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First of all I just want to say that I love my Nook, and all of the bad things that I am going to say about it I say them only because I want this product to improve and this can only happen from feedback of its users like myself. Also I would like to add that at this point I would have liked to have a new Amazon Kindle for comparison but since I don't have one and Amazon hasn't even started shipping the new Kindle, I can't tell which operating system and software is more polished at this time unless I can find a really good and recent review of the latest 2.5 Kindle firmware with photos in order to see what features the Kindle has.

This review will be my biggest challenge so for blogging wise because it's the longest post that I have written so far and I am sure that I will have many revisions for it, especially in order to get rid of all of the I I I pronouns but this wont stop me from writing this post, and if my writing style is so bad, then I just look forward to improving it as I keep blogging... And now without too further ado let's just get started :)

First shortcoming: Weak PDF Reader and PDF functions support

This to me is a surprise because when I open my Nook I get a disclaimer that this device uses Adobe Digital Editions technology and since Adobe invented the PDF standard I expected for the Nook in its fourth software update to have superb PDF support. Unfortunately although its support is good... it could be great with the addition of these features:

1. Ability to Pan and Zoom - Kindle got this support and I have to say it would come in very handy to also have it in the Nook. I have some scanned books that I have not OCR'ed and when I transferred the book and tried to read it the pictures were super small, and without zooming in you just cannot see the pages well.
2. This would also be handy when I have a normal book that has some screenshots that have small details which I would like to see, and as of this moment this is not possible so to me lack of pdf zooming is a big minus.
3. Font Support - Reading an epub book give you access to four different fonts to choose from, while the pdf's only have the default Amasis Font.
4. I have to admit that this font looks the best and when I read an epub book I still keep this font on, still if I am allowed to choose from different fonts on an epub book I should be allowed to pick other fonts as well when viewing a pdf.
5. Formatting - this is a big one for me :( because I planned on reading a lot of programming books on this device, and the pdfs look great with font formatting and styles until you get to code snippets
6. In languages like Python where the language is whitespace sensitive you want for the code formatting to be preserved and for it to display with the necessary tabs or soft-tabs in order for the code to be formatted and displayed properly. Therefore while some tabs are preserved (usually it only preserves the first level tab, the other tabs are missing leaving the code hanging in odd ways, hindering your ability to have a proper flow of the code and therefore taking an immense amount of time to decipher even a 5-7 line of a snippet code).
7. Bookmarking Implementation - Right now when you bookmark a page you are not being asked whether you want to name the bookmark like you are being asked when you are taking a note or a highlight.
8. This to me is a bad thing because when you make thirty bookmarks and you want to later visit those bookmarks ... what does page 21 bookmark say to you? To me not a whole lot so right now I am bookmarking pages that I want to read later but six months from now I will forget for sure which bookmark I was looking for and I might have to just visit them one by one until I would find what I was looking for.
9. No Notes and Highlights - This is another features that epub books have and pdf books don't and I am quite surprised that even after four firmware revisions pdf books still haven't got this feature yet.
10. There are a lot of phrases that I would like to highlight and save for later but right now I can only do so for epub books and even then this feature is not well implemented as I will explain this in a later section.
11. Weak Search Features - Right now you can only search for words, and I would like to be able to have an advanced search where I can search for Bookmarks, Notes, and restrictions like only in chapter x or through chapter y.
12. This is not yet such a big deal for me but this should be implemented as soon as possible in my opinion because right now searching is too limiting to say that it's any useful.

Second shortcoming: Epub support with its minusses

THe epub support is about the same as the pdf with the addition of the Highlights & Notes and Lookup word:

1. Highlights & Notes - This features again only works for epub books although I wish pdf books would have this support even in this current state where it lacks the ability to display all of the book's notes.
2. Right now I don't understand why you can name your highlights because if you have two highlights on the same page and you go to - "View notes for this page" you are only presented with the next options:
3. Next Highlight
4. View/Edit note
5. Delete highlight
6. Why have the ability to name your highlight if you can't see the name of it and you can't search for it? And where is the ability to view the highlights that you made for the entire book not just for the current page?
7. All of these discoveries for me are shocking and I truly expected more from the Nook software in its fourth revision... and if some of these limitations are because of the epub standard than this is even more lame... although I tend to believe that it's not the standard but the implementation that lacks here!
8. Lookup word - Provides a dictionary like functionality allowing you too see what the word that you've highlighted means, this is something that the pdf books should also support if possible, there might be words that you do not know and seeing the definition could help you to understand the words and message better.

