… the best of luck and success, and, above all, health! All this and more we wish for ourselves and our fellow men (but mostly for ourselves) at the beginning of each year. As if we didn’t know better. 2011 will, too, be a year full of flops, bad luck and mishaps, of failure and disease, of death and mourning. You need not be a Nostradamus to know that. Now you will probably consider me one of those inveterate pessimists again. But I’m not. I just don’t like set phrases. I don’t like when people talk in platitudes at certain times, just because the custom calls for it. And thus I wish you, my dear readers, no more a happy new year than I can wish someone a good morning without a guilty conscience or say “bon appétit” without lying. Instead, I’ll rather tell you about the small changes I’ve made to the blog, just on time at the turn of the year:

• I had long been dissatisfied with the home page. It looked confusing and rather daunting than inviting. I think I was able to improve this a lot with my newly implemented “bits of paper”.
• I didn’t like the old paper anyway, so I made a new one on this occasion.
• The footer had always seemed a little lost to me, because it was not well-delimited from the rest. This issue is now being attended by the yellow pencil.
• The number of comments per page has been limited, and a paging function has been added.
• A touch of non-essential Javascript here and there makes for a little comfort.
• Random gallery pictures now invite to click on long-forgotten photos.

In the background I was able to improve the programming of the theme clearly. It is now finally using its own language files instead of provisionally tinkered “language tags”, and the functions.php has grown by a number of functions. The HTML has been preliminarily converted to version 5. Not everything is one-hundred percent valid; and how should it, as the validator itself is still provisional? What the heck – once the browser world is finally ready for HTML5, everything will have to be revised again anyway.

But another question has kept me busy lately regarding this website: Doesn’t it lack a little personal touch? I mean, it is a private blog, but I deliberately write only few private things in it. This may make this blog seem cold and boring. I know that the most interesting parts of someone else’s blog are the places where you can live out your voyeuristic desires and take a secret look through the LCD window into the other’s private life like a peeper.

In the midst of these thoughts, as chance would have it, I came across a website where someone was keeping a photo diary. The idea appealed to me: On one hand it makes you post something personal every day, on the other hand you don’t strip completely naked. ;) But what I find even more interesting about such a photo diary is the challenge of having to find something interesting and meaningful in every single day – no matter how boring it is. Perhaps it even makes you go through the year more consciously and with opener eyes. And how much fun will it be to look at all the pictures again and remember at the end of the year?
Therefore, I am now keeping a photo diary myself since 1 January 2011, which can be found here (or via the main menu at the top). Comments are welcome, too. Enjoy browsing!