I've been writing in my journal since I was sixteen. I just turned forty-four, so that means I have journals covering almost thirty years of my life.

When other people hear about my journaling practice, they say things like "I could never do that", or "I tried it but I couldn't keep up with it."

So if you, too, would like to keep a journal but are struggling to start or maintain it, I thought I'd talk about how I've managed to do it consistently for so long.

1. First of all, for me, it is definitely not a daily practice! I absolutely do not care how often I do it. Sometimes I write more than once in a day. Sometimes I write a couple times in a month. It doesn't matter to me. This is because..

2. I don't try to write about everything that happened. Yes, I do write about some things that happened, but these may or may not be big things. I write about the big things, sure, but I also write a lot about small, insignificant anecdotes that I'd like to remember. But most of what I write isn't even about things that happened. Instead...

3. I write about whatever is on my mind. I use journaling to dump my thoughts on to paper, to give myself a time and place to process the things going on in my life, and help me to put into words the feelings and worries and hopes and goings-ons in my world at that moment. Whether I'm puzzling over which direction to go in my business, or processing a big social event I just attended, or thinking about some world event, or documenting the unfolding pandemic, or taking stock of those special moments as a parent, my journal is a place where I can "think out loud" (on paper).

4. I write as little or much as I feel like. Sometimes I write just a few sentences. Sometimes I write five pages. If I feel like stopping, I stop. If I get pulled away to do something else, I may or may not come back to finish later. It doesn't really matter. I don't try to write a full page, even though the journals I use have a place for the date at the top. I'll stop and start on any line.

5. When I start writing, I write the date. When I'm done, I sign my name and close the book. It's not important, but I did this as a teenager for whatever reason, and this gives a sense of closure, like the thoughts are now frozen in the book and I can walk away and leave them behind.

6. I can go back and see how I felt at certain times in my past. For example, my wife is pregnant with our second son, so I was recently going back to reading what was going on in my mind when she was pregnant with our first son. It was surprising to be reminded of all the stuff that was going on back then that I'd totally forgotten about. It's always enlightening to read about the things I was worried about that never came to be. And it's fun to read about decisions I made while journaling that ended up having a significant impact on my life for years to come. It's also interesting to see the patterns and cycles, the ups and downs in my life, my business, and in my energy levels and inspiration, that ebb and flow year after year.

7. Even though its nice to go back and read old journals, almost all the benefit comes from the journaling itself. It's the process of thinking, reflecting and writing that takes the thoughts out of my head and puts them on paper. When I'm done journaling, it's like a fresh start. I'm decluttering my mind, getting my thoughts in order, and throwing out things I no longer need. When I'm done journaling, I have a fresh energy where I'm ready to take on something new.

8. Although I don't have any strict routine around journaling, I almost always like to journal on Saturday mornings with my first coffee of the day. It's a great time to have some quiet time to myself, wake up slowly, reflect on what happened over the past week, take stock of all that's going on in the back of my mind, and decide on what I want to do with my free time on the weekend. I'll sit there for an hour or so, and when I finish, I'm relaxed and inspired and ready to go have a wonderful weekend.

9. I don't write for anyone but myself. Sure, I know in the back of my mind that one day, in the far future, my children or grandchildren might read through these, so there are a few things I might not say, or might write in a secret code for myself, but otherwise these are secret documents that are written for nobody but myself.

10. It doesn't really matter what books or pens you use, as long as you enjoy them. My favourite books are either Moleskine or Leuchturm1917, A5 ruled black hardcover notebooks. They're pricey, but they don't fall apart, and they're a pleasure to write in. I want them to last a long time. My favourite pen at the moment is a retractable black Stabilo Palette 0.4mm gel pen.

If you're curious about journaling, or struggled with it in the past, I hope this helps you see a different approach that might work better for you. I highly recommend journaling, though it might not be for everyone. For me, it helps me think and process my life, allowing my mind to be quieter overall, while having the small benefit of documenting the things in my life that would otherwise be easily forgotten.

