Weblogs

Do you take time for personal stuff?

Kite

I’m usually pretty good at taking time for personal projects. I think they are important, and they’ve served me well over the course of my career. But…I guess sometimes things just get too serious to play. Or, perhaps we just forget to play?

For a while, I was pretty good at processing photos and getting what I could posted on Flickr and/or Google+. However, going through the collection on my hard drive today, I noticed that I haven’t really posted anything of mine on Flickr since last March. Sheesh! Last March!. That’s terrible.

I have done a few events since March, and photos I’ve taken at those and for others are all processed and dealt with as they should be. The embarrassing thing is that all the personal stuff is just languishing there in folders.

I need to clear up the backlog and start enjoying my personal stuff again.

Time to play.

Please Stop

Media sites have really jumped the shark.

This morning, I followed a tweet to an article on Inc. Magazine’s website. What do you think met me when I got there?

1. A popup came up asking me to join/like/subscribe to their FaceBook, Twitter and other pages. I had to figure out how to close that off. Then, below that,

2. an ad sat there that said it would disappear after 4 more seconds.

So, we had a popup invitation appearing over an ad, before I even got to the site.

Despite the recommendation via the tweet, the article turned out to be another generic article about I can’t remember what. So I closed the tab I had open and…

A popup survey questionnaire appeared on my desktop, wondering if I would comment on how much I liked the site.

Really! Do we need all that sh*t?

I have fond memories of Inc magazine from its print version, so I thought I’d click through and see how the web version was. That will be my last visit to Inc, I’m afraid.

What a horrible experience.

A Forgotten Resource

A few years ago I discovered Pam Slim and her site Escape From Cubicle Nation. I followed her devotedly for a while, and then for some reason, I gradually faded off to other things.

I rediscovered her again today and ran across a couple of her newer blog posts on planning. What was great was that she supported the posts with a video. Actually, I ran across her video on youtube first and then found the posts 😉

The first post I ran across was on using agile development techniques to do your planning. Selecting 2-3 months at a time, decide what you want to focus on most: cash flow, visibility or opportunity.

Once you’ve decided what you want to accomplish in, say the first quarter, set up your projects with milestones and give them a ‘ship’ date.

Her blog is worth a look if you’re starting a planning process for 2012. The site is also good for those leaving the cubicle for a more entrepreneurial type of work. She’s definitely back on my RSS feed for now.

The Social Graph Expands

I have this on and off relationship with Facebook. For some reason, I just don’t get the interface. I like the idea and the potential, but it’s just never clicked with me.

That may have changed.

I have some old friends that I’ve known since elementary school. We’ve drifted together and apart at various times of our lives and for some reason, I started thinking about them a couple of months ago.

What do you know. A few days ago, the son contacted me through Facebook and we friended each other. I didn’t see it at the time because of FB’s stupid algorithms that decide who’s messages you should see, but he also left me a message along with the friend request. I just found it tonight.

Further inspection of his info page, turned up the FB addy of his mom, one of the dear friends of old. We’ll see if she responds to the friend request I sent today. It would be really good to catch up again. Then again, it’s not like I’m a stranger. I could just pick up the phone and say hi 😉 We’ll see.

This will be the first time I’ve actually found someone I knew from the past via FB (ok, technically they’ve found me, but hey). I’ve tried, but people just haven’t shown up in search when I’ve looked. Go figure. Like I said, me and the interface just don’t seem to jive.

Perhaps I’ll have to try harder and see if I can figure out what I’m missing. Of course by then, they’ll probably have changed things around again. Sigh.

The End of NaBloWriMo? Now what?

_DWS0635

National Blog Writing Month (NaBloWriMo) comes to an end today. After the last 30 posts, I guess the challenge now is to ensure the old blog doesn’t gather a bunch of cobwebs.

They say all you need to develop a habit is 3 weeks and consistent practise. I’m counting on that, and I’m pretty confident things will keep moving along here. They’ll evolve, but they will keep moving along.

That’s the feeling.

A Couple of Little Changes Done

I’ve added a photo gallery of some shots taken this year. Not sure if it’s worth it with the Flickr stream on the side, but there ya go.

I played a bit with the template, so I’m happier with that now – smaller header, posts are closer together and the paragraphs aren’t quite as far apart as they were. Still not happy about the ‘normal’ line spacing, but I guess I’ll have to see about delving deeper into the CSS for that – much later, I’d say.

So, it’s coming along slowly but surely.  More tomorrow.

This is the day

Well, this is the day. My old blog DWS@Large at Typepad is now pretty much history.

I’ve moved most of the past posts over here via the Squarespace blog importer but the old site will just sit until the hosting runs out in July. 

I’m in the middle of a NaBloWriMo exercise and given that we’re getting close to the end of the month, I might just finish it off here. 

We’ll see. Just getting started with this here new site. Once I get the domain redirect done, we’re good to go.

Later….

Time for a Change?

I’ve been humming and hawing about what to do next with this blog (physically, that is). It’s not that I don’t like where it’s hosted, it just seems some other options may have more flexibility or be easier to set things up. You might say I’m reassessing.

I’ve spent the morning looking at WordPress (both .com and .org) and Squarespace as alternative ways to host it. Some options are more expensive and some are definitely cheaper, so that brings me back to the question of just what I want to do with it and how much I want to spend. The trouble is, that all seems to keep changing right now.

On one hand, I’d like to have a photography portfolio that shows off some of my best work. I also want a blog and a few pages that highlight the business and the relationships that business might build over time.

As time goes on and more income starts to flow, I expect I’d move the photography portfolio over to one of the commercial sites dedicated to that and keep the main site as a blog and information pages – all integrated, of course.

I know most bloggers swear by a self-hosted WordPress site. I just don’t know if I want to spend my time keeping it and all the plugins up to date and secure.

Time will tell, I guess. I might explore a bit more with Typepad and then use up some free trial time at Squarespace and WordPress.com. That might answer my questions about what I actually need and how the backends of those sites facilitate that.

We’ll see how it all goes. Lots to think about over the next while.

Distracted

What’s new over the last month?

A Posterous account.

I found this while reading Steve Rubel. It’s dead simple. Just send a note off to post at posterous.com and the site sets up a blog for you, based on your email address. A return email gives you the relevant access information, but you can just keep sending things via email to build your blog. You can even embed pictures and links to other sites you’ve found.

You can watch your blog grow anonymously, or login to explore some of the other features. You can automatically update your other sites like facebook and twitter with your posts (or links to them), or subscribe to other posterous blogs. More to come, I’m told.

You can also sign in and post online, or use the new iphone app picposterous. Either way, posting is a snap, and the site includes an RSS feed. Nice.

Want a collection of the pictures you’ve taken at an event? Picposterous/posterous will build you a gallery based on the pictures you send. They will all be contained in a single post, with the title based on the Picposterous album name. I’m still trying to figure out how to delete individual pictures from the gallery, but in general, it works like a charm.

So cool.

A twitter account.

I swore I’d never do it, but … I did. What can I say.

Now that I’ve learned more about Twitter, I’m starting to see some value. Within a few minutes of signing in, I’d found some friends and a couple of local photographers, heard about some folks that were looking for a photographer, and got very confused about all the RT, @, D and #FF stuff littering tweets 😉

It’s getting better now. I’ve settled in with Tweetdeck and Tweetie on the desktop and iphone for now. We’ll see how it goes.

The next goal will be to tie everything together somehow. Typepad, Twitter, Posterous, and perhaps Facebook.

We live in interesting times.