Category: Meta

About the blog.

No more twitter here

I’m done. At least, I’m done with try­ing to include all my Twit­ti­cisms on this blog. You’ll just have to go to Twit­ter to get them (see the foot­er for direc­tions). It was too… not easy, to keep them all here, and there, and dis­play them nice­ly. So, screw it.

But, here are all my Tweets. Some­one warn me when I start reach­ing 3200?

Son of a… blog

Not quite a decade ago, I forked over sev­er­al hun­dred dol­lars to sup­port a lit­tle web host­ing com­pa­ny that could, TextDrive.  In exchange, they gave me a life­time host­ing promise.  It was a good run, and they even hon­ored their promise across a cou­ple of acqui­si­tions and merg­ers.

But a week or so ago, they sent out an email to those of us who had sup­port­ed their ini­tial bid for funds, and told us that their life­time com­mit­ment was being “end of lifed.” We had two months to get out, or we could sign up for a free year on one of their new servers, with a $275 year­ly bill wait­ing for us after that. Have they have gone from small pota­toes to too big for their britch­es?

A lot of the peo­ple who got this email were pret­ty pissed. (A support/bitching group or three have popped up around the Inter­net.) Most of them were clear that they would not be stay­ing. I just packed up my stuff, and with this blog post, the move is over. Every­thing now lives at A Small Orange, with whom I am pret­ty pleased.

Stuff is bro­ken (most notably the images on… I am afraid, all the posts) but those will get fixed even­tu­al­ly.

Here we go, again.

Ugly as [insert ugly thing here]

Yeah, I know. The blog is ugly. I’ve been mean­ing to get back to it (writ­ing, I mean) and have been play­ing with a cou­ple of host­ed options: Blog­ger, Tum­blr, WordPress.com, the usu­al. In the end, while they would all be a lot sim­pler to use, they also don’t quite do all that I want.

So I am left fid­dling with my self-host­ed set­up. Still. Again. Only this time, I don’t care what it looks like. Every­one uses the RSS feed any­way, right? (Insert link to study show­ing RSS feed use declin­ing, I’m sure there’s one some­where.)

Also: at what point do I have too many blog posts about blog­ging? Hm.

End of the experiment

A few new items around here, but dat­ed back to Sep­tem­ber. That is when I start­ed an exper­i­ment in mov­ing this blog to anoth­er ser­vice. I want­ed sim­plic­i­ty, and Pos­ter­ous cer­tain­ly gave me that, but it was­n’t what I need­ed. Yes, I still crave sim­plic­i­ty, but Pos­ter­ous works one way: post to Pos­ter­ous, and it will put your stuff every­where else (Flickr, Twit­ter, Face­book, this blog, etc.). I tried, but I could­n’t work that way. I need to be able to post with what­ev­er tool I have on hand, my phone, my blog, iPho­to, email… and have it show up every­where.

Plus, and this was the kick­er, I could­n’t fig­ure out how to keep my email and keep my Pos­ter­ous account both at this address, dannynovo.com.

Maybe if they pro­vide a super easy solu­tion for that, I might be back.

In the mean­time, here we are, still.

Now back to your reg­u­lar silence. Man, I should update this blog more.

I’m Back!

One new job lat­er, I’m back.  It is clear that I won’t be post­ing at the same (tor­rid?) pace that I was when I was at home eight hours a day.  I’m not even clear if I’ll be post­ing from work at all (maybe just Tweets), which leaves me between two and three hours at home each night to: fold laun­dry, wash dish­es, pay bills, canoo­dle with the wife, watch Tv, post some­thing mean­ing­ful to the fam­i­ly blog, post some­thing to this blog, and work on any num­ber of “oth­er” projects.

This past week and a half “watch Tv” has risen pret­ty high on the list, giv­en how exhaust­ed I am after a full day of work­ing.  Plus, I was sick.  So there.

In any case, I had some­thing to say, so I’m back.  Less fre­quent­ly than before.

WordPress 2.5 brings hotness, possible breakage

Noth­ing like mess­ing with a per­fect­ly work­ing blog. I’ll be upgrad­ing to Word­Press 2.5 lat­er today. The blog might break. My apolo­gies. For what­ev­er that’s worth.

Update: No break­age involved.  Had to refresh my includ­ed images a cou­ple of times, but oth­er than that, every­thing went smooth­ly, like a point upgrade should.  Your mileage may vary.

Won’t you comment, please?