I've been really enjoying working on this year's Advent of Code. If you haven't heard of it, it's a series of coding puzzles, two a day for 25 days, from December 1st to December 25th every year. It only started a few days ago, so it's not too late to catch up. Or, if you're reading this later, you can always go back and try it out at your leisure. But, it is a lot of fun to wait until midnight each day to see what the next puzzle is.

What's cool about it, is that you can use any programming language you want. You just need to take an input file, run a calculation based on the puzzle instructions, and come up with an "answer", which is usually a number of some kind.

You can use your favourite language to try to come up with an answer as fast as possible, or you can use it as an opportunity to strengthen your skills in another language, even a language you've never used before and want to try out!

You need to log in with GitHub, Google, Reddit or Twitter, and then you can download an input file for each day. You'll need to read the input file in to your language of choice, and parse and process each line of the file.

If you're really fast, you can even get on the leaderboard. But doing that requires completing the puzzles in just a few minutes at midnight EST so that you're one of the first 100 people to do so. I'm definitely not fast enough to even bother trying!

So far, I've been using JavaScript with Node.js this year. My approach is to pipe in the input into my puzzle solution like this:

node solution.js < input.txt

To do this, I'm using an npm library called split that simply splits a stream into lines, to make it easier to work with. Here's a simple example that just counts the number of lines in a stream:

import split from 'split';

// keep some variables in the module scope to keep track of things
let count = 0;

// read the input file as a stream from stdin (Standard Input)
process.stdin

    // pipe it to the split library, to split it into lines
    .pipe(split())

    // receive a callback for each line in the stream
    .on('data', (line) => {
        // do something with each line, in this case just counting
        count++;
    })

    // receive a single callback when the file is done
    .on('end', () => {
        // do something at the end, eg. console.log the output
        console.log(count);
    });

If you're interested, there is an online community on Reddit where you can share your solution and join in the discussion to see what others have done each day.

I'll be sharing my progress on Mastodon at @[email protected], so you can follow me on there for updates and commentary.

I've also been pushing my solutions to Advent of Code up to GitHub, so feel free to see how I've approached it, if you're interested. But no cheating! 😉

I've wanted to launch one of my side projects for a very long time. I'm the kind of guy who loves starting things, but never finishes them. Well, this week I finally finished one of them, by launching The Joy of Svelte, my first online video course!

Finding inspiration in an old five-year plan

Back in December, 2019 (a year ago, but feels like a decade), I got a new notebook for Christmas, because I had filled up my old one that I use for meeting notes, To Do lists, and stuff like that. I started re-reading my old one, and saw that near the start, I had a five-year plan from December, 2015. I had a goal to expand beyond my freelancing business and launch my first video course in 2016, with the goal of continuing to create courses, apps and other products over the coming years. By the year 2020, I wanted to have a whole catalog of courses and products under my belt.

Well, when I reading that, four years had passed, and I still hadn't launched anything. Not a single app or course, other than the dozens of free videos I'd recorded for YouTube, and, of course, all the client work I'd done as a freelance web developer. But I still wanted to do something for myself, something of my own creation.

The disappointment and shame I felt while reading this was the push I needed to finally commit to this lifelong plan and stick with one of my side projects long enough to actually see it through to launch. So, in January, 2020, I decided that I would focus on the things I was most excited about: teaching, recording videos, and Svelte.

Trying to stay motivated by committing publically

I had it all figured out. I put up a landing page that said "Coming in the Spring of 2020", and publically announced that I was working on a new course. I committed myself to my newsletter subscribers and Twitter followers, I put out an announcement on YouTube, and then hoped that all the public accountability would force me to follow through and finally launch something.

Well, that was all back in February. Spring came and went, and I was still stuck planning and trying to decide on the course contents. In June, I had to update the landing back and change it to "Coming Summer 2020..."

Coding as a form of procrastination

I decided early on to self-publish The Joy of Svelte by developing my own video course platform. I'm a web developer, after all, and it's way too easy to feel like I'm being productive when I'm writing code. So in a way, it was a form of procrastination, because I could sit down to integrate Stripe, or create a video player interface, or write code to deal with emailing out access links, and feel like I was making progress. In reality, I could've just used one of the many video course platforms available and saved myself a lot of time and effort.

