Since some time, I’m writing on this series of posts, which is supposed to be a little background story of my life. Explaining which are my passions, what I do all day long and why I’m here blogging. The second purpose of this post is to fill my about page with some more information. The up and coming posts will be covering the following topics:

1. My very first years with a PC (Posted: 2009-03-10)
2. My Way to Web-Development (Posted: 2009-03-17)
3. My Photography Story (Posted: 2009-03-24)
4. My Thoughts on Design (Posted: 2009-03-31)
5. Thoughts on Project Management (Posted: 2009-04-07)
6. Why I switched or My Macintosh Workstation (Posted: 2009-04-14)
7. My Way to Blogging (Posted: 2009-04-21)
8. The current situation and a look into the future (Posted: 2009-04-28)

One thought popped into my mind while I was writing this series: Why should someone be interested in all this, the story about a young man hitting the internet telling his way to all that?

I thought quiet long about this, coming down to three different aspects. First, I like to read similar stories cause I’m interested in the life of others, they inspire me and I can learn from them about how to life my life, what are their passions, the professions and the backgrounds, why they do what they do like they do it. Second, I wanted to fill my about page with value, doing this with some quick paragraphs was not my thought, I want that someone who wants to know more, can read an article about that special parts. Third — the last — is that I want to write an overview about my story that I can remember and read it some day, cause now I can remember the most parts best even though I don’t want to just write it down for my self.

I hope, the posts are well written, interesting and informative. At the moment my post schedule is one post on Tuesday at 00:00 AM (CET, Germany — Berlin) and one at Friday also at 00:00 AM (CET, Germany — Berlin). I want to stick to that schedule this is why I publish this series Tuesdays for the next couple of weeks and still be posting a different post at Fridays.

Update: This series is over. All posts are published.

A useless about page is one of the worst things you can have at a blog, right? I’m now — finally — about to change that. The last post was about why I write English — and also the first partly completing the about page —, this one is about my Mac Desk or Workspace — you choose how you call it.

For me its like for many creative or freelancing people — OK, I’m still at school but hey, I do my projects on side. Working at a desk is just impossible if it’s cultured with papers and other crappy stuff. Which means, that I normally have nothing lying around, especially if I want to enter the creative zone. The only things which are allowed to be there, are my MacBook, secondary screen, phone, a folder containing papers belonging to current projects I’m working on and — of course — my Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and Graphic Tablet.

The Whole Desk

My Two Chairs

Little about my desk. It’s 2.4m (94.49 inch) wide and 90 cm (35.43 inch) deep. It’s white which is one of the colors I like most. There are usually two chairs in front of my desk, one with a back which is chilly and one without which I like best for long sessions cause it doesn’t let me lay back and forces me stick to the work to get done.

Like I already sad, having a clean workspace is key for me to get creative or even just to get some work done. I can’t concentrate if there are many papers — which don’t belong to the project I’m currently working on —, dust or other stuff lying around. If you look at the pictures you’ll probably notice that there are two colors which dominate the room. White and Red. I love the white because it lightens the room and I also love the red because it’s a strong contrast to the white which is supposed to let me think out of the box and makes me fell good.

In the end it comes down to a clean, ordered and uncluttered work-area which makes me happy and helps me to get work done. The best part is I’m happy when I can sit down at my desk to get work done rather than sitting at school at desks which are not that great designed and chairs which are not comfortable.

The MacBook plus Screen, Keyboard and Mouse

What is your thought about the workspace? Is it worth spending some time and money to design a great work-area and to keep it clean? Or don’t you care about the place you are working in? What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment.

There is an updated post about my desk.

Writing this blog in English — which is not my first language — I got some feedback about my writing, which was not so positive. Some people mentioned the quality of my writing and that there are problems with grammar and the spelling of words. That being sad, I started to think about the reason why I blog English, rather than German and why I write in general?

Why I Write

I always had problems writing something at school and for personal usage. My hand writing is not the best, my grammar and spelling was and still is kinda bad. But the quality of writing does not change if you don’t write. But just writing for my own just bored me. Don’t get me wrong, for me it has value to write down the day at the end in some quick lines but just writing a few lines a day wasn’t enough at someday and I started to write more. Doing that, plus some other reasons, I started this blog (there are more reasons for this blog but not for this post). I wanted to write, I wanted to put my thoughts out there and I wanted to get better writing skills. Even if that means getting critics some days. That’s the why I write.

