Category Archives: Blogs

Blogs, Meta

Commenting on Comments

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Last night, a friend of mine sent me an email wondering why I didn’t have a comments feature on my blog and that he would have commented on a few things had there been one. After the initial burst of panic that something on the site wasn’t working, I realized that while there, the comment link on the theme I’m using could easily be missed. I’ve made a slight change to the page template to duplicate the comments link at the end of each story. It’s not perfect – WordPress has a function call to generate the comments link, which means it isn’t all that flexible – but hopefully it will make things a little clearer for those who were looking for it.

Of course, this makes me wonder about how many other comments I’ve lost out on. This blog isn’t widely read, but I do get a handful of interesting people leaving me things about the things I post, which makes this a lot more interesting, so I want to be sure it’s easy for them and others to do.

Comments? 🙂

Blogs, Communication, conference, Geek Stuff, oscon, Social Networking

More Social Networking For Me, Thanks to OSCON

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Looking through my blog’s archive, I never did blog about my getting started with Facebook, but I’m blaming, er, crediting the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). They had put up a note that Facebook was to be the social network of choice for that year. Previously, I had been avoiding Facebook, but with that final nudge, I relented and created the account. And Facebook has been great for reconnecting with people, and glimpsing little bits of peoples’ lives you wouldn’t necessarily see.

There’s a new social networking concept that I’ve dabbled with, but never really got into, called “microblogging”. This is where you make short posts, usually only a sentence or two, or a link. The site that’s been around the longest and is the most successful is Twitter, and no, I do not have an account there. Yet.

I just finished reading an interesting entry on the TED Blog called “How To Talk While People are Twittering“, and it discusses an article on how, as a speaker, being aware of the backchannel communication of your audience can benefit both the audience and you. The point for me is that I’ve been going to OSCON for several years now, and it was only a few years ago that I discovered the traditional OSCON backchannel: IRC.  From that, many of the points this article enumerates, I know first-hand to be true.
So, going to the 2009 OSCON site, seeing that the very first icon in the list of social networks and media to be used this year is Twitter, I have very little doubt that in addition to IRC, Twitter is going to be heavily used and will be another great source of commentary and information (we *are* talking about a group of notorious early adopters).

I know I can easily follow the twittering without an account: there are lots of aggregators out there, but I’m guessing that I’ll create an account for 2 reasons: the first is to be able to participate in the discussion, and the second is that I’ve been saying for the last few years that I’ll blog the conference, and while last year I did ok, I don’t have the greatest track record. Twitter might not be great, in-depth prose, but it will be (micro) blogging, and it will provide a trail that will serve as a memory aid should I then go back and write real blog posts.

Look for me on Twitter. Coming Soon. Summer of ’09. Maybe before. 🙂

Blogs, Meta

The Problem with My Blogging Philosophy

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Even with the name change to reflect the nature of the blog (sporadic posting), there’s definitely something wrong with the way I do things here.  Read any article on blogging, and they’ll tell you about posting often to build an audience and a brand, and I’m just plain ignoring that.  This isn’t really a blog about any one thing (which is a problem any of the previously-mentioned articles will tell you), and that’s coupled with two problems:

The first is that I am, by nature, a fairly private person.  I know that probably seems weird to say, given my online presence, but if you examine everything about me that’s out there, it doesn’t really go that deep.  Regardless, there is a definite amount of resistance I need to overcome just to write something here (or anywhere public, for that matter).

The second problem, more directly related to blogging, is overcoming the mostly-subconscious, self-imposed expectation of having to posting something really great (which I imagine people whose blogs have an audience have), which grows worse the longer the silence gets.  There have been things I could have written about and didn’t because I didn’t think I had the time to do it justice, or just forgot about it.  Then there’s looking at the date of the last entry and thinking “wow, it’s really been a while – I need something to write about”, and then rejecting most of the ideas as “not good enough”.

I have the head-knowledge bit of overcoming this (just write something!), but is there a practical thing I can do to overcome this other than just “getting over it”?

Blogs, Geek Stuff

My Wife’s Artwork Featured on Blog

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IT Crowd Cross-stitch A while back, my wife Michelle had made me a cross stitch of a frame of the opening sequence to the really funny British comedy “The IT Crowd”. She had worked out the pattern herself from a still, made it, and got it framed for me. It now adorns the wall of my office. Of course, I had taken a picture, and posted it to my flickr account.

Last week I got email from the owner of the GeekCrafts blog saying that her work was featured in an article: 9 Works in Cross Stitch. Very cool!