Swiss Miss

My traffic history: started in August 2004, up to 15,000 pageviews/10,000 visits/day at the 2013 peak, when blogs were at their zenith. I'd get 10 or 20 comments/post, often. Then a slow decline until January 2015 when I became clinically depressed and barely functional such that it took everything I had to post one sentence/day just to show proof of life. I recovered completely in October 2016 and resumed multiple posts daily as is the case today. Traffic when I started back in in late 2016 on a regular multiple posts/day basis was around 100 pageviews/day. Current traffic is about 600 pageviews/day, with 5-10 comments/week. Still, a couple times a year some popular blog/website picks up something I've posted and links to my post which results in a sudden spike to 3,000-8,000 pageviews that day, with a regression to the norm over the next week or two. One thing I find interesting is that things I post today I would've posted back in 2004, and vice versa. It's amusing to discover a couple times/year that something I'm about to feature or just featured appeared 10-15 years ago. Occasionally a reader from back in the day will point this out, to my delight. As best I can tell, the only popular one-person blogs that still update regularly and go back as far as I do are https://www.swiss-miss.com/ [March 2005] and https://kottke.org/ [1998]. I take pride in publishing daily including weekends and holidays, unlike pretty much every other blog/website. Always something…

Ok, so as someone that walked this path and is currently on the other end as a freelance graphic and web designer, i'll put out a brain dump. # Development 1. For web development, you'll find tons of best practices (i.e. alistapart, smashingmag, diveintohtml5, etc). This is the easy part, you can browse these or skim them whenever you get bored. HTML is pretty straightforward, but css is a bit trickier. 1.5. An too-long aside on css. CSS is one of the most important things to try to master as you actually start implementing design. CSS is pretty gross, it's alright and not that difficult, but it's gross and it's nearly always a mess. There are lots of frameworks around that try to remedy this, but i recommend that you actually try to figure much of it out before you start adopting frameworks. Similarly, before you use a css reset, you should actually try doing some work without them (the big problem is that each browser's default css is rendered inconsistently, so you make some assumption about webkit and find that opera and mozilla think you're a fool). EXERCISE ZERO: try to see if you actually understand a) the box model and b) floats and c) positioning. These are the trickiest things. You can only really understand these if you try to figure out how you would use any of these things in practice. I put up a page with some stuff about those topics when i was teaching a web design class recently: http://risd.generic.cx/review.html # Design 2. Learn typography. This is…

I still check https://www.swiss-miss.com/ to this day, more of this please!

I hate to be that guy, but this looks exactly like https://teuxdeux.com/, a service made by Tina Roth Eisenberg (https://www.swiss-miss.com/) which has been around for a long long time. More than one product can exist in a space (and todo lists are a dime a dozen) and maybe this was a completely original idea and GMTA, but wow it sure looks like a note for note copy

http://sethgodin.typepad.com http://zenhabits.net http://www.swiss-miss.com http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/

Related material: Cindy Gallop's struggle to get ANYTHING for MakeLoveNotPorn.com - which has a fantastic, social mission. She can't even get a bank. We've been working our banking partners to see if we can find a fit, but no takers. Here's a really great talk on it if you're interested: http://www.swiss-miss.com/2014/05/cindy-gallop-make-love-not-porn.html

I launched http://wikicancel.org/ this month. WikiCancel is a subscription, contract, and account cancellation guide. There have been over 40k unique visitors so far. More importantly, visitors are contributing content. I am humbled by the response the site has gotten so far, and I am going to continue to improve WikiCancel based on user feedback. It was featured on Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/5978253/wikicancel-is-a-collection-of-guides-to-… Featured on Swissmiss design blog: http://www.swiss-miss.com/2013/01/wikicancel.html Lots of Tweets including a tweet from @brainpicker who has 298k followers. List of tweets: https://twitter.com/search?q=wikicancel

Tina Roth's blog is awesome - http://www.swiss-miss.com/ http://designobserver.com/

Some of the design blogs or websites I follow: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/ http://blog.frankchimero.com/ http://typographica.org/ http://ilovetypography.com/ http://ministryoftype.co.uk/ http://www.typography.com/ask/?path=foot http://fortheloveoftype.blogspot.com/ http://www.jessicahische.is/obsessedwiththeinternet/ http://lydianichols.blogspot.com/ http://www.swiss-miss.com/

Reminds me of Helvetimail - I wonder if it still exists somewhere and works with basic HTML gmail? https://www.swiss-miss.com/2009/09/helvetimail-a-minimalist-gmail-skin… Edit: found the original CSS on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20110817055720/http://www.josefrichter.com…

The gifts category on swissmiss may help: http://www.swiss-miss.com/gift_guide_generic?c=gift_guide_generic

yeah, I get that too, but here's what you are supposed to see: http://www.swiss-miss.com/2011/02/naked-password.html

Perhaps just add another commandment about giving attribution and credit (and not representing others work as your own) to the existing TED commandments: http://www.swiss-miss.com/2009/05/the-ted-commandments.html