Having now built all that out, I'm happy I did, because now I can self-publish more courses in the future. But I realise now that I could have launched a lot sooner if I had focused on recording videos and spent less time writing code.

Pivoting to focus on learning objectives

I started to record some videos, with the idea of making an SVG drawing app using Svelte. I recorded three videos showing how to do this, until I got to a point where it was starting to be more about SVG particulars and less about Svelte.

Eventually, I came across some very useful advice about creating course content: identify what it is specifically you want people to learn, then go and teach those things. I know that seems super obvious, but somehow I'd lost track of that and was instead accidently trying to make a course teaching people to make an SVG drawing app, but I don't think many web developers have the need to make SVG drawing web apps.

I looked at the landing page I'd originally made, and saw that I'd already outlined some key topics that I was planning to include:

You will learn about:

• getting started with Svelte
• using templating syntax to render data
• data fetching strategies for components
• using components to simplify complex web user interfaces
• building custom stores for state management
• integrating Svelte into an existing web application
• ...and more!

I decided to make six new videos, each one focused on one of these learning objectives. It was a simple, straightforward approach that ended up working very well, because it kept me focused on what it is I wanted people to learn, and less on what cool thing I wanted to build as a code example.

Back to the drawing board

So I abandoned the SVG drawing app videos, and started from scratch. I looked for some simple free web APIs and found one for Nobel Prizes, and decided that I'd use that to show people how to fetch data from an API. It needed very little explanation, didn't introduce any new, unrelated concepts, and more closely resembled the kind of API that I'd often used to build web interfaces for my clients. It might not be super fancy or flashy, but it allowed me to focus on Svelte instead, which is what mattered.

Off screen, I sat down and built a UI for browsing, search and filtering Nobel Prizes, to see if that would work well for the videos, and it turned out to be perfect. It gave me lots of different opportunities to demonstrate various Svelte features, and plenty of ways to show off what makes Svelte a joy to work with, and all the different strategies for making clean, reusable web components using Svelte. None of it felt contrived, all of it was applicable to real world web applications. I was ready to start recording.

Early access pre-launch and a final push to finish

Summer 2020 was coming to an end, and I did not want to change the release date on the landing page again. So, in one day, I sat down and recorded three of the six videos. I uploaded them to YouTube as unlisted videos, and on the very last day of summer, I sent out an email to my newsletter subscribers announcing that Early Access was now available.

It felt so good when I had my first sale ever! And then another one came! And then, while I was sleeping, another one! People were actually willing to pay me for my videos! This was a huge milestone in my life and career, and really validated all the work I'd put into it.

Still, I had three more videos to record to finish it up.

Benefiting from my own misfortune

Then something horrible happened. I recorded two more videos in one day, but when I finished, it turned out that OBS had used the wrong microphone, and so the audio was total garbage. I had to painfully decide to throw those videos out and re-record them.

Actually, that turned out to be beneficial, because I wasn't totally happy with some of my examples, and ended up coming with better examples that demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of the different types of Svelte stores before I re-recorded the videos.

Launch day, and being too early

Three months after my Early Access launch, I had finally finished all the videos, and was ready to put the finishing touches on my web site, so that people could get a private link to watch videos directly on joyofsvelte.com instead of on YouTube. Using unlisted YouTube videos had felt a bit unprofessional, although I don't think anybody would have complained if I had stuck with using them.

Finally, on Monday, December 14th, 2020, I launched my first video course ever! I created a promotional video, and posted it with an emoji-filled tweet to Twitter.

On launch day I had two sales, and woke up the next morning to a third sale. I had tempered my expectations so that I wouldn't be disappointed, and so I was actually pleasantly surprised to make any sales that day. I'd figured most people who were excited about the course would have bought it during Early Access, and that turned out to be mostly true.

