CECILY.info

Remember back in the early days of the internet when people would put up “Under Construction” pages with animated gifs of construction signs?

Think of this as the modern day equivalent of those pages.

Thanks to Twitter, I’ve allowed myself to become frightfully lazy when it comes to blogging. I’ve let daily digests of Twitter posts serve as posts in this space, and I’m largely unsatisfied with that. Trust me, it bores me just as much as it bores you, and I find it every bit as redundant as you do, especially if you’re one of the few who follow me on Twitter. So from now on, no more daily Twitter digest posts: updates will now appear in the sidebar.

Another change is that I’m using my hey, cecily! domain to post camera phone pictures. You might occasionally see one on my Flickr stream, but I’m trying to draw more of a distinction between my SLR photographs and my cameraphone photographs that are taken when I’m out and about. The distinction is purely arbitrary, but dammit, I have a domain and a tumblr account, and I’m determined to do something with them.

Of course, you can always see my photos on flickr, and you haven’t quite gotten enough of me, check out my FriendFeed.

I’ve been saying I was going to try to get more involved in the local blogging community for quite some time now, but tonight was my first foray into the wild world of Vancouver Blogging. I attended WordCamp Vancouver, sponsored by Tazzu , an online business, technology, and knowledge sharing community for creative and technical professionals.  Held at The Network Hub, a virtual office space in downtown Vancouver, when I arrived the place was already pretty packed. My knee makes it difficult to sit on the floor for long periods of time, and standing is right out, so the hostess was nice enough to ask someone to get a chair for me from one of the offices. After 6:00pm, The Network Hub was bursting at the seams. 

The sessions I saw were largely informative, although the format made it difficult to go into detail about many of the more advanced features and functions of WordPress. Jeff Kee of Synchronous Design& Marketing gave a brief (all-too brief) presentation on using WordPress for total website development. I wanted to hear more about the custom PHP he wrote to gerry-rig a custom sidebar that would fit with a corporate brand, but alas, there wasn’t enough time. 

Monica Hamburg was a delightful and engaging speaker, and presented on Blogging and Social Media. I didn’t learn anything new in her presentation — well, I learned who she was, but beyond that, her presentation reinforced topics I’d encountered on other sites. And I can’t/won’t blame her for this, but all the talk of building an audience left me with an uneasy feeling that I can’t quite describe. I think in my mind talk of branding/building an audience is a slippery slope to discussions about “monetizing your content”, and as soon as I hear those discussions I start to look for the exit. To be fair to Monica, she didn’t mention “monetizing content” once in her presentation, so any unease I felt arose as a result of my own biases. 

Rebecca Bollwitt, aka Miss 604 discussed using plugins and flickr to post photos on your weblog. Because she liveblogged during the event, I don’t feel she actually connected with the crowd as well as she could have, but I get the sense that as a YVR “blogging star”, people were willing to overlook that just because of who she was. 

I just realized that sounds a lot bitchier than I intended it to be, and honestly, I’m not a sour grapes kind of person.  Seriously, I’m just tired and cranky. I enjoy Rebecca’s blog, and nobody covers Vancouver better than she does. 

But when giving a presentation, one should at least stand during that presentation instead of sitting on the floor behind a couple of chairs. I’m fairly certain there were a more than a few people who couldn’t see her. When you can’t connect with your audience at a basic physical level, your presentation may not be as effective. 

Still, I learned something new from her presentation, which is why I went to WordCamp in the first place. I’d never heard of the Flickr Photo Album plugin for WordPress, and thanks to her demonstration, I installed it as soon as I could and I’m using it to include photos in this post. 

By far, my favorite presentation of the night was Duane Storey’s presentation on Mobile Blogging with the iPhone. The one thing I noticed is that there are a lot of people in Vancouver who have unlocked iPhones. Storey is the developer behind the WPTouch iPhone theme, a plugin that formats your WordPress blog to an iPhone-friendly format. I couldn’t help wishing Storey (or someone with more WordPress mojo than I have) would develop a similar plugin for Symbian phones. Storey was clearly excited about the work he was doing in the mobile blogging arena, and it showed in his delivery style. He was affable and approachable, and not only did he want me make an iPod Touch something fierce (even though I love my N82), I walked away feeling a bit more excited and inspired to learn more about mobile blogging with WordPress. I’ll be looking for other tools that improve upon Nokia’s (regrettable) LifeBlog software. If you have suggestions for plugins or hacks I might try, feel free to post them in the comments. 

It had already been a long day by the time I got to WordCamp, and by 7:00 I was fading fast. I left a bit early and I regret that, because I was really looking forward to Bruce Byfield’s Joys of Amateur Blogging presentation.  It’s a pleasure to discover voices like his who blog for the sheer pleasure of it. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that he’s a pretty decent writer. 

