really nice ones. Many of these seemed to be WordPress blogs. I looking into switching every now and then, but was always daunted by the whole hosting stuff. But, it turned out to be relatively painless, and I was able to do this switch over three days. Most of my time was actually spent cleaning up posts - since Blogger didn’t support categories when I first started using it, I had to categorize over half of my posts! I also like the feel of the WordPress application itself; more than I like that of Blogger. Plus, there’s quite a bit of flexibility in terms of themes and widgets. I know just enough CSS/HTML (and no PHP!) to be dangerous, so I was able to find a theme I liked, and then tweak it slightly. For instance, the theme I’m currently using didn’t have a specific style for blockquotes. Once I added that in, I was very pleased with it.

Advertising

You’ll notice that there is currently *no* advertising on this blog. You may recall that I lost my Adsense privileges several months ago. To be honest, I still don’t know exactly what the heck blew up, but try as I might, Adsense will never ever ever let me play again. And to the a**hole who somehow managed to game my search page so it “made” me $25 in one day (when it never made more than one search’s worth), thanks a he** of a lot.

Anyway, I might still be a bit bitter. But, life goes on. Since I lost the Adsense, I experimented with a few other options. There’s a few other advertisers out there, who actually do provide services for blogs outside of the US. However, I’ve not been satisfied with any of them. The only advertising that I currently have is courtesy of FeedBurner. They can put ads in my feed entries, as well as on the blog itself. I’m never going to make money off this blog, but the few bucks a month from the feed will be enough to pay for hosting. I was having fun there for a while, with the ad money - it enabled me to buy software. However, nothing really is for free.

I’m also open to the possibility of direct advertising, like the CompanionLink banner that was up a couple of months ago. And, I’m not above doing paid reviews, for things that I actually like. But I think it’s safe to say that this blog will never be a big billboard, for anything. And to be honest, I’m finding it refreshing. I don’t have to worry about how many pennies of Adsense money I’ve made in a day. Nor do I have to worry about my stats. And, the look of the blog is nice and clean. I’m noticing more and more that some blogs are really hard to read, due to the fact that there are banners on banners, etc. So, here’s the more minimalist, less stressed GTD Wannabe blog. And you can be assured that when I blog, I blog because I want to, not because I need to. I’m hoping that it will result in a nice blog, that you’ll want to keep in your feed reader.

Feedback

I’d love to hear from you: about the switch, about the look, about the content, about anything. I want this to be a fun, useful place, with a bit of ;)-ing every now and then. And oh, if you’re a WordPress guru, I’d love to hear any of your great tips and tricks. And maybe figure out why two of my sidebar items show that stupid line? :)

I’ve decided to make the BIG move. I’m going to move this blog over to WordPress. It’s a concept that I’ve been toying with for months. Basically, I was scared off by the concept of having to figure out how to install it.

Turns out, my web host, GoDaddy, offers an easy installation of WordPress. The only thing holding me back was the fact that you have to select a “linux” host when you buy your hosting package. I had selected a “windows” host, but that was actually really easy to fix. (i.e., click a button, a day later, it’s fixed. Pure magic!)

Now, I’m just playing with WordPress, getting used to it. You may notice some weirdness with the feed. My goal is to keep my Feedburner feed, so anybody already subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/GtdWannabe should have no trouble. Anyone using any other feed should stop immediately ;)

The switch isn’t complete yet - hence this post is still in Blogger. I’m also in the process of trying to import my old posts from Blogger into WordPress. It’s not as easy as it should be. So, we’ll see. I have 348 posts in Blogger (doesn’t seem like that many, does it?) but if they don’t all come over, or if they come over, but are missing images, I’m not sure what I’ll do.

What else? Oh, I’m also going to kill off any other pages I’ve got listed over at GTDWannabe.com. I hate the layout I have there, and really, there’s no need for me to keep static pages. I’m not updating them anyway. So, I’m going to keep everything in the blog. (It seems I can create stand-alone pages in the blog too, so I’ll use that for weird things.) This means that the EverNote pages and the EverNote Template Catalogue are going to disappear. Download now, if you want to capture anything :)

I’ll let you know more later, for instance, the address of the new blog, and the feed, and everything :)

Wish me luck!