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Weblogs

This category used to be much more active back in the early days of blogging.

xBlog → Collaboratory

As you probably know, XPLANE is now Dachis Group. We are integrating everything as the year closes out — xBlog included.

On the heels of our post celebrating 4,383 days online (that’s 12 internet years!), I want to let everyone know that we’ll be importing key posts into Dachis Group’s Collaboratory blog, and we’ll continue publishing our thoughts and work on visual thinking there. In fact, my first post went up yesterday and other XPLANE alumnus have started blogging there as well.

We won’t be transferring all 8,333 xBlog posts. So many of them are outdated and linkrotted. But we will make sure key posts redirect to their new homes on the Collaboratory and all other posts don’t 404.

It has been a wonderful, amazing, enlightening ride here at xBlog, from hand-coding it starting in 1999, to embracing the first release of WordPress .7 in 2003, to today — a world where blogs are more than commonplace — they are ubiquitous. I don’t know that I could give a better rundown than I did for last year’s 11th anniversary, so if you want a trip down xBlog’s memory lane you can read it here.

Blogging has been core to me and XPLANE for a long time and we’re not going to stop. I truly hope XPLANE’s fans and xBlog’s readers will continue to follow our work as Dachis Group. We’ll still be doing that visual thinking thing, just as we have been for all these years, only now we’ll be bringing to it many more people and businesses.

So on behalf of xBlog… so long, and thanks for all the links.

See you at the Collaboratory.

Cheers,
Bill Keaggy
November 19, 2011




xBlog. 11 years.

On this day, in 1999, I let xBlog out.

Those were some wildly fun days at XPLANE and in the nascent blog world back then (they still are, but we’re all much more grown up now, and those worlds have gotten so much bigger than we could have imagined).

I started xBlog as an internal resource for the folks at XPLANE. As the “web guy” back then, I was sort of like the in-house “Seen it” version of Anil Dash. If someone said they needed to draw Singapore’s flag, I sent them a link. If someone wanted to find an Isotype library, they asked me. And so on. So I started saving and sorting those links, and soon released it to the world as xBlog | The visual thinking weblog.
Read more »

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Sunday, November 7th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Also published in XPLANE news | comments (3)



Dave Gray » Projects

Dave is the founder and president of XPLANE:

I’m a project guy. As an artist, entrepreneur, educator and amateur philosopher, I always have a number of projects going, both personal and professional. Sometimes they go somewhere, sometimes I get bored and abandon them. One of the beauties of the internet is that even abandoned projects continue to exist and can be picked up or reenergized at any moment. Here’s the definitive list of projects that I am working on or have worked on in the past (A work in progress). The list is alphabetical because I don’t work on these projects in any kind of linear way. They are like a busy kitchen: there is always something simmering, something boiling, something set aside to cool for awhile, something in the deep freeze, and something being served. In fact I am still working on this list. If you see something with no explanation it’s because I haven’t finished writing the description yet :)

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Also published in Art & architecture, Books, Business of design, Communications, Creativity, Infodesign & graphics, Learning, Photography, Random, Visual thinking, XPLANE news | Comments Off



Daily Heller by Steven Heller

The “new-improved, re-designed, wordier, picture-ier Daily Heller” now in blog format.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Also published in Graphic design | Comments Off



Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done

“Writing your blog should be a fun way to stretch your mind and stay connected to trends, friends, and the greater world, not another computer task that takes far too long to get done. But that’s exactly what it can feel like if it takes you more time to find your post ideas, tweak your markup, and make everything look right than to actually get your thoughts down. Being somewhat experienced at this blogging thing, your Lifehacker editors have pinpointed a few tools and tricks that make our posts go faster and smoother. After the jump, we round up 10 of them.”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 10:42 am
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The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs

“There is no way to accurately put a value on blogs and blogging companies. All are privately-held and, as is true with many content businesses, the value of the company is based on what a buyer will pay. The figures we have put together look at advertising revenue and income from related businesses like conferences. We have not included blogs affiliated with larger media companies.”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 8:37 am
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Yes, Stop Taking Advice and Start Learning on Your Own

“At first I wasn’t too sure how to take the post from Slant Six Creative’s blog post stop taking advice. In the post it suggests that reading too many blogs will drive you crazy, and within that context DesignNotes is mentioned along with a couple others. There’s one maxim where no press is bad press, but I also was wondering after reading it if that means that there’s one less person about to read about my observations. So I deferred to a friend to find out what she thought. Thankfully she thought it was actually quite a good post. The thing that surprised me about the original post was the premise that I’m giving advice.”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Also published in Learning | Comments Off



Evaluating the WordPress 2.5 Interface

“WordPress 2.5’s interface overhaul is getting closer, and now that I’ve been able to play with the release candidate, these are my thoughts.

The official WordPress blog posted up a nice sneak peek into the WordPress 2.5 release, and intriguingly enough, most of it seems to be an interface update thanks to the fine folks from Happy Cog. Excitedly, I grabbed the release candidate and installed it on my laptop to play with. While the experience was primarily positive, there were some things that irked me. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but the ones that I felt most passionate about are here.”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Also published in Interface design, Software & technology | Comments Off



WordPress Upgrade Preparation Checklist

“I recently asked if you were ready for WordPress 2.5, but let’s go through the steps to prepare your blog for upgrading to the new version next week.”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:34 am
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Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading

“Last year I decided to put on twist on my annual ‘best blogs’ post by taking a turn toward the obscure. Because blogs now pervade the media landscape, it makes little sense to write a post arguing that Huffington Post is better or worse than DailyKos — or Cute Overload.

It turned out that this change — pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed — was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us’ typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it’s time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren’t Reading…”

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
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Kronos video

Sample visual
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.

Azure poster

Sample visual
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.

Tweets & Flickrs