I think this experience was just the beginning for me. Maybe by the time the next WordCamp rolls around, I’ll have a bit more technical experience under my belt, and I’ll feel confident enough to stand in front of a group of total strangers to talk about what I know. At the very least, maybe I’ll feel confident enough to stay and network instead of slinking out like a thief in the night.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I haven’t had enough time to put the release candidate of WordPress 2.5 through it’s full paces yet, but I’m happy to report that the five-second install is intact, and I was able to successfully import all my entries. Early impressions:

• The navigation structure makes much more sense now. There are fewer options at the top level, and the secondary navigation has been streamlined.
• Better terminology. Instead of “presentation’ as an option, we now have “design”. Instead of “blogroll” (how 1999), we have “links”.
• The look and feel is gorgeous, and I’m not just saying it because they used orange in the design. Whitespace is abundantly and wisely used.
• Post management interface is improved. Granted, you have to take an extra click to delete a post, but moving the edit/delete functions onto the editing window makes much more sense.

Currently, WP RC 1 feels more like a (logical) evolution instead of a revolution. Right now I’ve only installed it locally on my MacBook, but I don’t anticipate the Dreamhost upgrade to be any more painful than the local upgrade. Here’s hoping.

An oldie but a goodie from 2003.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been experimenting with being a little more public and a little less guarded about my online communications over the last two weeks, and so far my experiences have largely been positive. I’ve discovered new voices and made new contacts (as impermanent as they may be), and these new contacts are causing me to adopt a more expansive view of the world.

Read the rest of this entry »

A pair of interesting quotes about blogging in Japan from the Washington Post:

By some estimates, as much as 40 percent of Japanese blogging is done on mobile phones, often by commuters staring cross-eyed at tiny screens for hours as they ride the world’s most extensive network of subways and commuter trains.

Do I dare beat that dead horse about mobile charges in Canada? Naaaah… not today.

Also of interest:

Blogging in Japan, though, is a far tamer beast than in the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world. Japan’s conformist culture has embraced a technology that Americans often use for abrasive self-promotion and refashioned it as a soothingly nonconfrontational medium for getting along.

I was having a conversation with Jason the other day about how we wished that blogging today felt like it did when we first started; how the barrier to building relationships and community was much lower than it seems today. In this rush to monetize our content and build notoriety, the things that I loved about blogging – finding friends, allies, and like-minded (or dislike-minded but amiable) souls seem harder to find. Maybe its’ still there and I’m just blind to it. I just miss the days before the A-list, SEO, and ad revenues.

I’ve been publishing on the web for a long time — since 1993 if you must know — and in that time I’ve made several attempts to move away from generalist content on my blogs to more specific, targeted content, particularly those things that were of interest to me as an interaction design/usability professional. Even though I am living the life of leisure (read that as gainfully unemployed) at present, I am still very interested in IxD and user-centered design. Yet there are a great many other things I am interested in as well, as you can tell by taking a look at my tag cloud. I’ve found that trying to limit myself to such a narrow outlook did more to stifle my creative impulse than any amount of self-doubt ever did.

When I was in liberry skool, I remember coming across a quote that made the point that generalists make great librarians because generalists have to be interested in a great many different things, and must be able to see connections and draw parallels between seemingly unrelated materials.

Grace Llewellyn, a former school teacher and current unschooling advocate wrote a book called The Teenage Liberation Handbook, and in it she states that a “glorious generalist” is a fine thing to be. According to Llewellyn a glorious generalist is distinguished by their ability to “see the world whole”.

“Because he can see the world whole, the glorious generalist can communicate thoroughly with people of every
profession, religion, or background. He can pick up any book or magazine and find in it a connection to his own
interests. If he is an all-the-way-there glorious generalist, maybe he can do mystical/scientific things like read
the meaning of the galaxies in a fistful of sand.

She goes on to say that the glorious generalist…

…starts with faith that the universe has meaning. This faith comes in two varieties—he can trust that a God, or
an otherwise entitled Ultimate Reality, exists and created all this or guided it into place. Or, he can trust
himself and other humans enough to believe that he can make sense of it all, that even if there is no actual
collaboration between the pattern of a spider’s web and the lyrics to that Led Zeppelin song, he can still weave it
together in his mind so that it has harmony and order, like a stained glass window in a French cathedral.
Also, he trusts language. He believes that with language he can bridge almost any chasm between himself and another
person.

I’ve been a glorious generalist for most of my blogging life and haven’t been able to find a name for it, nor a need for it. I’ve had quite a lot of time to think in the last month, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t anything inherently wrong or bad about thinking this way, about processing information this way. What is bad and wrong is to be bound by fears that I’m not good enough, not focused enough in my writing and therefore I shouldn’t write anything at all.

There can be beauty in chaos. Meaning can be teased out from the most unlikely places. My purpose is to make connections, and that’s what I’m going to do from this point forward.

A while back on my tumblrblog I posted a link to a tutorial that shows how to use Textmate to create blog entries. Textmate has completely eradicated any need for BBEdit in my life and has eclipsed Coda for the time being because of PHP syntax completion, but I digress. When I first tried this, I was using WordPress and wasn’t able to get this to work properly, but now that I’ve switched to MT4, I thought it was time to try this once more. I discovered a few things in the process:

• MT has two passwords; the user password and the webservices (API) password; and
• For whatever reason, I had to log in with MarsEdit and use it to fetch posts before Textmate would do it successfully.

Read the rest of this entry »