Third shortcoming: Other things lacking or badly implemented

1. Audio player shortcoming: Go to your audio player and you will see a big X on the top right corner of the screen... if you click on it and expect for the audio app to quit you are mistaken just like I was... all it does it to actually minimize the app so that you can continue listening to the song while you are doing something else
2. So how do you stop the music? You just hit the Pause button and then music will stop and you can hit the X button to minimise the app again. This is again shocking to me and it goes against any design patterns where X means Close and Stop and yet for them X is minimize and pause is stop... if they still keep this behaviour by the next firmware I will be very disapointed, not because I can't get my intended action completed but because it's just a weird way of doing a common task for no good reason what so ever again IMHO.
3. Another thing missing from the player is the ability to display songs with its corresponding folders, and I have right now two folders with different music that is all placed in the same playlist. If I don't have folder management and displaying then the audio player is a toy feature, good only for having one album at a time.
4. Playlist management - because I might need to search for a song, save, modify, create, delete different playlists or something similiar.
5. Wifi management - In order to turn off the Wifi completely you have to switch the Nook to Airplain mode... I believe that I should be able to also turn it off from the wifi menu completely.
6. Lack of a calendar app a simple Todo or Notes app - my Palm Zire 31 right now is more useful for my productivity right now since I can write things down if I need to remember something.
7. Some of you might say that this is an e-book reader not a Palm or an organizer, but I could see myself reading something that I would like to put it in a txt file with some notes, and a Notes app would be great to have my thoughts collected whether I pick them up from a book, or from talking to someone and just having the Nook at my disposal.

My top four wish list items for the 1.5 or next firmware

Of all of the things that I just enumerated here are my top three items that I wish would get fixed for the 1.5 firmware:

1. Pdf Zoom and Panning - again super useful if you have scanned books.
2. Bookmarking made useful - give me the chance to name my bookmarks and search for them.
3. Notes app and or a better implemented Highlights and Notes - feature that can also be used for pdf files
4. Pdf formatting - better preservation of the whitespace, any technical book that contains snippets of code could benefit from having it properly displayed, and also with better table support, right now I feel like there isn't any support at all, any tabular data being displayed without any borders and broken down.

What about you? What are the features that you lack the most or that you want to have changed for the Nooks software?

If more of us talk about the things that we would like to see them changed or implemented then maybe Barnes & Nobles would listen and implement them quicker... so let's get our voices heard and hope for the best ideas to be implemented to this otherwise great ebook reader!

I have written a lot of posts that are of various topics, from productivity to blogging and programming and now I am trying to get my head together about what kind of topics I would like to blog about from now on.

Having a definite purpose helps you get away from confusion

I don't want for people to think that this blog is just a blog about everything, and more importantly I need to be aware of this fact because in the process of thinking you can easily get distracted from your goal and end up writing about everything without a purpose or reason.

Giving this blog a written purpose

I want for my blog to capture my adventure in the web development business and I believe that now I should focus my writing in 4 categories:

1. Blogging -- or writing because content is kind and what better way to learn to write content if not by writing?
2. Business -- or marketing because a business will never thrive without promotion.
3. Design -- because a good design will make or break the content of the site and although I am not a designer I do intend to develop my basic skills.
4. Productivity -- because we all need to be productive in any fields of working, and productivity should be a top priority on all of our lists.
5. Programming -- because a good site needs more than just html and css... I will focus mostly on django and python related topics but also jquery or javascript subjects.