Why English

I started to learn English in 3rd grade of school. Till now I never stopped learning English – which adds up to now over 10 years learning English at school. But since some years, I have started to train my English even more, especially listening and reading. Why and how I did this is a post for its own, for now the reasons why I train my English, which are pretty obvious. English is the worlds most important language — followed by Chinese? — which means if you can understand and speak English, you are able to communicate with most parts on this planet. You can go to other countries for vacation much easier and you maybe able to someday life in another country — if you want that. All that is — in my eyes — much harder if you can’t speak or at least understand an other language — for which I choose English. In the first place I trained my English listening skills but about 1.5 years ago I started to train my writing skills as well and over the years I have seen an improvement — which makes me happy. At the beginning I haven’t been able to write everything down what I wanted, cause I had just a little vocabulary which lead to problems with finding the right words. For now an enormous part of my life is English. I like to communicate with people from other countries and do that with people from Canada, New Zealand, the USA and Australia, but not just communication is English, I write my to do lists, project ideas, mind maps, code comments and this blog in English, which is nearly half of my days language usage. All that I think makes me better in writing, speaking and using the English voice.

Conclusion

I hope that I made clear why I blog and why in English.
If you have some thoughts, own ideas or an own reason to learn other languages or to blog please feel free to leave a comment.
This post is one of many to complete my about page.

The last post I published was a look at the ‘1 month after relaunch‘ milestone which I just hit. Before I decided to publish such an post I had to decide if I wanted to get a milestone post online or not. I have spotted some pros and cons of writing such milestone posts on a personal blog:

Pros

The milestone post shows readers that there is something happening – not just some post hitting the rss reader – and it shows what is happening. A short review of what happened and a short look into the unknown future. I, as a reader, appreciate such posts cause than I can better see what is happening with the person behind the blog and the blog it self. I think especially at a personal blog that’s very important.

A second pro is your own ego. I like to see the good going on – who don’t? – and that includes hitting milestones like the ’1 month after relaunch’. I take the publishing of future plans as a incitation to get the goal hit by the deadline I wrote in the post, which is a great reason to publish such a post – at least in my eyes.

Cons

If you publish a milestone post at your blog you may turn some readers off cause they just like to get information and don’t want to get a note in their rss reader that you changed the design. The second reason is that maybe the feature plans don’t fit the expectations of the reader. This is for a personal blog both not that important I think, cause people who read your blog are interested in you and your opinion which means they are interested in what you think and what you write.

Conclusion

In the end I decided to write such an post. I decided that way because I want the readers to know what they have to expect and what happened since the relaunch. That shows that something is happening and I’m looking forward to get out more great content and improve my writing skills.

This thoughts are for my personal blog. If I would run a business blog which could make me money, I think I would write the milestone post in a completely other way.

What do you think about publishing milestone posts? Please leave a comment or just send me a email.

4 Days ago. The blog turned one month – after the relaunch. For me the experience till now has been positive. Writing is fun, reading other blogs is fun and I get it done on a regular bases. In the beginning I didn’t thought I could really make it, two or at least one post per week is in my eyes hard work. Especially if you have some other passions and jobs to get done – like school, photography, coding and design. Till now I have made it through and I’m looking to the feature which looks exiting!

That’s it, the way till now. Now I want to give you a quick preview on what I have planed to come in the coming weeks:

Design Update

The last month I have been improving the design locally and in a few days I want to get it online which will change some little things – like the sidebar, menu bar and Flickr hovering and improve the validity for some browsers. This will get it’s own attention cause I’m going to post something about updating your theme.

The About Page

In my eyes the about page is the worst part here at this website. There is no content and just some ‘coming soon’ text. That’s bad! Everywhere you can read that you miss getting subscribers and or readers if you don’t have a well done about page in the first place. I wanted to publish some posts about my passions and my workflow in the first place and update the about page with this posts. That was planed to happen in the first weeks of January. Well I didn’t made it. I plan to get that done in the near feature – it’s one of my top priorities for the coming weeks.

KwasK.com

This domain name is now no more under my control. After just one year, I shut the domain down – I already owned KwasK.de since July 2006 and last year thought I would need KwasK.com which now seems like a wrong decision. But I think no decision is wrong if you learn out of it. I learned and now I know that I don’t need that domains anymore. I think I’ll get some other domains in the feature and this two are hooked to an history which I lived, but not to the feature I want to live now!

