i-sako.com

As two blogs I admire recently announced their respective first birthdays, I thought I might take a moment to make a similar announcement—and to think about what the future holds for this site.

One year ago today, I wrote my first blog entry (although, at that time, I was still using Blogger). Like many of the entries that followed it, this entry took on a political tone that eventually took over as this blog’s dominant theme.

Hmmn...what does the future hold in store for this site? More eye candy would be good, of course (to look at the plain design of this blog, you’d never know that I work for a digital camera maker). More frequent updates? Probably. Collaboration with like-minded gaijin? Possibly. Collaboration with family members? I think that would be fun, but I suspect that my wife is far too shy to agree to do an intercultural husband-and-wife blog, unfortunately.

Other suggestions welcome.

One of my most common frustrations is a general lack of free time in which to blog about things. Naturally, this also means that I don’t have as much time as I would like to work on the design of my blog, either, but I found a moment to do so just now--and I seized it! Unfortunately, I don’t really have the time to finish what I started right now, so the rest of the redesign will have to wait until I get around to it (which will be soon, I hope).

The motivation for this redesign came from three people: Bob McDonald, who is a very cool guy (as long as you don’t call him a “dumbass”) whose blog provided the inspiration for this I-shaped layout; Ken Cotton, who was getting on my case about not providing an RSS feed (here you go, Ken!); and Kurt Easterwood, who was observant enough to notice that I was using a Movable Type layout without actually running Movable Type, but nice enough not to give me a hard time about it.

In the updates to come, I plan to revamp my list of favored blogs (who knows, I might even succumb to the temptation that is blogrolling!), bring back the Search form and Archives links, and do a bunch of things to make this blog usable--and, with any luck, worthwhile.