What this blog isn't going to be

1. A blog that might not miss even the self-imposed minimum 1 post per week -- Because in a later post I will tell you how I changed my view concerning quantity vs quality, and a blog post takes time and effort to write even for the simple topics.
2. A blog where things get promoted out of my will to make money -- If I make reviews, and I will recommend something, it is because it brought value to my operation not because of affiliate gains or other promotions.
3. Posts written in Romanian... I would rather start a different blog than to have this blog also written in Romanian... part of my motive for writing this blog is to improve my English not to stick to the comfort of my native language.
4. Lack of controversy -- I might write things that are of my opinion, and where I might be wrong I do expect for you the readers to respond to my opinion although I give no guaranty that I will change my mind or not... this is a personal blog of my discoveries, and not everybody shares the same ideas in the same way... all that I can promise is that I will respect your opinion but reserve my right to stick to my opinion.

Writing is easy, reading is hard

I know for a fact that writing is easy, I see blogs popping up every day and this blog can be put into this category, but it's the reading that is a difficult thing to do.

With so much information available most people just read the subheadings and glimpse over the comments and call it a day on that posts... so with me knowing this behavior I would be careful and write things that are easily scanned because if my headings can't convey the message of my paragraphs that I've missed my purpose of delivering a well written posts.

How about it? How do you feel that my writing style is? What would you suggest I do differently? I can only get better with help from you... the reader... and if these posts help... than by all means help me get better :)

I had a lot of good things come out of my experience with open source software, and open source code.

I had some bad things come out of my experience with open source software and open source code.

Notice the similarities with the previous two sentences?

Some software had bugs or features that did not function as they were expected, and some felt like they did more harm than good just by having them on my computer (like random pop-ups with advertising)

And then I get to the django open source apps that you might find in popular sharing hubs like github or bitbucket. A lot of them work without a problem, and then some... make you tear you hair off when you have to hunt some bugs in a code that sometimes it takes hours or days just to decipher what it means and how they all fit together (lack of proper documentation is usually a common issue of open source projects).

Most of my comparison to open source goes so far from up and down, from great to... not so great but to all of this I have only one thing to say:

Thank you open source people because you give me a lot of freedom of choice!

If I want to use your app but it has issues that I've discovered I can either file an issue or better yet I can send a patch. If I feel that it can't be fixed maybe I can take the good parts from the code and integrate them in my app.

Basically I have a given freedom that would not come from a commercial or closed source app and that is something very powerful in the hands of a community that is willing to take an existing code base and make it better or help the author make better decisions.

So I will tell it like it is:

Thank you authors of open source, I know I might have my ups and downs with future django apps but I have freedom of choice where I can decide what I should do with the code that was provided to me for free and that just mounts up to bringing more power to the programmers and to the products that the community or customers would be able to use.

Little intro before I get into the subject

I don't have a big post prepared for today, but since I am determined to post every Saturday on my blog, I started thinking of a small twitter like post concepts, where I can write a short message, and instead of using services like tumbler I want to keep it all focused on my blog.

Why the post name? Because I realize that in our days we want things to be done fast, yesterday if it's possible... so why not deliver a small message that is twitter like (short and to the point) and still give it out there rather than not writing something at all feeling that you need to only write major posts with a lot of substance.

So here you have it :) my first Twitbite post for June 26:

Marketing as a battle tool for our minds

I started reading Al Ries -- Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind and I got a great nugget that I want to share with you concerning the way some companies tend to market products.

Here's my quote from the book:

"Competition was fierce and not alway honest.

It got so bad that one product manager was heard saying:

Wouldn't you know it!

Last year we had nothing to say so we put new and improved on the package.

This year the research team came up with the real improvement and we don't know what to say."

Ending my first twitbite post

This was a great quote for me, because it got me thinking just how far people are willing to make their product more like able and how marketing can and is being used as a method of selling you a product in any way possible instead of selling you a solution for a problem that you might have.

It's also a lesson for me not to try to hype things up if I have nothing to say because you might never know when that will come back and bite you... social marketing is becoming more and more popular and I don't think that you want to risk a relationship with a customer by promoting something that just isn't there.

What about you? Have you ever felt like someone was marketing something to you that wasn't real? That they've said that it's so much better than product x or version y and you could have clearly seen that it was the same thing?

