Anyone who happens to look at my site frequently will notice I don’t get all that many comments. That’s never really bothered me; I write on my blog as a release and to hopefully help those few people that manage to find something useful.

Yet there are many who when coming to redesign or rebuild their blogs are removing the facility to add comments to their posts. Instead they attempt to push the discussion to somewhere external of their site; like Twitter. There are two glaringly obvious problems with this:

1. No matter how hard you try to convince yourself otherwise 140 characters simply isn’t enough to have a half decent conversation. Instead you end up with half meanings and no elaboration of your point of view.
2. The discussion is also restricted to two people and the few that happen to follow both these people. Any others are instantly exiled from a conversation they have no idea is even occurring.

There are a few reasons I can think of for people to remove comments from their website but on the whole they all seem fairly selfish. At no point can I find a situation where removing comments helps those that would otherwise be using them. Sure it’s the site owner’s prerogative to do what they wish with their own site but it seems against the spirit of having a blog if instead of trying to foster a discussion on the topic you’ve written about you instead kill it even before it begins.

I hope this trend I’ve begun to see is limited to only a few and that this doesn’t become the norm as even if you’re site gets only a few comments like mine I’m sure people appreciate the opportunity to add their view.

Although I’ve been to FOWD for the past three years the 2011 ticket prices just didn’t appear to be value for money with what seemed an aggressive price increase. Although for those three years I’ve been lucky enough for work to pay for me to attend the conference I thought I would maybe try out something different this year.

The reason FOWD seems to not be such value for money is that there are more reasonably priced conferences being launched that still appear to retain the same if not higher standards. The likes of DIBI and New Adventures in Web Design stand out. With such conferences costing much less than FOWD I thought it may be more beneficial to try a few smaller ones and see a wider range of speakers with different areas of expertise.

So this morning, after checking work would foot the cost, I signed up for DIBI 2011. The fact it is pretty local is what initially attracted me but with a decent level of speakers and the addition of Jeffery Zeldman as keynote speaker it appeared this would be the year to give this and possibly other conferences a go. Hopefully I won’t be disappointed and following the reaction last year’s conference received it should be good fun.

Of course it’s the start of a new year and up pop all the posts about new resolutions, reflections on the past year and predictions for the year ahead. Seeing so many articles over the past few days predicting what will be coming in 2011 I found myself wondering if these are actually worth reading at all.

A note

I was asked in December if I would write a post like this detailing the upcoming trends of Web Design in 2011. At the time I declined for a few reasons but not because of a dislike for these posts. I would have loved to have written the article at the time. But time has a way of changing your perspective.

Also if you’ve written such a post I apologise if this offends, it’s not my intention.

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I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I use JQuery as my default JavaScript framework. At one time it just one of many frameworks I would find to suit a specific purpose but because all the cool kids were using it I gave it a proper go and now I don’t think I could live without it.

Following the crowd

As a dedicated follower of fashion the next big thing was to start using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) in order to serve jQuery into your website.

It made sense too. As a meaty 70kb file being able to use someone else’s bandwidth is great, but there were other benefits not least the fact users would cache the file possibly making a visit to your website even quicker as jQuery would not need to be re-downloaded.

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