To come?

There is much on it’s way to come and I just started out. I hope everyone reading this blog stays interested and my content stays interesting. I would love to get your oppinion about my writings so that I can improve through your thoughts!

With the relaunch of this blog I changed my licensing to the Creative Commons 3.0 license. I already have been using the Creative Commons, but till the relaunch of the blog, the use of licensing was not consistent. Every time a work was done I had to decide which license I wanted to use. That created a fairly deep jungle of different licenses used for the same kind of work. In this post I’m trying to describe why I now have different areas of work sorted in categories and why I use different licenses for different kind of work.

What is the Creative Commons

If you already know this, you can go on to the next heading.

The Creative Commons is a license free to use and in my opinion it’s absolutely easy to understand. You just need to leave a link to the creative commons homepage, with a phrase at the end (such as by-nc-sa) which indicates the exact license and the person looking at that page instantly knows what he or she can do with the work and even what is not allowed. This is written down in a great amount of different languages, which means that really everyone can understand what’s allowed and what’s not.

Why I use the Creative Commons

The reason why I use the Creative Commons is that the license is free to use for everyone, not just just that, the Creative Commons is understandable and absolutely easy to use. You leave a link attached at your work with the license and the user will see an easy to understand list of thing he’s allowed to do an what not and under which conditions, which makes it really easy to know what you can do with this work and what not. Which is great because you don’t have to read through pages and pages of licensing.

Differences

The reason I use different licenses is that I think that different content should be used differently. At the moment I’m using a system of 5 different types of content sorted in 3 categories of licensing.

Photography & Web-Design & Design

About one of my passion, the photography, I’m going to post soon but now it’s about the licensing. I struggled a lot with the licensing of photography, cause I want to make it possible that anybody is allowed to publish my pictures but if that person is going to make a great amount of money I really want to get a peace of that sweet cake. But if a blogger would like to use one of my pictures in one of his or her posts why shouldn’t that be possible? Well there is a problem with the bloggers who make money with their blogs. I want that a little blog making a little money – like I’m – should be allowed to use my pictures for his posts. That’s why I use the ‘NonCommercial’ in the photography licensing. Even though I want to specify the word ‘NonCommercial’. In my eyes ‘NonCommercial’ means that you don’t make a living of what you are getting money for. But even that is not clear enough. I think about getting a post written about the clarification of ‘NonCommercial’ usage but for now, if you want to use one of my works with the ‘NonCommercial’, please feel free to contact me and ask if you can use even if you make money. We’ll find a way. With Web-Design and even just Design it’s just the same.

Web-Design should be easy to understand, in my case I think of WordPress themes and PSD templates as well as simple easy one page HTML and CSS layouts. Simply sad every homepage theme I create. Design it self for example is a Wallpaper, a Business-Card as well as a Logo. All this things are free to remix, share and use. If you’d like to use it and just make a decent amount of money with the project, please send me a short email, we can discuss everything!

The licensing for this is simply the – in my eyes – nearly standard Creative Commons License. The Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (by-nc-sa), which allows to use it for non commercial usage, share it and remix it as long as you name me as the author.

Writing

In short the category writing is pretty much every text I publish, weather it’s a post or just a page here at my blog or some other arrangement of words like a e-paper. I wouldn’t stop anyone of quoting me – if he or she wants to do that – but I don’t want to see writing created by me somewhere else with just some paragraphs rearranged. That’s the reason I’ve chosen the Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported (by-nd) for writing. This license allows to share the work but have to name me as the author and you are not allowed to create a derivative work of the writing.

Code

Code in most cases is licensed under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (by-sa) but I also often use the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (by-nc-sa). The reason for this differentiation is that I think some scripts can be used by everyone – like a CSS framework – but some PHP – such as a database framework – script should only be used for NonCommercial projects if the person using it also gives it away for free. The license which is used, is normally mentioned in the code file.

In Short and what if there is no note?

Under this paragraph you see a list with the licenses described above in a short version, with the rights and the link to the license page. But what happens if I haven’t made a note at the work which license is used? If there is no note with the license named, the license listed in this list is used. That means for example, every text I publish is automatically licensed under the Creative Commons by-nd license. If I used a different license I’ll add that for sure. Just at pictures you’ll never find a text where it says ‘licensed under the Creative Commons by-nc-sa’ cause that breaks the whole picture. For that reason please contact me and I’ll tell you which license I used for the particular picture.