Last week I've talked about some cold facts about commenting where some people go through a great deal of trouble to get their readers to comment, and how I wanted to change my attitude toward commenting, but I find it that sometimes a lot of sites just make commenting harder than it needs to be.

Just ask yourself these questions and let me know how many times you've gotten mad about these commenting stumbling blocks:

1. You've entered your comment only to find out that it needs moderation, and if you enter it Saturday and you are from Europe, it might take until Monday afternoon-evening until your comment gets approved.

2. You write all of those informations like name, email and web address only to find out that the site only displays your name (more about my opinion on this in a minute).

3. You can't edit or delete your comment, when you've made a spelling error or worse a logic error.

4. You can't preview your comment, which is especially useful to see how that long phrase of your is being formatted by the commenting style.

5. You're not being told what styling tags you can use, whether you have some markdown tags, or a couple of html tags, or if you can post links in the comment or not.

Make your site a community hub and comments will follow

I love the way sites like nettuts, smashing magazine, webdesignerdepot, line25, designinformer can offer great quality articles for free and still make a living, and although they all are running a business, I believe that they like the situation where they are at, where they can offer knowledge to the masses and still make a buck out of it.

Out of these sites, smashing magazine is the only site that will not display a website link to the name of the comment, because they don't ask for it and although I think this is a mistake at least it is not like friedbeef which asks for the website link and yet they don't link that website to your name.

I believe this is a big mistake because:

1. When I read a good comment, and they have a great looking gravatar, I can't wait to check out what else they might have to offer, and it's a great way to check it out by just clicking the linking name.

2. A good commenter will stand out from the crowd and it would be in your best interest as a reader to discover new fountains of knowledge that other people would be willing to share for free with you.

3. It brings the community together in my opinion, and big sites should not be afraid to endorse this kind of interaction because even thou I discovered 40 best practices that have great content and that I would like to check out, I still check out daily only the major sites because of the community interaction and the high quality content.

4. It differentiates the nicknames or names from one another and that can happen to my great surprise, like Jeff Hardy the wrestler and Jeff Hardy the .Net guy.

Commenting elements I like to see

I love to see the following elements present in a blog:

1. Have the web address as a link to the name, it's a great way to see what that person that is commenting is doing.

2. Have a preview button and an edit button, sometimes I might misspell or I have written some words on an anger that I might want to rephrase in order to better get the message that I want to convey out there without the crazy ranting or aggressive attitude.

3. Have a system like commentluv implemented because it is a great idea to have the name of the last post displayed next to your name (I plan to implement such a system in django-mingus, hope to figure it out by the time I will roll the redesign). I mean just think about it ... If someone posts a thank you for a great article and his last post is about getting cheap viagra or buy my quick scheme to get rich, at least you know not to thank him back because you would know that he is just a spammer.

4. Implement threaded comments, it's just a nicer organized way of viewing comments where you can visually skip an entire conversation and focus on just what's interesting to you.

Make a stand to improve your commenting system and profit from it

Commenting it's here to stay, some will use the tools at hand more effectively and get more engagement out of their users, and other will continue to frustrate their users and will effectively drive out the comments away in a form or a fashion.

What about you?

Will you take the best practice and implement them in your blog?

Or will you just leave you're commenting system in a way that just brings frustration to your readers?

I am a horrible blog reader, because nine out of ten times I will read a great blog post that gave a lot of informational value to me and yet I will not even post a thank you comment, and I was trying to figure out why I am acting this way, so I started to look around the internet and to see how people attract comments on blog.

Cold facts about blog commenting

1. People will give away prizes, money, extra advice, whatever other perks to get people to post comments, and still the results are less than favorable
2. Even when you do get them to comment, some comments are written in a way that is bringing more distraction from the subject and not building up the opinion factor of the community that the site owner wants to have for his site.
3. Sometimes you will get people who visit your site just so they can write their "first comment" remark instead of actually reading what you have to say and be a real contributor to the site.

