I had a four day holiday, back in September this year down in Busselton to celebrate my birthday. I did the same exactly a year before, same dates, same place. In fact, since starting Bam Creative in mid 2002, I have taken exactly 3 three to four day holidays, and that’s it.

When planning for my whopping great big 16 day break (which I am in day 3 today), my wife rightly pointed out that the last time I had two weeks off was our honeymoon, April 1998. How bad is that? Here I am telling staff and others how important it is to have ‘down time’ as much as ‘up time’, yet I am the worst offender!

Well, I know my new years resolution…and to celebrate we’re off to Busselton this Saturday for a whole week – I’ll be working on my sleeping and lying on the beach skills, possibly my food and wine consumption muscles, and even some board game, photography and visual arts work-outs too! :)

Walking, yoga and meditation is also on the list, along with just hanging out with my wife and kids. Unlike my previous short breaks where I plan our days off down to the hour, this time I am making sure I haven’t planned anything beyond accommodation and when we need to get home.

Here’s wishing all of you also get some down time, and catch up on life outside of work and careers. I really do believe it is very important to pursue relaxation and out of work experiences, as well as work goals – I just seem to be bad at doing it my myself, ha!

Image: ‘Holiday!’ biro and paper scribble.

When I say value, I don’t mean the traditional financial sense – I mean how do you value your blog? Looking around, you can work a number of scenarios, obviously traffic stats, etc give you an idea, but honestly, half of the stats are skewed by pings, feeds that may never be read, bots and more. Then you’ve got Google, search under some crazy terms, and see if you appear in the top 10,000 results (someone came to this blog last week searching for ‘bam creative blog‘ – now that’s weird!).

You can use Technorati, to see if anyone mentions you or your site, you can use the same to find inbound links, or you can wait for people to tell you they read your blog (hello to the four people who did this to me at Perth Massive a few weeks ago!).

Then, it seems many people use a less statistical method of evaluating their own ‘blog health’, which is the quantity and quality of the comments left after posts.

This is interesting, since starting this blog, I have learnt to appreciate comments, so much so that I find myself actually leaving comments on other blogs when I have something interesting (or even uninteresting) to say – I never used to do that, I always read a post, nodded and mumbled ‘I agree’, and move on, however now I know the buzz of getting people commenting on my posts, it makes me realise I should reciprocate on other folks blogs.

At the end of the day, what is the driver for you to maintain a blog? It takes time and effort, it sits out there in the ether, and what’s it all mean? A year ago, I believed most people with blogs posted self gratification and were full of self importance. I have started to realise that ordinary people, with little to say, can also use blogs as a way of ‘catching up’ with friends, colleagues, family and random strangers.

It’s nice when someone responds to a post, because then you realise someone is actually reading your drivel, and perhaps to at least one soul out there is interested in what you have to say.

What say you, fellow bloggers?

Photo: My son, Davis (on left), looking at his 5th birthday cake, last Sunday.

I like any forms we do to be well explained. You have to account for the lowest common denominator. It’s very important that any web based forms are well laid out, clearly explained, and very intuitive. There’s an amazing amount of work making a form reach all of these goals, and most clients wouldn’t even notice the work that goes into them

That’s all well and good, but sometimes you see explanations gone mad. See the above – it’s great that they explain what the card numbers are (see red text).

What’s with Bankcard customers needing to call?

Merry Christmas/Festive Season/Late December and Happy Next 365 days to all. :)

Image: Screengrab from an Australian e-commerce payment form.