I also have come to realise that I'm probably way too early to be launching a course about Svelte. I chose Svelte because I'm so excited about it, and am happy to talk about Svelte endlessly, but the fact is, Svelte is not yet widely adopted amongst web developers, so there really isn't a huge audience there yet. It's still somewhat a niche topic. And that's okay, but it means that there was no way I was going to have a ton of sales on the first day.

There just aren't that many people learning Svelte right now. I think this will change over the coming months and years, and I'm glad to have put this course out into the wild to help people looking to learn Svelte. I hope it helps people to see what it is about Svelte that I find exciting, and why it has changed the way I approach web development altogether.

Lessons learned for the next course

This won't be my last course, it's just the beginning. Here are some lessons I've learned from building this course, that will change the way I approach building my next video courses.

1. I'll focus on learning objectives from the start. I'll make a short list of what I think people will want to learn about, and make videos focused on those points. The code examples I use will be chosen for how well they can demonstrate those key learning objectives.

2. I'll avoid perfectionism, and limit how much time I spend planning the course up front. Planning is a trap that I fell into, because you can keep planning the same thing forever. At some point you have to say "good enough" and start doing the actual work. Chances are, when you actually start recording the videos, you'll find out the best way to do things.

3. I ended up re-recording a lot of The Joy of Svelte by accident, and that benefitted me by allowing me to improve the content before recording the final videos. I will do this on purpose next time, maybe live streaming the content on Twitch, or possibly running a workshop beforehand, so hopefully I can get some useful feedback first as well. (And I'll try to remember to double check my microphone before recording the final videos!)

On to the next side project

One of the best things about launching The Joy of Svelte, is that I can now start working on all the other side projects and ideas I came up with this year, but wouldn't allow myself to work on until the course launched. If you're interested in following along, you can sign up for my newsletter.

And, of course, if you're interested in learning Svelte, check out The Joy of Svelte!

I've been working on rewriting my blog since forever. In fact, here's a video I made back in 2015 introducing codingwithjesse.com and my plans to rebuild my PHP blog using the latest and greatest web technologies. In 2015, this meant I was going to make a REST API with Node.js, and build a React frontend. So that's where I started.

Fast-forward three-and-a-half years, and the site still wasn't done. I hadn't spent that much time on it really, so it just had a REST API and an administration area for writing and editing blog posts. I had done a tiny bit of the public side using React but it was still in rough shape.

That's about the time I fell in love with Svelte and decided I wanted to use Svelte for everything. In July, I started migrating my blog from React to Svelte + Sapper. (I enjoy rewriting React code using Svelte so much, I would do it all day if I could!)

Static Site Generation

Sapper by default comes with a Node.js web server, which serves dynamic server-side rendered markup that gets re-hydrated in the browser. Alternatively, you can choose to use the Sapper "export" feature to generate a static web site that works with any web hosting, no Node.js needed.

My administration area using the REST API is not part of this static website; the admin will only run on my local computer, using a local database. The site does not need user authentication or any kind of session state, and it only changes when I write new posts, so I decided that a static website would be perfect, at least for now.

What was easy & awesome?

My experience with Sapper was mostly positive. Often I was surprised at how easy things were. Here are some of those surprises.

1. Getting started

Getting started with Sapper is really easy. The Sapper sample template already has a blog as its example code, and comes with all the build and testing infrastructure that you'll need to get a Sapper website up and running.

2. Rollup

I really enjoyed working with Rollup, also created by Rich Harris, the creator of Svelte & Sapper. If you don't want to use Rollup, you can also choose to use Webpack or another build tool, if that's what you're into.

3. Static site generation

The static generation worked great! It starts at your homepage and crawls your site like a spider, looking for new links in any <a> tags it can find. This meant that my secret administration area was excluded, which was exactly what I wanted anyway. It creates directories and index.html files, to create all the URLs you've defined.

