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2012 reader survey: interim results and book winners!

Last week I announced my inaugural annual reader survey. In it, I asked ten questions to better understand the audience of this blog. This post is to inform you of three things:

1. The survey is now closed. Thank you very much to those who took time to give me some valuable feedback!

2. We have three winners of physical copies of Best of Belshaw 2011 randomly drawn from those leaving their name and email address. Congratulations Melanie Knight, Katie Hassman and Lesley Gourlay. Witness the process of randomly choosing here.

3. Interestingly, despite their having ceased over a year ago, re-introducing my Things I Learned This Week posts featured heavily in the question about how I could improve this blog. I’m still mulling over what to do about this.

Thanks again to those who took part. It’s given me much to smile about and lots to reflect upon. I’ll have an anonymised breakdown of results in a post next week. First I need to crunch the numbers and produce some pretty charts…

Major blog redesign.

This blog used to look like this (click to enlarge):

Old version

Now it looks like this (click to enlarge):

New version

Why?

  1. More information
  2. Better user experience
  3. It was time to tinker

Continuities: things that have stayed the same

  • Reasonably similar colour scheme
  • Prominent links to social media profiles
  • Obvious links to RSS and About page for new visitors
  • Links to related posts
  • Evernote and Instapaper integration

Innovations: things that have changed:

  • New name for blog, to enable guest posts improve identity
  • Photos of real Doug, not just social media avatar
  • Use of @font-face web font (Orbitron from The League of Moveable Type)
  • Change of body font from Georgia to Arial (it’s easier to read online)
  • Recent comments in sidebar
  • Links to e-books
  • Better use of footer

You like? Wondering why Synechism?

How to upgrade your Nokia N95 to v12.x firmware and make it a whole lot better

Nokia N95

A couple of weeks ago I wanted to upgrade the firmware on my Nokia N95 after I’d read lots of blog posts saying how wonderful the new version was. In fact, some said it was like having a new phone! Unfortunately, I managed to re-install the same firmware over the top of my existing one and lose all of my contacts and settings in the process! 😮

Continue reading “How to upgrade your Nokia N95 to v12.x firmware and make it a whole lot better”

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