Now I'll try to write all the reasons for my lack of commenting actions, and they range from plausible to ridiculous, and I think I will go first with the ridiculous ones:

1. First of all, I am lazy and sometimes I just listen to my instinct of get in, get what you need and go out (which is a terrible instinct by they way, it's almost like a stealing action)
2. Second reason I have is because sometimes I feel like I don't have a smart enough thing to say and my simple thank you will pale in comparison to the context of the post or other "well thought comments".

And now for the plausible reasons:

1. Lots of times when I look at other posts, I'm taking a quick break from my work, and I fell like I should get as much info as possible from as many sites as I can, and having the feeling that there are so many things out there that are worth checking out is not helping me think otherwise either.
2. I read a comment that captures what I meant to write and I don't want to sound redundant.
3. Third reason is because I feel like my comment should have value since I want to reply to a valuable post, so if I don't have something good to say I would rather not say anything.

Not commenting brings value to nobody

From now on I will try to break my rule of not commenting unless I have something useful to say because commenting can help the authors in several ways:

1. The more comments, the more the search engines sees the site as an active site and display its content higher in the search list, and let's be honest, how many awful sites from the 1990's are top of the search rank instead of the newer and better written content that other sites have and yet they are not in the top rank! That's why many sites like nettuts will give away free books just for entering comments or subscribing to the rss, a super good deal for the user that gets a lot of things for free and you are doing just a little work to help them continue delivering free and quality materials for times to come.
2. Authors will get a boost even from a simple thank you, because it's the best way to see that what they wrote helped other people and those people wore so thankful that they wanted to reply personally to them giving their gratitude and opinion on the subject that the author wrote about (this is a super good way of helping the author create better content, for you, the reader, so just a simple action out of your part can bring a benefit to you in return).
3. Third of all (and this is a big one in my opinion) advertisers could see that the author can get the readers involved into taking actions even as simple as writing comments, but people who take actions are more likely to participate or buy things that the advertisers would advertise, so it would worth more for them to display ads on that site since it attracts readers who take actions.
4. Fourth of all if there is no feedback the author can't know if he needs to improve the quality of the content, or to have a better grammar, or if he improved since the last batches of posts that he posted.

Taking an action against this phenomenon

I've decided to break my excuses, and to give value where value is due, and comment for the sites that I appreciate, that have a good subject, that is worth commenting, that is worth praising.

Now what about you? Will you comment more? Will you give value back?

Or will you keep it to yourself???

At the beginning and end of my work day I like to take about 20-30min in total to check out what's new on programming.reddit.com and dzone.com, 2 programming link aggregators I like to check out on what's new in the "industry", or maybe just to check out a cool tutorial that people just love to share now a days (thank you all for that), and I have to admit that even thou a lot of these posts have just some generic and basic tips, I am drawn to see what others have to share with their "ten ways to do this, or ten programs to do that" kind of posts.

We are drawn to things that come in a big volume

I for one think that it has to do with the perception of depth that comes from us reading that there is more than one tip, or more that one program or programming advice or piece of code, and in the unstable economic times that we live today we are drawn more and more to getting more bang for the buck, more information per posts, everything just has to come in bigger and bigger numbers.

This phenomenon is present in our daily lives

I look around in my city and I find it a bit funny when I see a lot of signs with "buy 3 pizzas and you get one free, or get some free fries to go with your bought drink", or the hypermarkets who battle in free stuff for larger quantities, and although it's marketing they are doing and it's sales they are after, it's funny how this type of marketing affects so many ares of our lives, including our daily browsing.

My take on this kind of marketing

I embrace this kind of marketing in programming and design links now, partly because of lack of time to read or track down a lot of individual posts, but at the same time I feel like I am being bombarded by new sites that pop up every week with marketing titles and posts that get a lot of clicks from linking to good blog posts that have a lot of original content, and a lot of them are already blogged and linked about by more established sites.