4. Static websites are fast!

Once the static site was live, it didn't take long to achieve a perfect lighthouse score! I honestly did not think that was possible, but here we are:

5. Routes without a router

The way routes work in Sapper is really easy and powerful. You put Svelte components inside the src/routes/ folder to define new routes. If you want a URL like /blog/my-post, you can make a Svelte component in src/routes/blog/[slug].svelte and use the slug to dynamically look up the blog contents in order to render the page. This syntax for dynamic routes is so awesome that even Next.js was inspired to do the same.

6. Client-side static search

I wasn't sure if I'd be able to keep the search box on my blog, since there would be no database to search. Turns out all I needed to do was have the search page use the /blog/all.json route as a data source. I passed the search terms as a query parameter like /blog/search?terms=example The search page parsed the URL to get the search terms, then filters the blog posts client-side to render the results. Might seem ridiculous to have a single JSON file with all the blog posts in it, but on my blog the all.json is only 142kb which is smaller than some JavaScript frameworks! I might write a blog post going into more detail about this client-side search, if anybody is interested?

7. Deployment

Deploying a static site is easy. I use shared hosting so I wrote a bash script that does the following: 1) npm run export to generate the static site, 2) zip up the static files into a zip file, 3) upload the zip file to my web server with scp, 4) ssh into the server and unzip the zip file into the correct folder, 5) delete the zip file. I don't need a complex CI system, though maybe I'll set that up down the road. For now, running a bash script after each blog post is fine for me.

What was hard & confusing?

Learning any new tool has its ups and down. There were some concepts that I didn't understand correctly, and that led me to make mistakes, causing a few bugs and broken pages. Here are some of the things I learned in the process.

1. JSON API

It took me a while to figure out that all the API calls needed to be "JSON API" calls inside server routes that would later generate .json files. Confused already? Let me walk through an example.

When you're viewing a page of the blog, and you click a link to another article, the Sapper client-side code will fetch the contents for that page asynchronously. It can't access the actual REST API so it needs to get the data from a static file, and the best approach for that is to have static .json files in your static site.

For the src/routes/blog/[slug].svelte component I mentioned above, I created a related src/routes/blog/[slug].json.js file that acted as a "server route" that will cause Sapper to export a /blog/my-post.json file for each post.

For more on this, including code examples, check out the Sapper documentation about Server routes.

2. Every page needs to be discovered with a crawler

As I mentioned above, Sapper uses a web crawler to start at your homepage, and dig through looking for links to pages. This means that any pages you might have needs to be linked from an <a> tag. You cannot have any truly secret pages.

To achieve this, I made a single route /blog/all that acts as a site index, with a link to every blog post, plus some extra links at the bottom just so Sapper will know about them. For example, I needed to include an extra link to my RSS feed and my Newsletter signup that weren't linked to with <a> tags anywhere else.

3. Vendor CSS was awkward

Of course I needed to have beautiful looking code examples on my blog, so I integrated Prism.js. I couldn't figure out how to import the prismjs-monokai.css vendor stylesheet into the Svelte component that needed it, so I ended up just using a <link> tag to load it from the template.html, similar to the global.css example file that comes with the Sapper template.

Seems there is a solution that uses a Rollup plugin to allow you to import stylesheets from the Svelte <script> block but I didn't go down this road (yet). Maybe doing an @import in a Svelte <style> block will be something we can do one day, but not today.

Conclusion

Unlike Svelte v3, which is very much ready for production, Sapper is technically still in early development, and hasn't yet reached version 1.0. Still, it was a joy to use, and for something like a blog I think it's perfect. I'm already using Sapper in two other production web applications, as I feel Sapper is mature enough for my needs.

Further reading

• Sapper documentation is a great place to start
• Svelte & Sapper Discord if you need help
• Static Svelte: JavaScript Blogging with 93% less JavaScript

My name is Jesse Skinner. I'm a web consultant, developer, author, speaker, husband and father. I'm a Canadian from Barrie, Ontario, an hour drive north of Toronto.

I was born in 1980, and I've had a computer since 1983. As a child, I read programming magazines and typed the BASIC code into my Coleco Adam. I started running a BBS in 1992, chatting, sending messages, making ANSI graphics, trading files and playing games with people over the computer. I started using the Internet in 1994, and made a web page for my high school band in 1995.