Every blog­ger wants peo­ple to com­ment on his or her blog. That’s why we do this. We want to know you’re out there, lis­ten­ing. And while I have a nice stats pack­age that shows me that I’ve had twen­ty unique vis­i­tors so far today, that is eas­i­ly trumped by one actu­al com­ment.

But I have anoth­er rea­son to beg your involve­ment. A few days ago, I was perus­ing one of the feeds that I read, and I saw that my friend Mark (or as it turns out, his wife) put the movie I Am Leg­end in his Net­flix queue. I was remind­ed that I had just seen the movie, and that I’d had a rather inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence watch­ing it. So I blogged about it.

Most­ly because I knew Mark would com­ment on it.

And he did. (Thanks, Mark!)

And as a result, I am faced with the fact that I am blog­ging for one guy. I’m choos­ing blog top­ics with the under­stand­ing that Mark will com­ment on them.

I find that a lit­tle pathet­ic of me.

So, I beg of you, won’t you leave a com­ment? Pret­ty please?

I kiss you!

Change is in the wind. No, no mid-life cri­sis, but I have been engag­ing in a wee bit of intro­spec­tion these past few days. My life ain’t what I want it to be, and I’m the per­son best suit­ed to chang­ing that.

On the job front, I’ve been search­ing for a job for about eight months now, and have sent out lots of let­ters, had a few inter­views, and even with­drawn from one search (still a good idea: sev­en months lat­er they still haven’t found a suck­er to take the job). I have a cou­ple of irons in the fire at the moment, and a cou­ple of prospects pos­si­bly on the hori­zon. It has been a bit depress­ing, but I do still believe it’s not me, it’s them. That is, the jobs that have been open haven’t been up my alley, though I’ve still applied for many of them. So, I’m okay there.

To hedge that bet, how­ev­er, I’ve spent these last eight months sor­ta kin­da try­ing to work free­lance web design. I set up a busi­ness site, set up a bank account, did some solic­it­ing, and while I got some nib­bles, I’ve had no bites. I also start­ed blog­ging in earnest, build­ing my per­son­al brand, and dip­ping my toes into a cou­ple of niche mar­kets (shop­ping blog, tele­vi­sion blog, sports blog, etc.). And while the per­son­al blog has been pret­ty suc­cess­ful, the oth­er avenues haven’t. And it takes a lot of time. Not reward­ing + a lot of time = unhap­pi­ness.

And per­son­al­ly, I’m get­ting fat(ter), I’m los­ing my tem­per more often, I’m ignor­ing my dog (those of you who know me may be most shocked by that admis­sion), I haven’t made any friends here (and we are well past the one-year mark)…

It all adds up to a lit­tle bit of depress­ing, and a lot o’ bit of frus­tra­tion, because I still think I’m bet­ter at these things than my suc­cess (or lack there­of) indi­cates.

So. I’ve been think­ing. And I have come back to the sim­plest of prin­ci­ples. Keep it sim­ple, stu­pid.

So. I’m going to pare back the online ven­tures to just two: my per­son­al brand site, and my design site. All the niche blog­ging is going to get rolled back into the per­son­al site, which will make it more eclec­tic even than it is now (which is a whole ‘nother issue). I am actu­al­ly great­ly relieved to have just two work sites to think about: in just the past day, since I’ve been beta test­ing this idea in my head, I feel more relaxed and much skip­pi­er.

I’ll keep look­ing for work, I’m com­mit­ting to walk­ing the dog dai­ly again (I know!), I’m going back to my aware­ness eat­ing plan (which worked well until Thanks­giv­ing last year), and hope­ful­ly I’ll find time for some of the things I have been miss­ing: self, books, my lifestream, fun, friends, art.

It’s a good feel­ing to be doing some­thing, even if it’s all in my head that the doing’s get­ting done.

By the way, the like­li­hood of the head trim­ming is going up.

Be my friend

Nev­er did get in on the beta, but Friend­Feed has just launched. Essen­tial­ly, it’s a feed aggre­ga­tor for all the ser­vices you use. You attach your Friend­Feed account to your var­i­ous ser­vices, and it lists all the updates you make. That way, your friends can sub­scribe to one place to fol­low all your doings on the Intar­webs. Be my friend, won’t you? And here’s the feed.

No more AdSense on this blog

I know, you’re not all torn up about this. As a fur­ther refine­ment of my blog­ging efforts, I’ve decid­ed to stop host­ing ads on this site. Espe­cial­ly Google’s con­text-sen­si­tive AdSense ads. Turns out that a blog as eclec­tic as this one is a bad fit for con­tex­tu­al adver­tis­ing. I’m open to ads in the future, if I find some­thing that fits the blog bet­ter.