My confessed change in attitude

Since I started blogging myself, I started being more appreciative of good, original, single topic blog posts, rather than feeling good about seeing ten article titles displayed on a page, calling me to click to see what's "the latest and greatest from this past month" so in a way I feel like I should be more selective in clicking on these kind of posts, and instead read single posts that bring more depth to the content, give more value and are more personal than posts that give "10 short advises or 20 blogs posts that are the hottest thing for the month of whatever", because in the end I found myself wanting to subscribe to the rss, twitter, newsletter and maybe other social media buttons, of websites that have great individual posts, are backed up by credible authors, and are built around giving the best advice for free or freemium, than just adding myself to the latest cat on the block who only links to other people's content because they have almost nothing to post that is of their own content, and unfortunately I have started to see a lot of these wordpress based blogs that bring almost no personal value except for linking to other blogs.

I was curious to see the state of job offers for django gigs, and I didn't find as much as I hoped to find, but one thing caught my attention on most jobs, specially the ones that involved php as well ... most of the ads look for a three to four man job to give to a single guy and to pay him only 20$ per hour, where you should be a super developer, have 5 years minimum experience and be proficient in the fields of: database design, system administration, javascript ninja, gis knowledge, photoshop, cms, illustrator, web 2.0, interface designer, deploy to cloud, multicore programming, and the list could go on and on to even the office suite for a graphic designer job ( which is by the way one of the most idiotic requirements I ever heard).

Having unrealistic impressions

I have the impression that some people think that designers or programmers are super genetic humans who are like a super-duper universal do it all wrench, or that we are like the cleaning products that hit our TV commercials with claims of clean it all, one of a kind 4 in one products, shampoo-conditioner and hair hardener, detergent-cleaner-freshener, all with the do it all and be great at it tag.

Taking a stand against this nonsense

I think that we need to express our desire for people who hire to have realistic demands for job positions, and to advertise for specific job fields, be it a media specialist, or a graphic artist, or a database administrator, or a front-end developer, not a super do it all kind of human, because if those people existed ... they will not work for your small project, instead they will work for people that know what they are worth, because all the skills most of the job posts I see nowadays are worth way more than 20-50$ per hour.

I have wanted to read for a long time the book No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog especially since I started this blog because I am very new to the process of writing for a blog or for something that people would like to read in general, but everyday I think of a blog post this books name keeps popping into my head.

Without reading the book yet my mind is split 50/50 about this remark because on one hand I agree with being careful of what to write because it might be too plain and uninteresting like letting people know what you had for lunch, but on the other hand I read a post a programmer that I respect and that I usually read his technical posts, and yet one of the most interesting things that I read from him and felt like I got a really good read was a blog post about him trying out some tea cocktails that made him feel better that drinking coffee or caffeine beverages.

Any new information might be of interest to you at some point

That information for me was something that I enjoyed far more that I expected because deep down I realized that I wanted to know what other people were eating or drinking and for someone who was spending more and more time at the computer it was an edifying thing to hear how other people were trying to find ways of living healthier because spending a lot of time at the computer can make you develop a lot of bad habits but more on this subject maybe deserves a blog post on its own.

If I would have not given in to my curiosity to read a post that was different from what I normally like to read and from what I expected to read from the author I would have missed a good post because I would have had just a conservative mind to read only the technical posts and not care about the personal aspects of the blogging that might contain more posts like the one that I found, and I wouldn't have found out how much I enjoy reading posts that are personal and yet with a lot of good info that I can use outside of my interest for programming knowledge.

Above anything that others say, try to form your own opinion about everything

So now I know that I will be curious to read and maybe even enjoy topics that professional bloggers might tell you that you shouldn't write, because at the end of the day you decide in what kind of mood you are in to read or write something that you normally wouldn't think are interested in, because sometimes allowing your curiosity to break free you might find enjoyment in something completely different from your regular topics of interest.

I love it when program installers are honest. Honest in giving you a choice, in letting you know in bold red letters that the program that you install wants to change your browsers default engine, or add another useless Toolbar to your browsers, or offering a free trial or download of another program from the same author.

I hate the installers that hide the customize button, give you the one click install option, that installs everything without you being worried about anything, until you find out how much crap came along with that easy installer. Default settings might never be the good way to install any program, because most of the time any user should feel like a power user where they want to control what's being installed on their computer and whether they need any extra things except what he intended to install.

