The Whitehawk

It means the server transfer went well, and the domain has propagated.

If you’re not reading this… it means you and your computer spiraled off to another dimension. You are no longer in the time and space you used to know. And you won’t be able to have sex ever again, among other simple pleasures of life.

Thank you for your interest and please enjoy the rest of the trip.

Over the next few days I’ll be changing my host and ironing any bits and bops. You may experience some downtime on the website, so I apologize beforehand for any inconvenience.

Last time I tried to do a redesign, I started to do it live and stuttered across many difficulties I couldn’t anticipate, and it ended up in cold water.

This time I decided to leave things quiet and work on it at my pace so the upcoming version doesn’t suffer the same fate as version 3, which never saw the light of day.

So first things first, rather than jumping into Photoshop blindly I decided to think about what I wanted to do with the website. Something that many people and companies don’t do. » Read the rest of this entry «

On the 11th of  October thewhitehawk.com will be no more.

Wait! Don’t go yet…

No, I’m not going anywhere, and no I won’t stop writing. If anything at all, I’ll write a bit more. From that that onwards, or even a bit earlier, the site’s new domain will be http://jard.im which is my last name.

I decided to focus on my name a bit more than a nickname. I’m not famous enough to use a cool domain name like “unstoppablerobotninja“, and trying to have a portuguese person, possibly a future customer or employer spell out or remember “thewhitehawk” is next to impossible.

At first I was thinking of buying marcojardim.com, but the current owner wanted €5000 euros for it (lol!), so I looked around a bit more, and when I found out that jard.im was available I was immediately tempted because not only is it incredibly short, but easy enough for portuguese and non-portuguese people alike to memorize.

I have to admit that if it wasn’t for Jonno I probably wouldn’t have bought it so soon, and I’m glad he supported the idea. So look forward to the new domain name very soon, and another little surprise which I won’t reveal yet

I’m currently out of space in my webhost and the free size has reached a critically low level. Although I can still post a few more articles, I’d feel much better if I could get some free space back.

The reason for this is long and complicated, and I’m certain that I’ll be able to write a great article about how it happened, why, and how I worked around it.

(the space isn’t being occupied by the blog alone, I’m currently hosting a few websites the company I’m working for is/was developing)

Even though I claimed that I would be back in action, the past few weeks have been a bit too tiresome for me. It’s not that I haven’t had the time to write some articles, but between studying for exams, and writting for ForeverGeek, there is little room left for creativity or will to write.

I intend to change that, very soon. Therefore, starting from tomorrow onwards, I will resume the work I made on the next version of this website and from hereon, instead of discussing Anime or Manga I shall be making a sort of “designer’s journal” on the work being implemented.

Unlike my friend Bryan from AvalonStar (currently down) who was doing a live redesign, I will be posting bits and pieces of work. And try to explain the reasoning behind it. I will also be sharing my work with the friendly folks from 9rules, who already gave me some pointers that helped out in the early stages.

So look forward to that. Tomorrow I shall be posting the very first piece of the design, and hopefully you might help me overcome some design blocks that I will eventually stumble upon.

Over the years I’ve had about a dozen homepages/blogs but for the very first time, I’ve reached 10.000 visitors on a homepage since this one’s “foundation” in September of 2005. Although that’s not an amazing feature, given the time the blog’s age, it gives me a certain feeling of accomplishment.

When I made my very first homepage, I got really excited when I finally got 100 visitors, even though the counter tracked my own visits. And now I’m finally jumping into the thousands mark.

Hopefully, the 20.000th visitor will arrive before 2008 ends. And hopefully one day I’ll be able to surpass my girlfriend’s Cross Stitching blog’s visits

Yesterday, the Nintendo Wii was released in Europe, and since I had reserved one, I was (thankfully) able to pick one up from the only FNAC in Madeira. When I got home, I started playing right away, and even got my mother to play it a bit (unfortunately, only the consoles arrived, no Games nor peripherals arrived yet). I thought that those moments would be some of the best, if not the best, this Christmas.

Today when I turned on my laptop, and saw a message from David Peralty popping up and saying “CONGRATS ON THE 9rules ENTRY” I couldn’t believe my eyes! I rushed as fast as I could to their network blog and there it was, The Whitehawk is in. And now I have no doubts, this is certainly the best, and most surprising, Christmas gift so far!

Now I have the arduous task of choosing two categories to put this blog in… and I’m not sure about what to choose. But all in all, I guess that I’ll choose “Anime”, since it’s one of the things I’m certain that I’ll continue about. The second category will be “Personal”. Even though I like writing about technology, most of the things I put in this blog are opinionated, therefore, I think that’s the second category that suits it best.
Technology is probably one of the categories that gives me the most “leeway” since I can write about anything slightly related to it. Hopefully, I’ll finish Version 2.0 before the end of this year
and try to focus a bit more on those categories. But for all visitors, be advised that this blog will be mostly about myself.

If you look just below the blog’s title, in very light blue (yes, I know, terrible contrast), this blog is about: Marco Jardim’s and thoughts and hobbies: exposed.

And now, even though it’s not even 11am yet, I’m going out to celebrate!

When I was submitting this blog for 9rules’ latest submission round a curious question popped up when I was seeing which categories this blog should belong to. So which one is it?

I think that the categories I entered at the time were “Personal”, “Anime” and “Technology”, but are they all correct? Don’t get me wrong, I love to write about all those things, but does this blog really fit any of those categories? I think that I’m missing a general theme for this blog, or at least a tag line that can help people identify what this blog is about.

With this in mind, I decided to edit the almost invisible tag line of this blog from “Griffith’s Blog” to:

Marco Jardim and hobbies: exposed

Though right now the tag line is very irrelevant it made me realize how little I payed attention to one of the important aspects of this site and how “slim” some of the categories I created are. I think that in the beginning I got carried away making too many of them and now there are some subjects I can’t write about as much. Maybe I’ll separate the content and create two separate blogs, maybe not. But from here forward I will try to push this blog in a single direction, instead separate ones.

I can’t be a “Jack of all trades” if I want to distinguish myself from other bloggers.

Over the past couple of days, this blog has been getting quite a few references. First it was David Cubed, who then found the idea interesting enough to bring to BloggingPro and I guess that from there, Aron Putra from Weekly Weblog discovered this blog and invited me to exchange links with him. Unfortunately, due to the similarities between his blog and BloggingPro I had to refuse the invitation.

Though the article has nothing special about it, nor did it propel me to blogging “star-hood” or anything similar, it did (somehow) help me raise over 100 positions in blogtopsites.com and also helped to get my name across to some of the better known bloggers out there.

I can no longer remain in animosity much longer, because my visits are slowly rising again, and who knows when or where they will stop (rising). I’d like to thank you all who just started visiting this blog and I hope that I can continue to provide, and improve, my articles.