At what point does constantly writing about daily activities become the most prevalent daily activity?

Thinking about all the annotating, linking, and tagging that must accompany an update about my happenings makes the who process seem overwhelming. There are too many other new things to be doing instead of rehashing the just completed things. Writing about things I’ve read takes time away from reading more, linking to music I’ve found takes time away from finding newer music, and, most importantly, blabbing about it all takes time away from resting from it.

Phew.

On Saturday I attended the first ever WordCamp. Based on the notification emails going out about it, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Only 15 hours before it was slated to start, Matt sent out a message saying that more than a dozen sessions still needed discussion leaders. It made me wonder what we were in for.

The event actually turned out fairly well I thought. I mostly stayed in the Main Hall for the sessions in there. The Second Room seemed to be discussions for more advanced users.

My only criticism about WordCamp would be the organization of the sessions. It would have been nice to let us know as users which ones were geared towards different experience levels. I heard people say that too much of the technology-speak was over their heads. Next time an effort should be made to distinguish different types of users. Have more sessions for the people who know only the basics–and clearly tell us which sessions are for whom.

Anyway, here is very short synopsis of what I got out of the sessions that I sat in on:

Widgets Showcase, Andy Skelton - Widgets are cool. They make your sidebar easy to configure.

Blog Promotion and Writing a Compelling Blog, Prince Campbell - Write about other people so they will want to come read your blog. People care about themselves the most; play to that.

State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg - WordPress needs help with support. Work on it is constant and enthusiastic.

Blog Architecture, Aaron Brazell - I didn’t get anything out of this session, but it wasn’t necessarily Aaron’s fault. The conversation became dominated by nonsensical audience members’ questions.

WordPress as CMS, Mark Jaquith - This session showed me the potential WordPress has in making all kinds of great sites that are not blogs. I really hadn’t thought about it before.

Blogs and Journalism, Om Malik - He basically said bloggers aren’t journalists unless they put in the effort to do fact-checking and follow-up phone calls. They are separate spheres.

SEO & WordPress, Neil Patel - I learned that SEO means search engine optimization. The worst things you can do are sleazy tricks. Search engines are smart.

Plugin Showcase, Niall Kennedy, et al - I was getting really tired at this point. I didn’t write down the address for the coolest plugin I saw: one that gathers all the info on the web about a commenter on your blog and displays it in a box on a mouseover. Oh well.

After all that I went to dinner with some friends and some people I had just met. I went up with Elea and Melinda, met Lauren, an Internet acquaintance, and her friend Anna, and was good to catch up with Will again. I didn’t take too many photos during the day, but by far the best one was at dinner. I don’t even need to say any more.

technorati tags:wordcamp

Blogged with Flock

A little while ago I posted on my MySpace blog about Mozy, a cool little online backup company. I’ve been quite impressed by their service so far.

Well, the people who work there started a blog. The posts so far are funny, a tad sarcastic, and even informative.

My favorite part so far has been the little jabs at the government in a post about encryption:

We’re a little unique here in that we give our users the option to provide their own private key (a passphrase, a picture, a music file –whatever) which is hashed to generate a 448-bit key for encryption.This key is stored on their PC, and we don’t have access to it – it’stored on the PC and is never transferred to our servers – which means that we can confidently protect data from both kid sisters and government agencies.

When debating which aluminum foil brand to wrap their hard disks in they recognize the threat posed by the government and cooperating corporations:

This is a tough one. On the one hand, you’ve got Reynolds – which is an old standby. On the other hand, perhaps it’s safer to use a more generic brand, like from Target. Reynolds is made in Virginia, which is home to all sorts of government agencies, and who knows how they’ve meddled with the manufacturing process of this aluminum foil. But the Target brand is manufactured in Minneapolis, which was the home of the Cray supercomputer, and everyone knows they were in cahoots with the government, specifically the NSA.

I hope they continue in this vein. I will love it.

Technorati Tags: mozy, blog

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While at work at another school the other day I became frustrated with the effort required to keep up to date with all of my friends’ sites and various other sites on the web that I read. I had access to a computer so I began checking out feed readers. I tried out the interface or at least looked at the website on many of them. I was using FeedBurner as a reference because they give a whole slew of options for subscribing to feeds when you pull one up at the site.

In the end, I settled with Bloglines. It is a web-based feed reader that is incredibly easy to work with. Although I initially resisted feed readers in general because I didn’t like having to click into different folders and having to view each feed separately, I may come around because Bloglines makes it so easy. My prior preference was for aggregators in the fashion of LiveJournal Friends pages or the feed aggregator built into Flock. When I install the Bloglines Toolkit for Firefox it makes life so easy by putting a “Subscribe to this Page” option in the context menu and putting a notifier in the browser window. I know right away when something new is published.

A feature that I just explored last night has proven quite useful already. Bloglines allows you to set up unlimited numbers of email accounts with them, which is particularly useful for subscribing to mailing lists. Mailing list subscriptions will never flood my email account anymore, and I don’t have to worry about being spammed.

I know Jessica started using Bloglines yesterday when I was telling her about it, and I noticed that Jacob uses it. I recommend it to anyone who tries to stay on top of many different sites.

Check out my subscriptions here. Subscribe to me here.

technorati tags: bloglines, feeds

As most people know who might ever read this page, I work in schools as a substitute teacher. Every once in a while I get lucky and there is a computer in the classroom that doesn’t require a logon or, like this one, has only Windows 98 which is easy to get around.

When I’m at school I need to pass the time once I get the kids to work. I often like to read the news and my friends’ sites. Today I tried to go straight to the sites of Jessica, Jacob, Akiko, and Elea but with no luck and got the message:

The page you requested has been blocked because it contains a banned word.

The funniest thing was that I was able to get directly to Andy’s site, which has the subheader “Andy ‘Bad Motherfucker’ Smith”.  His site was blocked at a different school the other day.

…I hope this post doesn’t help the DoJ in reviving the Children’s Online Protection Act by pointing out flaws in filters…

It’s a little old now, but it keeps popping up in my mind. My friend Jacob from back in D.C. when I interned at Cato wrote a guest piece on a blog about coffee that I read. He gives his libertarian take on the whole Starbucks phenomenon. Jacob’s is a point of view worth checking out in the realm of coffee because all he does I think is sit around in coffee shops all day in search of the perfect cup. He even makes out-of-the-way trips to specialty coffee shops all over the world. I don’t even like coffee, so his word would be what I go by.

Technorati Tags: coffee, libertarian

Yesterday I got around to adding one thing to my sidebar. I have a lot to do still. I put up my Currently Reading list via a script from allconsuming. Then today I put my top weekly artists from Last.fm in there. Will someone teach me how to take the data feed they give me (here: http://www.last.fm/onyoursite/datafeeds.php) in any format they offer and put it on my site? I want my recent tracks to show rather than last week’s top artists.

Other plans include getting rid of the default blogroll, changing the order of stuff, making my header an imagemap with only the “All Clear” button clickable to take one back home (help?), changing the Flash loop on the domain homepage, and actually changing around the homepage.

If anyone can teach me how to do small, cool things, I’d be happy.

As can be expected when changing one’s blogging tools, many of my old posts have broken things in them or they do not look pretty. I will be cleaning this stuff up as I come across it. Feel free to take the opportunity to point out flaws I could fix or improvements I could make by commenting on this post.

I have a new blog. Yippee! Thank you to Elea for coming over on New Year’s Eve and nerding it up with me. I’ll be messing around with some of the little details later. Enjoy for now.