Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Waffle of the month

Waffle of the month

Some of our more regular and observant visitors might wonder what the WOTM category is all about. It actually stands for “waffle of the month”, and it’s the license we give ourselves to go a bit off-topic every once in a while. We did promise in our very first post that we’ll “keep the waffling to a minimum”, so readers can expect the waffling to just only be once a month.
Joining Twitter

We joined twitter last month. We joined merely because everybody seems to be talking about it, but over a month on, we’re still not quite sure how to use it most effectively. Our preliminary conclusion is twitter – social media in general, in fact – can potentially be a great business tool, but it may not be for everyone.

So while twitter can and should be included in marketing mix considerations, we probably won’t lose too much sleep if we can’t make it fit into our model. A possible folly is for people to just latch on to it because it seems to be what people are talking about these days and lose a lot of resources just getting it to work right for them.
Playing with site look and feel

We are still constantly playing with the look and feel of the site. We added, and then removed, a tags widget on the left sidebar as it looked too cluttered for our taste. We added Clustrmaps at the bottom of the right sidebar, mainly to give us a (free) indication of where our visitors are coming from. We did not expect visits from China and India to be so high, at least relative to the rest of the world; but thinking about it now, it probably makes sense just with their sheer volume of internet users.

We also added the new WordPress twitter widget on the right sidebar. This widget is fairly new and WordPress seems to still be working on some kinks here and there. But we trust Wordress to eventually get this right, so we’ll just leave it there. Last but not least, we’re experimenting with comment threading, another fairly new feature provided by WordPress.
“Sample Us” page

Just introduced this week is a new “Sample Us” page. The page contains links to seven previous posts, intended to give new visitors a feel of what this blog is about. The page is probably a bit unnecessary at this stage, considering that the blog is only a few months old.

But we received some feedback that the top menu bar looked a bit barren with just two items there, and we just could not think of anything else to add. We aim to update the page with different sample posts at least every two months so longer-term, we think it will prove good value for new visitors.
Dilbert

Finally, one of our workmates found out last year (by spying on our email) that we subscribe to the Dilbert daily strip, and she thoughtfully gave us a Dilbert desk calendar for Christmas. It was our first time to have a Dilbert desk calendar, so we really appreciated the gesture. And then we found that the strips in the calendar are two years old (we even read an exact same strip we have plastered on our wall)!

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