Provide sensible defaults or give user clear warning messages

I got burned on one of these default settings, on yahoo messenger where the programs decided to only keep the archive of your conversation until you logout. There are other ugly defaults that I usually change but this was something that I wasn't aware of and that made the most trouble to me when I needed to look at a previous conversation I had with somebody only to find out that the program already erased it, and even thou I kind of understand the security issues, and the amount of space that these logs would take after a while, I still think that some warnings should have been provided to me at the install wizard or after I've logged in.

Things to learn out of this experience

• For starters, never trust the default settings of any program, because a persons default can be a pain in the neck for another individual.
• Second of all, to encourage developers to allow users as much customization to the program as possible in relationship to the skin, color, saving or deleting mechanism, sound alerts, Internet usage ... and lots of other little features that many times we take for granted in some favorite programs that we use.

I hope that I have convinced you out there as well, for the next time that you install a program, to take that little extra time to look of the configuration settings because you might be surprised of the features that you can enable and are not enabled by default or the opposite ... or finding some features that you couldn't possibly understand why they are enabled or even present even in some programs that you've used for years and that you think you know about 100%, only to find out that a new version came out which changed some defaults from the previous versions without you knowing and then suffering out of your trust for the way things worked.

I've written at least 10 blog posts since my last post on my site, but for some reason, I felt like I needed to double-check or triple check every word and what I've meant to say, and because of a lack of time and energy I've felt I should postpone publishing my new posts till they got to a point where I was comfortable with them.

Here I am 4 months later and I still haven't posted one single post since November and I ask myself if it's really worth getting my head filled with the information that I have posts to publish and yet I do nothing with them. I think it gets tiring after a while to seek perfection in the detriment of actual work, so in line with the quote of "version one usually sucks but you should release it anyways" I think I will start publishing more often even thou I feel that I need to take more time to proofread my ideas and the spelling, and whatnot ... I will not delay them as I did up to this point because:

1. I am in a position where I'm just starting out to blog so not a lot a people know about this blog

2. Since I didn't advertise this blog I don't give out to people wild expectations out of me, or to the quality of my posts

3. Because of all the above, I can always rely on the edit button, if there is something that is not clear I can always come back and do an edit, or maybe I am lucky and a reader of the blog can comment on what they felt it's unclear to them, thus benefiting from the fact that I've done something to make the reader connect to me through an action that they were willing to perform.

Gaining wisdom and taking actions

I liked one blog post that I read or comment on reddit I can't remember where I found it but it was something like:

1. version one --- slow and sloppy

2. version two --- better than version one

3. version three --- faster than version two

4. version N --- perfection

I don't want to waste my time anymore going for version N so I think I will just start from now on from version 1 and see where that takes me.

So what about you? Will you waste your time achieving perfection or will you ship the product and steadily improve it?

I was listening the other day to some podcasts from freelanceswitch.com and one of the topics they covered there was a mailbag entry where some guy lost his business by bankruptcy because of a deal that he thought it was great for his business, and in the end the people he worked for decided not to pay him and claim to try to sue them because they didn't care for.

Another example that I got came from a fictional ground from The adventures of Sherlock Holmes - The Engineer's Thumb, a story from the 1880's where a guy lost a thumb because he went for a deal that felt suspicious but the money he was promised sounded too good to pass.

In both example one true, one fictional that is more than a century old, which should make you consider that this behavior is nothing new, where you are drawn to the high paycheck, were you are not taking in consideration the risks that you might go through is a mistake that could costs you your job, and sometimes even your likelihood.

Practical lesson: always take care to really study what offer you might take, because if something looks and sounds too good, it might be just that, and it might be better to go for something smaller that feels more at home than something that would promise big bucks but might deliver in the end just a big headache.

With my first blog post i want to thank Kevin Fricovsky for django-mingus, a blog i like for it's nature, being constructed from so many reusables, with some decent looking default templates. I look forward to populating this blog with lots of hopefully useful discoveries from my day to day delve in django, python, web design and development and even life in general from a young 24 year old who just got married this year.