joeblandnotes

New blogger

2011-02-18T14:42:00.000+11:00

Hello again blog. I have moved you to my current Google account, and applied a new Blogger template to you. Will need to make you look cool again, hopefully soon.

Reading over some of my older posts, I think many of the issues I found with Blogger have been addressed, or perhaps I just found the answers. Anyway, perhaps more blogging will finally happen now.

2009-04-16T18:51:00.002+10:00

Yes, I'm still alive despite recent lack of activity

Just a brief note to keep this blog alive!

There's so many things going on at work and home right now, that I just don't have time to contribute enough here. Rethinking ways of putting feeds into this blog to make it more alive and active. That will take time, though.

wwwme#4: Head is hurting

2009-03-03T21:20:00.011+11:00

If I were to move this blog, where would I move it to? As it is, in blogger, it all works and looks OK. But I have to put up with the crappy blogger header strip, so-dumb-your-mum-could-use-it backend and un-pro '.blogspot.com' url. Also, the painful prospect of integrating new, coolthings like disqus.

Here are my options, should I choose to move.

Self-hosted

I have hosting space and a domain, so could easily set up a blog there.

Prospects: Wordpress–like everyone else; Drupal–can be carefully configured for a blog; or a light CMS set to blog, like CMS Made Simlpe or if you're feeling exotic, Radiant CMS, a Ruby on Rails system.

Pros: it's all mine and I can make it how I want; cost is low, as I already have what's needed.

Cons: time to set up could be huge; my hosting space can be slow; I don't want to maintain the software over time.

Hosted and free

I'm not serious enough about this to pay for a blog (yet?) so free, hosted blogging is what I'm looking for. There are plenty of these, but my research didn't find any others worth mentioning. If you know any with free use of your domain, no ads and css/html editing, please let us know (I love comments!)

Prospects:Blogger–see intro to this post; Wordpress.com–great until you realise that css and domains are chargeable (not too cheap, either); or Tumblr–discussed in previous posts as an agregater, can be configured as a more classic blog, also.

Pros: no installing frameworks; backend always up to date; no hosting needed and potentially a faster host than mine; being part of a network of bloggers.

Cons: potential loss of data or blog if host has problems (could happen on your self-host too); actually finding a service offering what you want; perceived loss of control over your content generally; not seen as pro by others.

Can Tumblr do it?

So currently, Tumblr is under real consideration because it has all of my must haves (my domain, my css/html, no ads). Things that aren't clear are: it's ability to present several images in one post; how the post archiving works; how I can track and manage posts over time.

Enough already!

Who would have thought I would spend most of my words here blogging about blogging? If you made it this far with me, you deserve a prize! One day, after this platform issue is resolved, I envisage glorious, image-rich posts about design, film, art, books, the web, my family and friends and our travels.

I'm loving friendfeed right now, so if you just want to see some design I think is worth looking at, please visit my feed there.

wwwme #3. Sharing

2009-02-25T21:01:00.005+11:00

A couple of weeks have passed, and I'm pretty happy with how this blog is looking.

I've discovered some excellent tools for life on-line, but first I just need to say that as good as Blogger is for getting you up and going, I've encountered some glitches and read about many more. Having built similar things in Wordpress before (bee and tree) I think I'm going to be better off with my own hosted WP install. I'll post here about any changes when and if they happen. On with the cool web toys...

Friendfeed and Tumblr

So I had my blog and Twitter and various other places around the web to create content. Having read some posts mentioning Friendfeed and Tumblr I thought there might be something for me there, too. I don't think it's common for these two services to be lumped together, but for me right now, they have some cross-over as aggregaters of content.

Tumblr collects all your posts and any shared things you feed in and presents it in a very html/css-configurable way, like a blog. Note: still working on the html/css of my tumblr, don't be too harsh on the design!

Friendfeed can do this minus the configuration, presents your content in a more 'headline' way, and can mix in content from your friends who use ff, or as RSS for those who don't. You can also create your own content on either of these sites, but that just confuses me, except for the short twitter-like messages on ff (which can actually be feed back to twitter. ed: head now spinning). Even more confusing is if you feed your tumblr into your ff or vice versa. Entries multiply like gremlins.

Delicious

You're cruising the net, finding all sorts of great things to share, blog about, or note for future reference. You make a bookmark in your browser. How very 1997 of you! Get up to speed on Delicious, or any other online bookmarking site. Bookmark, tag, search, share, go to another computer, it's all there. The video on delicious is quite good at explaining it.

The blog is a blog

With all this blogging, tweeting, sharing and bookmarking, I've kept my content creation parts separate. I like the idea of the blog being one stand-alone part of my web space, not the end point. Instead of showing feeds of my latest tweets and shares on this blog, everything is collected and presented in ff and tumblr. Maybe it's my small brain, but this just works for me.

Fruit of the streets

2009-02-20T15:21:00.005+11:00

Fruit of the Street is a beautifully simple idea: collect the stuff you find on the streets and photograph it.

Fruit of the Street is the thinking of our good friend and colleague, photographer Albert Comper. Albert keeps himself, and often the Univers crew busy with these great little projects. Hoping this could become a book or designed website.

