guest article 04

The onderhond blog has been running for a good 2.5 years now. There's been ups, downs and many in-betweens. I've learned a lot from the time spent on writing the near-400 articles already present on this blog, but with all the time going into fine-tuning these articles you start to demand something in return. Now, before you think this is my goodbye note, no need to worry. There's only happy stuff in here.

Blogging for fame is a pretty horrible starting point, that said it certainly helps if what you write has a certain impact on the people you write for. You can't write 2 years straight without getting any feedback or without straying outside of the boundaries of your own blog. Going places gives a serious boost to your motivation so it's good to stay on the lookout for opportunities. On a personal level I achieved that by joining the Twitch team, on a professional level I seek for guest posts once in a while.

hunted

First things first though. Looking for guest post opportunities is one thing, people picking up and publishing your stuff is even more fun. That way you don't have to do anything and you still get to reach new audiences. When I checked my site stats last month I noticed a serious bump in Japanese traffic coming to my site. On further exploration it turned out the article on 1px rounded corners made it in the June issue of Web Designing, a Japanese (printed) magazine.

They were nice enough to send me a couple of issues. Not that I understood any of it, but how cool is that, holding a Japanese magazine with a reference to one of your own articles. From what I could read it did look pretty informative though. Shame they don't have an English translation out.

Check out the scan I made

serious stuff

Sometimes it takes a little more effort, which isn't all that bad as long as you have something to show for it. A good two months ago I solicited to write a guest article for Smashing Magazine, one of the leading web design blogs out there. It ended up as one mean beast of an article, but the result is something I'm quite proud of.

The article is about semantic consistency and the lack thereof in most sites. Not only big corporate sites that have other things to worry about, but also blogs from the leading web design bloggers seem to suffer from semantic inconsistency. Quite strange, as it's not all that difficult to implement. The article gives you a little sample of content type implementation around the web and some pointers on how to make your own code more consistent.

Find it here: When One Word Is More Meaningful Than A Thousand

predictions for the future

Well, that's a simple one. I just take what comes along. Whenever I feel the need to write something I believe deserves a bigger audience than my little blog can guarantee I'm sure I'll be able to land the article some place or another. And when that happens, you'll read about it here.