• Photography & Web-Design & Design
  • URL / Short: by-nc-sa
  • In Words: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
• Writing
  • URL / Short: by-nd
  • In Words: Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported
• Code
  • URL / Short: by-sa (sometimes: by-nc-sa)
    
  • In Words: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Conclusion

Different licenses is a great thing but like everything, it has some cons. It can be confusing, caused by the use of different licenses, but also is great cause different works should be used in different aspects and for that the different categories of works need different licenses, like in my list above. To prevent confusion I decided to write down which licensing I use for what, for that reason I just have to look at that paper and decide which is right for the work. But that does not mean that I’m going to stick to the licensing given for every and all works. I’ll decide each time, especially if I do client or stock work. The last thing is that I don’t guarantee that this licensing system never changes, that being sad means that this can change!

If you read this and although have such a system or just use one license or have some other thoughts, please leave a comment and let me know your opinion on that licensing things.

Finally it’s now exactly the 2008-12-23 at 00:00 AM and I’m back. Read on to see what changed and what’s going to come.

The Blog

Finally, after 50 days I’m back with a new design, improved layout and the structure. Now there is a much less cluttered sidebar and a well positioned Flickr stream – at the top – here at my blog.

Second, i reimported all posts I wrote over the last year since I’m writing this blog. Why I did this? I’ll publish a own post about this in the future, stay tuned.

Third, the place changed a bit. Till yesterday – few seconds ago -, the blog was placed at cspiegl.com/blog now it’s just cspiegl.com that’s cause I think the blog should be the main part and not just one in the background. And the second reason is that the about page is much better placed at whereischristoph.com which brings up the next point.

New About Page

I created a new about page which was inspired by some other pages I discovered over the web, but manly by the one of Michael Mistretta (http://whereismichael.net). It’s a clean easy way to find out where you can find information about me and where I do my stuff for example the link to my flickr stream, twitter profile, my facebook profile and of course to this blog.

KwasK.com and KwasK.de

That wasn’t the last I changed, I also had another page for a long time. The page I’m talking about was KwasK.de for the most time and than about one year ago as I were hitting new areas of the internet, I got KwasK.com. But now after a year of KwasK.com and about 3 years of KwasK.de I thought about the use of the domain and came to an ending, in which this two domains are no more exist. So I simply got rid of the two domains which means that I don’t own them any more. They KwasK.com will stay online and linked till the 24 of January 2009 and KwasK.de will stay online till the 06 of June 2009 and both will have a CLOSING page online for the rest of their lives. So far about KwasK.com, I’ll post more on that soon, especially about the reason why I got rid of this domains.

Business-Card

In the last few month I tried to overwork my complete online brand. But not just the online brand, I also worked at the offline brand. I’m going to post a picture of the card and a down loadable version the day after tomorrow. I’m pretty satisfied by the result and that’s manly cause I thought so long about getting a own business-card and now finally it’s here and great looking. I simply can give it away and not just write my email or homepage address on a crappy paper. If you have a blog and want to contact with people offline for example at a conference or a congress – like the 25c3 where I’m going to be and post in the next few days about – you’re willing to have a business-card in place so that anyone who asks you for your email, you just give them a little card with all information needed. The second reason is if you are a designer, you can instantly show your abilities to the person in front of you – about this I’m also going to post a own post, why I did my business-card the way I did it.

Future?

So, that’s it for now. With this post I start a series of posts which are going to be more in depth information about why I made my decisions the way I made them. So if you’re interested, stay tuned – maybe subscribe to the blog? – and give me some feedback or contact me if you want.

Some days ago I took the blog offline for maintaining. I now decided to take the blog back online till the new will be launched cause of the ‘rss’ / pagevisiters cause the rebranding will take some time longer than just some days. The new page will be online with the next WordPress release 2.7. Until than I have some work todo and am not just relaxing. So, see you with V2 in the near features (maybe 2008-11-10?) let’s see.

Until than, have fun!

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Just a quick note.

I just updated this WordPress installation to 2.6.1, some ‘dot zero’ bugs were fixed.

If you want to know more about that version, please look at the WordPress Develoepment Blog.

Today a new Version of WordPress where Released, and up to date – which I’m most of the time – I’ve just upgraded this blog to Version 2.6.
If you want to know something about the ‘Features’ of 2.6 watch this video, or visit the news which were posted about WordPress 2.6.