I've been working as a professional web developer since 2001, and graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2004 with a "Bachelor of Mathematics" in Computer Science. I've been doing freelance web development since 2006, helping a wide variety of clients build web applications with JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Previously I heavily used jQuery, then React, and lately I've been mostly using Svelte.

I love to help people learn web development, and I enjoy sharing my learning and development process. I stream regularly on Twitch. I also record coding videos for YouTube.

I write regularly here on Coding with Jesse. I wrote a book for O'Reilly called Unobtrusive Ajax. I've also given a number of talks, and sometimes I teach at Georgian College.

Well, that's enough about me. What about you? Please feel free to get in touch.

I discovered something while refactoring my Svelte code that blew my mind: A Svelte component can be an empty file. How many other component frameworks can say that?

This was very useful during refactoring, because I could just create a placeholder file for the new component, import it and start using it:

<script>
import Empty from './empty.svelte';
</script>

<Empty/>

Sure, it doesn't do anything, but it doesn't break either.

I think this is very symbolic of what makes Svelte so groundbreaking and powerful. Let's dig deeper and see what it can teach us about Svelte.

A Svelte component is a file

With Svelte, components and files have a one-to-one relationship. Every file is a component, and files can't have more than one component. This is generally a "best practice" when using most component frameworks. Perhaps this practice comes from the practice of having each class in a separate file in languages like Java or C++.

By enforcing this practice, Svelte can make some assumptions that simplify your code. That brings me to the next observation.

No boilerplate, just make a new file

In most component frameworks, you need to write some code to define your component. With React, the simplest component is an empty function. In other frameworks, you need to import a library and call a special function to define and create your component. With Svelte, you just create a new .svelte file.

The Svelte compiler will take each file and generate a component for it automatically. And that brings us to another important observation.

You don't need Svelte to use a Svelte component

In order to mount a React component, you need to import react-dom. Using a Vue component requires the Vue library. An Angular application absolutely requires loading the Angular framework.

Svelte, on the other hand, is a compiler. In a way, Svelte is more like a programming language than a library. When you're programming in JavaScript, you don't need to import something to use a for loop. Similarly, you don't need to import anything in your Svelte code to use Svelte's template syntax. Your Svelte files get compiled into Javascript and CSS. It's a very different approach.

You might guess that an empty file would compile into an empty JavaScript file, but every Svelte component comes with an API that allows you to use it outside of Svelte and mount it into the DOM. Here's what it looks like to use a compiled Svelte component:

import Empty from './empty.js';

const empty = new Empty({
  target: document.body,
  props: {
      // if we had some, they'd go here
  }
});

If we compile our empty component and bundle it with Svelte internals, it ends up being 2,080 bytes uncompressed, and 1,043 bytes gzipped. So the overhead for using Svelte ends up being only a kilobyte. Compare that to other frameworks that require 10x or 100x that many bytes just to mount an empty component!

Svelte is a new paradigm

At first glance, being able to use an empty file as a component seems like a silly, impractical gimmick. But looking deeper, I think it teaches us a lot about how Svelte differs from most if not all JavaScript component frameworks that came before it.

I imagine it will inspire other framework developers to take a similar approach and reap some of the same benefits. This is the kind of shift in thinking that changes things permanently. Svelte is not just a new framework, but a complete paradigm shift.

Can you believe it has been four years since I last posted here, and eight years since I really wrote blog articles here? Is anybody still reading this? If so, I'm thinking about writing articles again. If not, well, I will probably write them anyway!

In the meantime, I've been streaming on Twitch for the past year. I stream at random once or twice a week, a few hours in the afternoon EST. There is an archive of videos if you want to watch past streams.

Hope to see you there! (If there is anyone out there??!)

I succumbed to twitter. If anybody here twitters, feel free to follow me at @jesseskinner or leave your id in the comments.

Three years ago today, I wrote my first post. I was just about to move to Berlin and was looking for a new job.

