shiny things in messy little piles

Month: May 2007 (Page 1 of 3)

TQR — Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging

Bloggers blogging on blogging

Deep Secrets of Suc­cess­ful Blog­ging is the com­pli­ca­tion of 30 posts from April of 2007 when Chi­ti­ka (a blog­ger’s adver­tis­ing net­work) held a “blog­bash” about pro­fes­sion­al blog­ging. (I’m a suck­er for pdfs, or any­thing that I can print and take away from the com­put­er and this one is nice­ly designed for the type of con­tent it offers.)

So why should I, or you, care about blog­gers blog­ging about blogging?

Look up there at the tag line and you’ll see it. “Tools, tips, and toys…” Blog­ging is a tool for think­ing. Con­tin­ue reading

right books at the right time

Today David Seah men­tioned in an almost aside to a post about learn­ing to net­work (a shared weak­ness) that he had read a cou­ple of books by Paulo Coel­ho and that these were, for him, the right books at the right time.
For me the right book was Coy­ote Blue by Christo­pher Moore. I’ve read and loved a ton of CM’s books since then but only Coy­ote Blue came by at the right moment with the right mes­sage: You are what you are, and any and all attempts to pre­tend oth­er­wise are bound to result in the old man bit­ing you in the ass.

What was your right book at the right time?

Tracking my (sparse) user base.

I spent a good bunch of time last week try­ing to set up some sort of basic track­ing for shiny and the DH’s blog obser­va­tions. There are ninety-three (gues­ti­mate) Word­Press plu­g­ins that track traf­fic (most­ly by look­ing at the site’s serv­er logs.) But there is not one decent review of which ones work well and which ones don’t or even an overview (excel spread­sheet any­one?) of what sort of infor­ma­tion they make out of the raw log data.

Yes­ter­day Google Ana­lyt­ics gave me the shock of my life — I had vis­i­tors. 12 in fact. The result of some tech­no­rati search­es, the men­tion of an Adam Green­field post and the love­ly folk(s) over at //engtech who came by to see who the hell I was.

I also found out that I had com­ments wait­ing to be mod­er­at­ed. Way wait­ing — like a week. The email noti­fi­ca­tion did­n’t work. Sor­ry — I’ll watch much more care­ful­ly in the future.

Now if I can just fig­ure out what all those box­es and charts over on Google Ana­lyt­ics actu­al­ly mean…

Hap­py Week­end y’all.

edit­ed 25.may.07 to change the url for //engtech, who is now ter­ror­iz­ing the web-o-sphere under the name inter­net duct tape. Too cool.

Paradign Shift

In a recent issue of Forbes mag­a­zine (May 7th, 2007) sev­er­al authors wrote short essays on the nature of net­works. One of which (titled “90 Years of Net­works” by Aman­da Schu­pak) includes a nifty lit­tle time line of sig­nif­i­cant events in the his­to­ry of net­works and net­work­ing. In the 1991 spot she includes the following:

Finnish pro­gram­mer Linus Tor­valds kicks off open-source move­ment, a sort of wiki of com­put­er code, with a plea for con­tri­bu­tions to Lin­ux oper­at­ing system.

Note care­ful­ly the wording.

Open source is now described as being wiki-like rather than a wiki being described as being open source-like.

Please don’t be tempt­ed to exclaim — but that’s a tau­tol­ogy! a wiki is a sort of open source project. You’d be miss­ing the point. This is about par­a­digm and analo­gies, not about hier­ar­chi­cal typed-classification sys­tems. The more famil­iar object is being used to describe the less famil­iar object. In the view of this writer a wiki is more famil­iar to her read­ers than open source.

That grind­ing sound you hear is my world view rub­bing up against the curbing.

PS I’d love to give you a link to the arti­cle but in the three days since I pulled it up to read, it has dis­ap­peared behind the for-pay wall. pfft.

Getting Too Physical in GTD

I’ve been mess­ing about with GTD for about 6 months and the ben­e­fits have been immense: A clean inbox at least a cou­ple of times a week, the dis­ci­pline (and per­mis­sion) to skim and file email with­out think­ing that I need to ack every sin­gle FYI that cross­es my screen, gro­cery lists that actu­al­ly reflect meal plans…

But it does­n’t quite fit and I haven’t been able to fig­ure out why. I work like mad — there’s always some­thing next on the list and I get the wid­gets cranked. Some days… oth­er days it’s just an over­whelm­ing sea of ran­dom tasklets swim­ming around my note­book and fail­ing to coa­lesce in my brain. I end up spend­ing a cou­ple of hours read­ing lol­cats just to avoid the reel­ing sen­sa­tion I get every time I open my con­text lists. Con­tin­ue reading

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