This Fall, I celebrate five years of blogging. I have written tons of web development stuff at Perishable Press, lots of helpful WordPress stuff at Digging into WordPress, some philosophical stuff at mindfeed.org, creative/artistic stuff at Dead Letter Art, jQuery stuff at jQuery Mix, and some business-related web-design stuff at Monzilla Media. Plus a bunch of interviews, guest posts, and other blogging projects. So yeah, lots of blogging and writing during the past five years. And they just flew by.

Despite what the haters may say, there are some tangible benefits to blogging. As I write, I continue to learn a great deal – not just about the fine art of writing, but also about the nature of the audience, social media, and the Web in general. There’s a lot to it, more than you may realize. Looking back during my recent hiatus, I enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on the past and contemplate lessons learned, future goals, and what it all means. Here are some of my thoughts, strategies, and lessons learned after five years of blogging..

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I have been doing some non-design-related work recently and have not been saturated with anything even computer-related for the past several weeks. Mostly I have been just enjoying life, but also drawing quite a bit and going around taking photos of old, decrepit homesteads and factories. Needless to say, it’s been a much-needed respite from the usual crunch and grind.

Taking a few steps back like this from the Web — even for such a short period of time — is remarkably refreshing, and has given me time to contemplate all this web-stuff that keeps us all so busy. When you’re right down in it, focused like a laser and cranking the days away, time sort of loses meaning, as every moment is purely an opportunity to get something done.

Looking more at the overall shape of things gives you a better perspective of how all the little pieces fit into place. When we’re focused strongly on a particular set of goals, it’s necessary to filter out as much extraneous information as possible. This helps in the short term, but it’s good to step back once in awhile and “let in” as much depth and perspective as possible.

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Might as well face it, Twitter is here to stay. Not that it’s all that bad, just used to be a lot more laid-back and enjoyable. These days it seems to have been taken over by the lowest common-denominator, mostly high-school twits or useless commercial propaganda. Even so, I still enjoy tweeting the occasional profound thought once in awhile, and even like to play around with various types of “advanced” Twitter functionality. You know, cool stuff like including “Tweet This!” links with short URLs, showing off my number of Twitter followers, displaying the number of tweets for each post, and even backing up my marvelous tweets quickly and easily. As you might have guessed, these are the kind of stupid Twitter tricks that you will find in this article. So kick back, relax, and enjoy these twitterific techniques that will make you go tweet.

“Tweet This!” short links for posts

I like to include an easy way for readers to “tweet” my posts, but the URLs are generally way over Twitter’s 140-character limit. Fortunately, we can use PHP’s handy file_get_contents function to grab short versions of our URLs from a free minifying service like TinyURL.

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Dipping into a little social-media nonsense on this one.. hope you enjoy it!

I have been using Twitter now for around two years. In that time, I have gone from hating Twitter to practically loving it. The more I use Twitter, the more I appreciate its value in terms of social networking, self-expression, and even online entertainment. What can I say, it’s just fun to be working online while sharing nano-thoughts with a group of like-minded individuals. In this post, I share some insight and elaborate on some important aspects of Twitter: following & followers, profiles, avatars, and tweets. Not all of it is especially earth-shattering stuff, but hopefully it will contribute to the growing pool of understanding about everyone’s favorite micro-blogging service. So without further ado..

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With the explosion of social media, networking, and bookmarking services, there are a zillion ways to add “Share This Post” functionality to your WordPress-powered sites. In addition to the myriad services and plugins, we can also add these links directly, using nothing more than a little markup and a few choice PHP snippets. Such individual links provide full control over the selection, layout, and styling of each link without requiring the installation of yet another WordPress plugin.

This article shares SEO-friendly code snippets for ten of the most popular social media sites using completely valid XHMTL-Strict markup. All of the following code snippets feature:

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Picture it. You have just prepared some recent snapshots of your buddies from a gathering over the weekend. Special care was taken to choose the images, and resize the images appropriately. As you sign in to your favorite social networking site to upload these images, you realize your credentials are invalid. You type in permutations of your user-name and password, check the “Caps” Key, but find that you are still not allowed access to your account. Your account could be have been hacked, removed, or just made unavailable. The site that you swore would hold and keep your memories, thoughts, feelings, and treasured moments are inaccessible or worse, gone forever. How could this happen? Just as we get attached to material things in life, we become attached to our email, blogs, podcasts, bookmarks, and images. In other words, this is our new digital existence. Some would call it our digital baggage.

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Alright, time for another “How’d-you-do-that-thing-on-your-site?” post. This question comes from the one and only Mr. Graham of ImJustCreative.com. In a recent email, Graham literally begged me to share my “secret recipe” for displaying my latest Twitter Tweets (wow, did I actually just say that?) right here on Perishable Press:

…Would be really really decent of you if you could let me know how to do it? Pretty please? How do you call the last twitter feed, what commands do you need etc?

In case you have no idea what we’re talking about here, scroll down to the bottom of any page on the site (using the current theme) and observe the savviness and sophistication of my latest Twitter post, updated automagically every fifteen minutes. Or, for those of you too lazy to “go there,” here is a screenshot demonstrating the perpetual Twitter display:

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