A lot has happened since then. I started freelancing a year later, and I couldn't have done it without this site. 100% of my clients come directly through my "hire me" page.

By the time this blog turns four, we should be living back in Canada, and I might set up a web development agency (in an office!)

That's enough about me! What're you guys up to these days?

I've just added a new page where you can see a listing of all the articles I've written (this article is my 181st). This might be an easier way to see older articles than going page by page or month by month. Check it out: All Articles

I wrote a jQuery tutorial which was just put live on IBM DeveloperWorks today: Simplify Ajax development with jQuery.

I discuss a lot of the core functionality and philosophy of jQuery, including an introduction to writing plugins. So if you've heard of jQuery but haven't really decided if you want to use it, or if you've started to use it and want to see what it's capable of, I think you might enjoy the article.

Joe tagged me. So now I have to tell you 5 things that the blogosphere doesn't know about me.

I know, these things are totally boring, and you didn't come here to learn about my pets, so I'll try to keep them slightly interesting and on topic:

1. I ran a number of BBSes from 1993-1995. They were called "The Dreaming" and "Pepperland", and my handles were "Morpheus", "Zippo" and "Fone Bone".

2. When the Internet came out, I thought it was just another crappy network for "lamers", something like AOL or CompuServe, and hoped it would go away. After a while I gave up and jumped on the bandwagon.

3. The first web page I made was in 1995 (Grade 10). It was a one-page psychedelic propaganda page for a hippie cult I was trying to start called "The Mellow Revolution". It was hosted on Tripod, but it doesn't exist anymore.

4. My mom has one of the most successful quilt web sites on the Internet called Victoriana Quilt Designs. When I tell people this, they assume I made it for her. In fact, I only taught her how to use FrontPage one day and she did all the rest by herself (okay, I helped her integrate PayPal and add login security, but that's about it).

5. I've climbed up and stood on one of the pyramids in Cairo. If you don't believe me, here's proof.

Well, I hoped I didn't bore you to death. Now I'm supposed to tag 5 other bloggers and see if they actually find out, give a crap, and follow through with a list. Tag, Emil Stenström, Roger Johansson, Tara Hunt, Mike Papageorge, and Dan Webb, you're it.

Big news: I'm quitting my job, moving back to Canada (with Svea of course) and taking the plunge into fulltime web development freelancing. This is something I've wanted to do for a long, long time (like seriously 10 years).

I'll be available to do any sized projects, from debugging CSS to adding Ajax functionality to full-blown database-driven web applications in PHP or Ruby on Rails. I love doing it all, and I love the variety. I think that's why freelancing is going to be very fun for me. I also plan to have more time to work on my own projects and get some very interesting things started. Stay tuned for more on that.

You can probably expect the content of this blog will start to include stuff about freelancing and self-employment. Hopefully I can help someone out by passing along any painful lessons learned. I'd also love to hear your stories and advice about going it alone.

Anyway, if you'd like me to help you out with JavaScript, Ajax, CSS or whatever else, drop me a line.

I hate to do posts like "Sorry I haven't posted in so long" or "I won't be posting for the next while" but... I won't be posting for the next while. I'm leaving tomorrow morning to go back to visit Canada for three weeks, and chances are I'll be pretty busy. But don't worry—I'll be back just in time to do Carnival of the Web #2. See ya!

If you want Ajax on your web site, I'm your man.

Although I'm already available to do all types of web freelancing, I want to emphasize that I specialize as an advanced JavaScript, CSS and Ajax freelancer. I've been doing Ajax and other advanced JavaScript for over two years now, and it's really my favourite thing to do.

If you're not really sure what is possible, I can also offer suggestions on ways to improve the usability of your site while still following best practices, web standards and accessibility guidelines.

So if you want to use some animation, auto-complete, XMLHttpRequest or any of that other Ajax stuff on your web site, or if you are a web developer or designer who needs help with JavaScript, please contact me.

From Tuesday (May 9th) until Thursday (May 11th), I'll be attending JAX 2006, a Java conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. Not only will I learn all about what's new in the Java world, I'll be able to really test out my knowledge of German. (Eek!)

