Web Development, startups, entrepreneurship, books, art, and other stuff
So, I had installed Twitter-Tools, thinking that it would be a nifty idea to integrate tweets with the blog posts, kind of like little “asides”. There are a few not too far below this post, for example.
I’ve since re-considered, and decided against this. I just don’t think it integrates real well. Perhaps in a tumblog, but I just wasn’t seeing the value in leaving that turned on. If there is some short tidbit that I want to post on the blog, I think I’ll just post it as an aside.
That is all.
Well. Mephisto is a very nice blog engine, but I think I’m coming back to Wordpress. There are too many advanced features I’ve gotten used to in Wordpress that are missing from Mephisto.
Wait, you say. You could add these features to Mephisto, submitting them as patches, making the world a better place in the process.
I think I could, but for now with school, work, freelance projects, and a pre-alpha startup in the works, I don’t have the time.
(”Pre-alpha startup” is a fancy way of saying “Notes on the back of a napkin.”)
So, I’m going to be blogging back here again. I expect I’ll be tweaking the theme again soon, but more importantly. And there isn’t really much more to say about that: back to Wordpress. See you soon.
So, having thrown my lot in with Ruby & Rails, I thought maybe it was time I switched to a blog engine that runs on Rails. Mephisto looked interesting, so I’m trying it out for a bit.
I may return to Wordpress; I may try a different Ruby or Rails blog engine; I may just stay with Mephisto. That’s what’s so exciting! Who knows what I’ll do? Will I stick with it, overcoming the learning curve? Will I succumb to the lure of the familiar and easy, returning once again to the ubiquitous Wordpress? Feel free to engage in wild speculation; it’s all right. I’m okay with that.
So I have set up Mephisto in the subdomain blog.philcrissman.com, and got it all up and running. It’s quite minimal, the default Simpla-based theme, with my trusty TV image added, just to make everyone feel at home. Go visit me there; I promise to try to be interesting.
Alternatively, if you view actually visiting blogs as so three years ago, the feed for the new blog will be blog.philcrissman.com/feed/atom.xml. Subscribe to it: you know you want to.
I jumped into Twitter by starting to follow about 1400+ people right away. Obviously, I did not know all those people; I found them by following someone, and then seeing who that person was following, and adding them, and so forth.
Too random? Maybe. The thing is: people on Twitter, in general, seem to neither care nor mind that you don’t know them. In fact, soon after I joined, I had someone start following me. I didn’t quite “get” why at first. At any rate, that’s Twitter.
The fallout from that is, I’m following a heck of a lot of people. I haven’t tried to run any tests (and I probably won’t any time soon), but I’m pretty sure that a lot of the folks I’ve followed are not Twittering regularly. I see the same few hundred names over and over, for the most part.
Due to the nature of Twitter, it’s pretty much a given that people using regularly are also bloggers. Maybe not all, but the majority. So, I’m starting to try and make it a point to also subscribe to these blogs. Main reason: I figure if someone can say something interesting in 140 characters, they can probably do so in a longer format as well.
Obviously I can’t read all that many feeds every day; I barely read the few hundred I have already. But I like to skim the headlines, and I think I catch the gist of what’s going on over a fairly large spectrum of blogs. I use Google reader, which has the nice feature of letting you read everything at once, if you want, so you can see the latest posts of everything you subscribe to aggregated into on big river of feeds. I’m not religious about it, but I try to add things that stand out to my Google shared items, which you can find linked in the sidebar of this blog.
I’m not sure I’m very good at predicting the Next Big Thing. I mean, when I first heard about Microsoft Windows in 1990, I figured that would be a complete flop*. Yeah. So, there you go.
(* But really, who could blame me?)
Still, I think we can be assured that there will be, at some point, another Next Big Thing. It’s just the actual shape and smell of it that eludes us.
I don’t know if the Metaweb will be the Next Big Thing. But if it isn’t, I think it may be the Next Next Big Thing, or possibly the 3.times(”Next”) Big Thing, or maybe somewhere beyond that. I don’t even know if we’ll call it “the Metaweb”, but at the moment, I don’t know what else to call it.
When I say “Metaweb”, then, what am I talking about? Mainly, I mean a layer of activity and content over the web, interdependent with existing web content. Some possible examples:
Continue reading ‘The Metaweb’
I’m trying to be objective. I love startups, and I like seeing all the new ideas, and sometimes the ideas that seems silly to me at first (Twitter was one) really take off. So, I’m trying out something called Triggit.
The elevator pitch is, Triggit is a new way to add images, embed videos, and place Amazon affiliate links on your blog. Technically, I suppose it could be used with any website, but the target is definitely bloggers.
I pretty much dismissed it at first. I mean… putting an image or a YouTube video in a blog post? I need a tool for this?
Continue reading ‘Triggit’
Thanks to mrBen and afongen for pointing out that comments were not working. Right now the entire site is down, after an upgrade to 2.3.
Frustrating… but at the same time, I’ve had almost no problems with Wordpress for over a year, so… oh well. Here’s to troubleshooting.
UPDATE: Comments working again.It was (I think) the ELA plugin that K2 used for the Archive page.
I suppose I’ve been using Twitter for a few weeks now; more so in the last week or two. It’s not a long time, but Twitter is not a complicated application. Here are some thoughts.
I haven’t gone and looked for interviews with the founders or other stories about Twitter, but in my own humble estimation, Twitter is based on the assumption that communication is valuable, connections are valuable, and the two together are more valuable. Twitter’s creators may put it differently, but I’d be very surprised if the meaning would vary much. Twitter is a social network, period, on where you have only three avenues of expression:
In blatant disregard to previous things I might have stated about the general theme of this blog, I’m getting set to make some changes in direction. Come to think of it, I may have already been making these changes for awhile.
So, I just took a glance (finally) at Scoble’s linkblog… Overall, interesting content, so I subscribed.
I think subscribing to such things appeals to me for the same reason I find the del.icio.us/popular feed so handy… why surf the internet when you can have other people surf it for you?
