But now I had one week off from school (holidays) and thought: One week should be plenty to finish what I wanted to finish a year ago. So I started to get going and rock this thing through. And now here the result is. I am not to happy about the design and some other things but I am happy that I am finally releasing it to the wild. And to mention it I just read a post where I found the following quote and I think it is totally right. I can improve what I started not as good later on too.

That anything you do you should do the best you can, but even if you don’t have it perfected before you start, for goodness sake, man, still start.

~ Shawn Blanc

Now what is this thing about? First, it is called AIDvertisement. Second it is about advertisement and aid—who guessed right?

But what is the deal? More than one year ago—just after the start of FusionAds, I got hooked by the way advertisement should look like, not distracting, simple, beautiful and elegant. Some time later, I started to think about how I could give something to organizations like Greenpeace and UN-Aids or BlogActionDay and than I had an idea. I though why is there no advertisement network for such organizations where everybody can grab one tiny code sniped to include banners of such organizations at his own site. So I started, not finished. Started again and finished it. I hope you all like it and I hope even more that some people are going to implement the banner code at their sites.

In the end there is just one thing left to be sad. Right now this is an one man show. But I would like to change that! So if you would like to help me with some stuff please feel free to contact me at ads@aidvertisement.net or via Twitter @AIDvertisement

Now check out the AIDvertisement, and start helping to solve problems.

Climate change affects us all and it threatens more than the environment. It threatens to cause famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees.

~ Blog Action Day ‘09

I think everybody knows that it is not just about the Blog Action Day, it is more about every day life. And we have to change something about the Climate Change. We need the environment. The environment does not care about us but we need to care about the environment.

One of the biggest problems is that the Climate Change will not just harm our environment. It is going to harm our whole lifestyle. It is going to change technology, money, business, our food and land, water and the temperature. And most other aspects of life too.

There is need that something changes and I hope together with over 9,040 we can achieve this change — or at least force some people to think about it. Make more than 12,597,554 readers aware of the problems — or at least get them to think about it again — is not bad and seriously a great step to remind the theme.

I am just one person with a blog, but here with the Blog Action Day we are over 9,040 Blogs writing about the issue and all together gather about 12,597,554 readers which are about 0.2% of the worlds population — not taking into account that some people are reading two or more blogs. That is a great number and I personally hope that we can change something.

I AM READY for an ambitious, fair, and binding global climate deal. I call on world leaders to pass climate policies grounded in the latest science and strong enough to get us back to 350.

~ 350.org

I hope that the issue is interesting for everybody and you read some more about it at blogactionday.org. Maybe you are also interested in 350.org which also issues the Climate Change. The last resource I would like to add is tcktcktck.org’s I AM READY event which addresses the hopefully signed climate deal in Copenhagen this year!

I take this post for the one normally posted friday morning.
UPDATE: Some numbers changed!

Like I already wrote in my last Tuesday Post, I recently cut back on Twitter usage. I unfollowed many people and now read every tweet which arrives in my twitter Inbox also called my timeline. But why are so many people following way to many people? Just for the big numbers of followers? I don not think that Twitter is just about followers! As you may see if you visit my Twitter account, I’m just following 34 people. And I read all of their tweets! That as a result meant for me to unfollow some big twitterers, some not so big. In the end it came down to this 34 I’m following right now. That number is constantly changing, it may be 33 tomorrow or 35 who knows? The thing is who I’m following.

The last time I scanned though the people I follow to find out whom I may unfollow was when I was about to get more stress at school plus the fact that I switched the Twitter Client—I’m now using Tweeti. But how did I decided whom to unfollow? For me I decided to unfollow big accounts which were posting a huge load of tweets per day. For Example @garyvee or @kevinrose. These are just two and I have to admit that these are two who are very interesting persons from around the web but for me they didn’t provide relevant content in their tweets. Gary Vaynerchuck (alias @garyvee) posts much more relevant video posts at his website garyvaynerchuk.com and Kevin Rose does the weekly Diggnation which is also very informative and worth watching. Even though they have several thousand followers and post many times a day, I continued to not read their tweets and just overlooked them.

I needed to get rid of this tweets which I never read. I needed to lower the amount of time which I needed to skim through my timeline for more relevant stuff, like learning for school especially in the last weeks before my final exams! Just like my RSS Reader needed to be cleaned up. But who is worth following is Twitter even worth using? In the end it came down that Twitter definitely is worth using! But it needs to get used wisely. I’m just following people who are interesting for me, who post relevant tweets and are personal at their twitter profiles. And I really don’t like it if a person posts to many times per day cause I just do not have the time to read all that stuff!

In my eyes Twitter is not about the number of followers nor about how many people I’m following. It’s about whom to follow and what to tweet!

Quick Note About this Post

Even though, I was about to publish this post, reread it and checked the links. You may notice that I’m again following @kevinrose. The reason for that is simple. I checked the link, read the last tweets and noticed that they are more interesting than I thought last time I deleted him from my followers list. Let’s see if he’s worth following.

My problem was that I tended to register an account at each and every social-network I was able to find, just to protect my nickname and / or to test what the network was all about. Till I hit a point where I started to think about why I have all this different social-networks? That was when I decided that something needed to change. What I did was that I created a MindMap of all the networks I was registered at and thought about the reasons, why I registered there. Moving the different networks around I decided which to use active, which to stay registered and not use actively and most important to delete! In the end I got a massive load of networks to delete.

