I think everyone that blogs for any length of time gets the deja vu feeling about posts. It could be your own or someone else’s, but there are times when it seems there can’t be anything new to blog about. You’ve been there ‘brought the t-shirt’, blog and tagged that same t-shirt - heck you’ve even taken a picture of it and flickr’d it. If you blog at any regular interval you will at some point get the feeling you are rinse and repeating yourself.

Each new social network seems to spur a rash of customised home pages. It’s easy to brand identify yourself throughout the social web and doing so is often overlooked in it’s importance. I see this as part of taking control of your online presence. As a designer this is crucial - you could argue that as anyone that interacts online this is also crucial. You can get your ‘identity’ out there on most sites you use and this is a good thing I think.

I have done the reboots for a few years now, this time around I am not rebooting though. I had the choice a few weeks to go for the reboot or to take a different approach and opt out this time. For some reason I did feel a bit of pressure to reboot, it wasn’t from anyone so not sure if anything beyond my own mind. There is a certain something about rebooting, not a ‘rush’ it’s more a community enjoyable thing, whatever reboot site you do it from. Being the community junkie I am I liked that. There was also something about committing myself to a deadline as I only really (bar one) rebooted personal sites. Add to those reasons the ‘buzz’ and feeling in the air and you get a powerful sway to reboot.

Praise and working paradox

It’s a bit of a paradox that things that work well we never notice in life. You’d think the things that ‘just worked’ would be hailed as wonderful and supreme, yet as human’s we have this nasty habit of ignoring the silent working. Think about the last time you weren’t complacent about something that worked all the time and noted that it was doing a great job? More often than not we are focused on the things that don’t work. The things that claim to do one thing on the tin and fail to live up to anything apart from much ranting.

One of the most noticeable things about a lot of sites done in the after glow of the brand name web 2.0 is the virus of the tabs. If it’s navigation it seems nowadays if it’s not ‘tabbed’ it’s just not hip with the kids. However, just with any samey trend the reverse effect is reached of mind numbing clones. Somewhere along the hype and band wagon jumping tabs came to mean the same rounded gloss or not gloss (you get a choice in gloss at least) boredom.

This is a sort of mini update post as feel I need to after my prolonged quietness. The past few weeks have been a bit mad not in part because I’ve been out of the country for one of them. The week before I left work was hectic so I had to put blogging on the back seat (you know it’s bad with me when that happens). Lots had to be sorted as I was heading for America thanks to a client. I’m now back and despite a bit of a case of jet lag getting settled into what I missed in my mini Spring break.