While chatting with Scott at ETUG, he commented that he was frustrated with Twitter. Both because of the constant flakiness, and the negative effect it’s having on many people’s blog posting activity. I’m definitely posting less frequently since getting bitten by the Twitter bug.
At first, I didn’t see the problem, but then he explained it. If people are pumping their content and energy into Twitter, something that is by nature largely ephemeral and transient (both in server uptime and lifespan of content) then the blogosphere is effectively losing out. Yes, there are benefits - the conversations and serendipitous connections that happen via the always-on and always-shifting nature of Twitter streams are compelling because they are some of the most highly social public interactions on the internets. And that has helped me feel more closely connected with the 40-odd people in the strange, distributed, cosmopolitan set of folks I consider friends.
Things are getting out of hand, when Peak Oil - the end of cheap petroleum - is the only way I can see out of this mess. It would help reduce carbon emissions, and it would help reduce our environmental exposure to plastics and plastic byproducts like Bisphenol-A.
OpenID appears to be gaining some momentum. It feels like the right approach to identity management - let individuals control their identity in a trusted way, rather than relying on federation through central brokers. Sun Microsystems just rolled out OpenID support for all of their employees. Stephen’s been talking about this kind of decentralized identity management for years (and most recently just yesterday).
But, it’s been a bit strange in that it hasn’t been very easy to run your own OpenID server. I mean, you could go through myopenid.com to get a free hosted OpenID, but that’s just a federated, centrally hosted identity. No different than a Yahoo! or Google account. The power of OpenID is that you can/should run your own OpenID server, so you control it. It’s not a decentralized, individual identity management system if we still hand control over it to central services. We need to be running our own OpenID servers. Which means it needs to be easy to set up. Ideally one-click easy. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s getting closer.
I was poking around in my Aperture library after importing the latest batch of game photos from Evan’s U5 soccer team today, and I realized that I’ve kept 2345 photos so far this year (on pace to keep well over 6000 in 2007). At the average ratio of keeps-per-deletes, that means I’ve shot well over 10,000 photos so far this year - and the year’s not even half over yet - I might conceivably shoot over 30K photos in 2007.
I have a lot of categories in this blog. 542, to be exact. I use them like tags, rather than a rigid hierarchy.
The WordPress Categories panel in the “Write Post” interface sucks with this many categories/tags. Having to scroll through a verrrrry long list to hunt for keywords is tedious. Here’s a screenshot of Drupal’s autocompleting text-entry interface, which makes it easy peasy to select existing categories/keywords and to add new ones all in one fell swoop. As you type keywords, an ajax call is sent to the blog, returning any categories that match the characters that have been typed, making it easy to select matches from a potentially infinite set of terms. This pattern is also used by del.icio.us very effectively.
I migrated my blog from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2 nearly 2 weeks ago. The process wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be, thanks to a handy howto via vrypan.net. Another resource I refer to every time I get into tweaking MySQL rows is UrbanMainframe’s MySQL search and replace tipsheet. Thanks to both of these great resources for helping me through the migration.
This guide is intended only to document what I did. It’s not a polished howto or manual. There is no warranty. If you blow up your database because you didn’t work with offline backup copies, I won’t be able to help you. Actually, if you’re that silly, I won’t be willing to help you, either. Your mileage may vary.
I got really frustrated with how painfully slow Firefox gets when opening new tabs, so went through my seasonal try-every-browser-known-to-mankind phase last night and today. At the moment, I’m in Flock. It’s based on Firefox, but doesn’t seem to suffer from the glacially slow new tab/window creation problem I get in Firefox. I think I’ll try Flock for awhile. The integrated blog editor is nice, as well as built-in Flickr and del.icio.us love. I’ll stay with it at least until it pisses me off. I’m fickle that way.
I’m wondering (out loud) if I’m guilty of taking the Small Pieces Loosely Joined concept for granted. It’s one of those things that can be talked about at length, but isn’t really understood until a gulp of SPLJ Kool-Aid has been swallowed and the approach has been tried on. Conceptually, it makes sense to talk about using a set of small, directed, task-oriented tools, each doing what they do best, then integrating the various tools to produce an organic, dynamic system that resembles a custom-designed software platform.
It’s always bugged me a bit that my SL avatar was a plain-vanilla human. I mean, here’s this awesome metaverse, where the rules of physics don’t apply, and you can change your appearance at will. And I was walking around, looking much like I do in real life. How creative and interesting.
So, today while watching Stephen work his magic on a panel on SecondLife, in SecondLife (ooh. recursion!) I went shopping for a new avatar. I don’t have time to create an avatar at the moment, and for some reason have a few thousand Lindenbucks in my account. So I went hunting for a prefab avatar that I could live with. I was initially wanting to be a disembodied singularity or something entirely Other. But then I stumbled across the Battlestar Galactica Centurion, from the original 1978 classic series. Perfect.
Efficiently whiteboard dynamic content without cross-unit channels. Distinctively implement plug-and-play manufactured products with open-source innovation. Proactively integrate goal-oriented paradigms before best-of-breed internal or “organic” sources. Energistically network multimedia based markets rather than diverse convergence. Enthusiastically implement wireless web services without standards compliant platforms. Globally embrace enterprise-wide ROI rather than cross-unit applications.
Compellingly expedite prospective imperatives and worldwide results. Efficiently aggregate pandemic partnerships via client-centered e-services. Professionally matrix high-payoff methods of empowerment via out-of-the-box niche markets. Compellingly scale ubiquitous opportunities after customer directed benefits. Enthusiastically foster principle-centered sources without economically sound technologies. Continually disintermediate resource maximizing testing procedures whereas low-risk high-yield mindshare. Enthusiastically architect just in time ROI before ubiquitous core competencies. Assertively provide access to interdependent intellectual capital through 24/365 benefits. Assertively create wireless initiatives vis-a-vis accurate information.
I’ve been using Drupal for my blog for just over a year now, and it’s been a really great platform to work in. I use it pretty much all day for projects at the U of C as well. But it just feels a bit lacking in the area of managing a personal blog, compared with WordPress which is built solely for that purpose.
I’ve been missing things like email subscriptions to comments, and some of the other niceties that WordPress has had nailed for a long time, but are missing in Drupal.
I gave a presentation this morning as part of Faculty Technology Days 2007. I was asked a few weeks ago if I’d like to talk about weblogs and wikis, and I couldn’t come up a reason why not, so they slotted me in. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about weblogs, wikis, academic publishing, and being Open, Connected and Social. So I decided to try to subvert my presentation slightly, into a more open-content-is-good kind of talk (but still based on blogs and wikis for much of it). What better way to do that, than to present directly from a wiki? It’s worked very well for Brian Lamb - all of his presentations are wiki-driven.