Candy magazine/PDF 2009 February

2009-02-19T13:18:00.004+11:00

The new issue of Candy, the PDF-only magazine, is ready for your download. They've put together a solid collection of contemporary-cool visual art and art-oriented design, and presented it in an appealingly neat format. I think it's very good.

wwwme #2. Tweet my blog

2009-02-12T12:32:00.011+11:00

So once I was all Googled up, I began to wonder what else my (online) life was missing. It soon became clear: I needed to tweet.

Twitter

I've known about Twitter for a few years, since my bleeding-edge friends got on it. Until I checked it out, I thought it was a bit of a time waster, and couldn't imagine how it would be useful. Although I'm not a total nut on it now, it's been good to keep up with who's doing what, and to get the lead on a new website, piece of software or design piece. I try to post a couple of things a day, using it to share the odd whatever.

Tr.im

Along with Twitter came tr.im. Because Twitter has a 140 character limit, long web addresses are shunned in favour of services like tinyurl.com, is.gd or my favourite tr.im. With tr.im you simply copy a long URL into the web interface (or use a bookmark button) and it returns a beautiful, short URL. For example you can navigate to this very site by going to http://tr.im/mynotes. So short! So cute! I use it for lots of web addresses now, not just in Twitter. You can even choose your own address, and track how many visits your URLs get.

This spurned an interest in short domain names, generally.

Blogger

Well here we are, now in Blogger. Not really sure what I'm doing here: I mean I have hosting space elsewhere, and can develop and run a blog in Wordpress in an afternoon. I suppose, I just wanted to see what Google is offering here, and as I set it up I began to like it. The back-of-house graphics are really bad (does any one like this?), and it's got this hard-to-characterise clunky feel, but you have enough freedom with the final presentation, and it all just works. If I'm still blogging here in a year, Google can rack it up as another win!

wwwmeE #1. Google's slippery slope

2009-02-11T13:40:00.006+11:00

The way I use the internet has changed drastically over the last few months, mostly thanks to the good people at Google. What started as a new email address quickly cascaded into a swag of new content creation and viewing platforms. In this and a couple of other posts, I'll present a rundown of online incarnations I've taken up.

Gmail

I had been using my home ISP mailboxes for personal email since I was a customer with Onetel in the 90's. But before Christmas last year, we were moving house and didn't know who our new ISP would be. After looking at the options, I read the good wraps on gmail (Google's email service), but also signed up for a livemail account because I could get 'my name @live.com' – an address I liked. Gmail had all the moves – POP3, minimal ads, labels, filters, +addresses, add-in accounts, a simple-looking interface – and quickly won we over.

Google Docs

About this time we were moving around, looking for a house and planning a wedding, and I started to use Google Docs to keep things all together while my physical world was not static. Simple, easy to understand, and they just work well. Spread sheets for keeping track of houses, document for letter of change of address, another spreadsheet for the wedding day running sheet, and it didn't really matter where I (or my wife) were. Very handy.

Chrome

So I began to think, these Google things must run better on a slick browser not weighed down by all the add-ons and developer plug ins that I need for FireFox. I tried out KMeleon (highly commendable, but somehow not 'the one') and Google's Chrome browser. Chrome just does the trick. I hate the blue interface, and the memory use is bad or ill-depicted depending on how you see things, but it feels quick, is well-thought-out, and looks very minimal.

iGoogle

From gmail it was a simple click on one of the top text links to find myself in iGoogle. This was actually a short affair, I configured the page, loved the art themes, tinkered, didn't really find it useful on-going. One thing I missed from vanilla Google was the ability to search sites in Australia.

Google Reader

Google didn't seem to mind too much that I wasn't entranced by iGoogle: they simply dished up Reader, in another top text link. This has really changed everything on the web for me. I wonder how I spent so much time online before without it!

For people who don't use this or something like it, the basic deal is that you find things on the web and either note them in Reader, or if they offer RSS, you subscribe to them. You can then tag or share posts, so your friends can see what you've shared, and you can subscribe to your friends or other people's shares.

When new stories are posted, the RSS goes out, Reader receives this info and presents it to you as a new story. You can then view, tag and/or share it. So instead of trawling the web for interesting or relevant things, they are collected and presented to you a bit like email. If you don't do this already but use the web a bit, you have to try it out!

Drupal book chapter on theming

2009-02-10T16:38:00.009+11:00

Found this quite useful and like the writing style. I think it's on Drupal 5, but mostly still relevant to 6.

Also, just found this article on D6 theming: http://tr.im/fu8f.

A few days later

2009-02-09T21:57:00.003+11:00

Well here I go again! This Blogger thing is kind of addictive in that way that Google are really good at doing. I think it's the configuration ability, and the gadgets. Also the 'part of the family' feel - if you're already using gmail, reader, maps, igoogle or any other useful thing they do, then Blogger feels at home.

Perhaps it's just beginners enthusiasm, but I have already thought of a few posts I'd like to make here. I'm feeling good this just being a scrap book of my stuff, and doesn't need to be too professional, like some other places where I write from time to time.

A post

2009-02-04T14:22:00.002+11:00

Not promising much here, sorry folks! I'm just looking into how this works. Who knows, I may like it, and end up writing here often, but that's not my current intention.

Sorry if you're seeing this in a few years time, and thinking 'damn, I want that blospot.com address, and this guy's not even using it!'