If any of you are going to be there by some freak chance, let me know so we can meet up. For the rest of you, I'll be sure to write about anything that relates to web development and the future of the web.

I just submitted my first article to EzineArticles.com. I just heard about this site a couple of days ago so I thought I'd try it out. Basically, it's a way to get articles read by a new audience. I won't get paid for it or anything, but ideally people will discover this blog and my writing if my articles get republished in various e-zines or newsletters, etc.

If you do some writing and want to try spreading your articles a bit further, it might be worth looking in to. I'll post again on here if anything incredible comes out of it (though I don't except much yet).

What's the point of this site? Well, the Big Picture is an outlet for me to write about my greatest passion: the Internet, the direction it's moving in, and the way it is changing the world. But at the same time, I work as a web developer, so this is also my forum for sharing different problems and tricks I come across, as well as touting the benefits of web standards and best practices.

The result is, I have articles like Setting a form field to null or undefined and Let's get personal on the same site. This means that people who don't do any JavaScript coding have to put up with my technical articles. And people who just want my tips and tricks have to put up with my, let's say, fluff articles.

Luckily, these both roughly fall under "The Future of the Web". If I started posting pictures of cats, or investing advice, or whatever, I might get more complaints. But even under the blanket of "The Future of the Web" I have some thinking to do about my target audience.

I don't really write the techie articles for regular readers so much, they're more geared at people searching the web on, say, "setting form field null javascript". Nor do I write the fluff stuff geared at search engines; they're mostly for the regulars.

So how do I solve this apparent dilema? I could create multiple RSS feeds for categories. I could spin off a second blog. I could drop one of the topics altogether. Or, I could just ignore the problem and let people skim over the topics they have no interest in.

Well anyway, I haven't solved the problem yet. I've thought about these options, but I haven't decided what I'll do. But I'm aware there is an apparent identity crisis looming.

How do you deal with identity and branding, and evolution over time? Do you put much thought into this before creating a site or blog, or do you just let it evolve over time and define itself? Where would you like to see this blog go?

I didn't want to put my email address on the site, purely for spam reasons. I thought I could avoid spam by putting a contact form on the site instead. Now, I get more spam than I used to from comment spam bots using my contact form!

There is no escape, and I will have to accept this as a part of my destiny...

I just had a look at the WayBack machine for thefutureoftheweb.com. Turns out someone else had it before. Creepy.

I finally got around to adding comments to the site. Feel free to test them out if you like. No html is supported..that is, everything will be converted to HTML entities. There is no preview or edit. It's pretty basic stuff. I guess that's the problem with writing my own blog code.. I never get around to adding the most basic of features. At least now you can comment on the lack of features :)

And on an unrelated note, I put the design back to the original one. The new one was a bit too boring I think. I'm not sure when I'll change it again...

So what do you think? I redesigned the web site, as I'm sure you'll notice. Unless it's your first time here, of course. It took me about 15 minutes to do the design. I was kind of bored of the other one so I thought I'd go for the terminal-window look. I should put some of my old ANSI art here next.. ha.

I just launched a real simple web site, Free Horoscope Daily with my father. It contains free, daily horoscopes, and nothing else. I was sick of all the clutter that ends up on horoscope web sites, and wanted to make one that was simple and good. It may grow in the future, but right now I like it how it is.

Please, I'd love to hear your feedback. Drop me an email if you have something to suggest or that you'd like to see.

Hello there. We are living in a very exciting time. For the first time in human history, the entire earth is connected. We have the ability to share anything with anyone at anytime, easily and inexpensively. We face enormous potential with this technology, and we haven't begun to realise the full implications.

There are some amazing applications of the Internet that are just starting to emerge, some that have become very widespread. In the first days of the Internet, web pages seemed to be the ultimate purpose. Next came peer-to-peer file sharing. Now, we are starting to see a new generation of web applications, more powerful than today's desktop applications. What comes next is anybody's guess.