I’ll be honest, I’m not much of a regular blogger (that’s why blogger wasn’t one of my tags at Barcamp Auckland) and that’s mainly because it takes a lot of effort to write something good, something you know your readers will be interested in but more importantly something no-one else has said.

When your topic of choice is along the lines of “web design and development following web standards”, your job becomes that much harder.

• Lots of the problems you solve is case specific, and even if you were to share these with your readers you would have forgotten about it by the time you’ve completed the project. So you hardly ever have “something good” to say.
• In some ways it’s a lot easier to write when you know you have people reading, even if it’s just ten readers, you know someone will be reading what you wrote, someone will benefit from the time you put into writing a post. You know there are people who are interested in what you have to say. Some say when you have thousands of readers, your job as a blogger becomes much more difficult. I disagree, when lots of people are reading what you have to say, a couple of them are bound to respond to your post and give you material for the next post.
• When you blog about the field that invented blogging, you hardly ever say something no-one else has said before. Every web developer and their cat has a blog, and every web developer has to deal with the same browsers, standards and mainly the same issues. So, coming up with something revolutionary is really hard.

My point is; blogging, consistently, is really hard! And anyone who manages it, even if they have hundreds of readers, has earned my respect.

When I found out that my friend, Novia, has posted 102 blog posts since August 2006 (that’s an average of over 6 posts a month!) I was amazed and extremely proud. I introduced her to blogging in 2006 and said she should write about whatever she wanted. In this way, her topic became her life.

Her blog has gone through 3 redesigns now (when I say redesign I mean she picked a skin and I modified it for her.) And this latest one is really cool because it let’s her add an illustration with every post, and if she doesn’t, it degrades gracefully down to a default image.

Novia has always had awesome cartoons and sketches (you should see her school diary!) so I can’t believe it’s taken us ‘til now to give her a way to express this through her blog. On her last redesign, the header contained an image I vectored, from a self-portrait she did, but this was a one time thing and was really a piece of my art inspired by her drawing and not her own image.

Although her blog is based on her life, and you may not know her, I encourage you to read it. Often it contains rants and recounts of a day she enjoyed but at other times she writes interesting essays about life from the view of a teenager. With Novia, you never know what you’re going to get and that’s what is so great. If you don’t care for her topic, subscribe at least for the illustrations. Of course they’ll make more sense in context (with the actual post) but would be just as entertaining and inspiring to look at by themselves.

One final thing before you leave to see it, please comment! She loves receiving comments, and although my stats package says she has regular readers who spend over an hour per visit on her site, she doesn’t believe me because only her friends comment.

So, without further ado, check it out.