There are some different reasons I decided to delete some networks, some of which were:

• that I had most people in two ore more different networks at a time
• the network had no value to me
• the network is not international

Maybe I’m wrong about this. I now some people who told me that it’s important to be in each and every network, in as many as possible, just to get your name out there. Maybe that’s right but if it is, I decided against that. Why? I think it’s not important to be in as many places as possible to meat the right people. It’s much more important to be at the right place at the right time with the right people. Maybe I decided against the ‘best places’ but for me the places I’m still at are the once which provide valuable to me.

One question I got a lot in the past weeks was why I deleted all my accounts at local networks which concentrate on German / European people. My answer to that is that nearly all people I had there as contacts are registered in at least one international network where I’m too which makes the local network somehow senseless. I’m an international person, I’m interested in what happens all over the world, I’m not really interested what happens locally and if something crucial happens I hear about it thought the people registered at the international networks. Local networks — in my eyes — are some kind of limit.

Maybe some of you think differently about this but for me it meant that I now am registered at social-networks of value to me. Spend less time in the once which didn’t meant anything to me and have more time for things I love to do — somehow that was a GTD decision but I’m feeling better and that is what counts.

Like I already wrote, I started to learn coding with the book ‘HTML for Kids’. I than slowly started to play less games and focused more and more on coding, switching to Visual Basic for some time and later switching back to HTML, CSS, Java Script and PHP, doing some of my own projects which—I think—nearly every one, learning to code one of this languages, tries to get done.
Some of which have been a simple guestbook-script, a counter/analytics tool, a news script, an account management systems (user management) and for me in the end the plan was to code a ContentManagementSystem or at least a framework to use for website development. Most of this projects were shut down pretty quick caused by new ideas—how to do something—hitting my mind or new ideas for new projects.

In this time a friend of mine and I got our first client, who asked us if we could design and code a website—some HTML, CSS and PHP. For me it was the first time I had the experience working with a client and with a deadline! Doing the website was a little tone of work and we had to learn many things from scratch and redo the project some times before it turned out the way we and the client wanted it to be. Even though I have to admit in the end, it looked pretty good but if I look back at that website I’m not proud of it and wouldn’t add it to my portfolio but I’m proud that I did it, the way I did it, the time I did it—keeping in mind that was in 8th grade.

After that project, I started some other activities, projects like game-server hosting and trying some various things, like coding an own community site/social-network. While most of this ideas have been a mess, I learned so much through them that I think it was good for me, to learn different things and to get some experience in the field. And it fit’s my idea of learning something. I think that way of learning something is way better than school. Learning something just by hearing about it, writing down some lines and than learning till you get bored is not the way to go—at least not for me. I learn by doing failures, experimenting and getting hurt—wether it’s stress, money or just invested time. This process may take longer than the normal way but in the end it’s more of a value to me.

Doing all that also thought me something about me. Which is the reason I slowly moved away from this row coding sessions too more a project managing and ‘doing’ kinda thing. This mainly happened by discovering things like WordPress—which is a gorgeous CMS. Since than I started to use ready to use resources from the web to get my projects out there and to get client work done in less time than before when I had to code everything my self. Nowadays I use WordPress as a publishing platform—with a bunch of plugins—, PHP classes, a JavaScript framework—jQuery—and a reset css script—coded by my self.

Using all that made my workflow much faster and I’m happy about that because now I can focus on other things like actually bringing something out there rather than getting stuck in the early day development—even though I love to do some coding some times—and focus more on things like blogging, design, planing, collecting ideas, brainstorming or networking and of course photography.

Done! What’s next? Ah OK, photography! Stay tuned for part three of the series. If you want let me know your feedback or maybe tell your story.

The Why

I’m a web-developer and designer which means – for me – that I can’t just let the design like it is now and am constantly improving my website theme – even if I should be doing other things. I just can’t let it look the same if I get a new idea, I just have to implement the thoughts. That’s manly the reason why I updated the site’s theme.

The Way I did it

Reading many different blogs, I learned that you risk loosing readers which come to your site constantly. New readers will see the new and just don’t care. But for the constant readers it can be hard to see your site change completely one day to the other, which means, it is much easier to through little changes out than a big update, moving all objects and change the colors, which was never my thought cause I’m happy with the design like it is now.

Thinking about not updating with one big update rather than pumping out little changes. I decided to updated my local copy, giving me a deadline in which the update should be ready. I started updating my local copy, thinking about the changes, updating again and looking at it again. Some days before the update went live, I stopped implementing new things and just got rid of all this validity errors and browser compatibility problems. After all the little update which hit the ground at Sunday morning was ready 2 days earlier than I thought – which never hurts!

I think this milestone updating of a website is much better than just sending out updates when they hit you and you just implemented the new ideas into your local copy. You never know which problems that update will bring you, or if you really like it.

Final Thoughts

I’m now planing on getting other projects done. At this blog I now want to focus on writing posts rather than updating the design. Following the advise which is spread at many places from various people: “Content is King”

I hope you like the changes – even if they are a little hard to spot. If you have some thoughts about it or have an additional thought about updating a web-site, please leave a comment.

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!

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.

funny-Plurk-no-Plurk-Bug

At school we have like you would know, one internet connection. And if there are many people online, than it’s really slow. And I tryed to look at my Plurk timeline, above you see what I got.

I think thats really funny, but it’s defenetely not Plurks fault!

What and you don’t even get a message or something that it only works with JavaScript enabled…

My Opinion on this

I think that’s bad, OK most of the people have JS enabled but some don’t wether its for security or for speed or just cause they don’t know about. But I think the simplest thing you could do is to show a message that it just works with JS.

What do you think about it? Does it matter for you or what?