Sample the Web

Yes! It worked! Now if I could only get it to upload to S3 rather than to my server….

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Wow. This is pretty cool Wish it worked in landscape mode, too. I can even add live pictures from the camera or my photo library. Check out these screenshots of the app in action.

Update: Oops. Looks like I have to configure something server-side for the picture upload to work correctly. It tried to upload to my old server.

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New blog cards back on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.

The new green-friendly Moo blog cards I ordered a few weeks back came in yesterday. The above pic is of the back of the cards with my contact info (minus cellphone). The front is the grimacing angry black and white picture of me that you can find in the about box on this blog. They came out quite nice, I think.

Why blog cards? I have business cards for business. Why not blog cards for all my non-business blogging, tweeting, and social networking?

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This blog as visualized by Wordle

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I just installed WordPress 2.6. So far, so good. It has a new “Press This” bookmarklet that is a bit snazzier. Pretty cool.

Update: It doesn’t look like everyone loves WordPress anymore. Spam Karma just went opensource (GPL) and one of the major reasons was discontinuing updates and support due to WordPress:

In a word: Wordpress kinda sucks nowadays. Its retarded upgrade rate makes it nearly impossible to keep up, in turn making it a constant security threat on my servers. And each time I finally cave in and install one of those “mandatory security upgrade”, it also installs 600 Ko of other theme compatibility-breaking fluffy crap that I never asked for in the first place. Usually setting the ground for the next cycle of security-exploit-rushed-upgrade. To sum up, it’s become incredibly bloated and tedious to support. Replacing it on my own servers is very high on my list of things to do (which means somewhat in the first 1000 items).

Having no interest for Wordpress anymore, I have thus very little interest for Wordpress-related development.

Whoa.

And here I was just thinking, “Neat! They added wiki-like history to posts!”

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Matt is going all out with live streaming video today promoting his latest book Brave Men Run. He’s posted details about the promotion plan here.

I just bought a copy. Matt, I expect you to autograph it, buddy.

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…it won’t stop until I do.

As for other people’s blogging, I have no answers for you. I hadn’t even noticed the announcement until people started pinging me asking me if it was real or not. I have no answers for you. People are definitely
in a tizzy over it, though.

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…I got an interesting comment on this old post about Wii Boxing:

Can I ask though - how did you get this picked up and into google news?

Very impressive that this blog is syndicated through Google and is it something that is just up to Google or you actively created?

Obviously this is a popular blog with great data so well done on your seo success..

Boxing greats you should write about next!

I wonder what search result he came from? Let’s see… He had a URL to his Kung Fu Boxing related store (which I of course stripped) linked to his name, so maybe it was something to do with that. One could surmise that it’s because I have an old URL, plus I’ve maintained this blog in one form or another for 6 years, plus I’ve perfected a precise method of in-linking and out-linking, plus I’m adept at naming my posts so that they are keyword rich!

All that is B.S. though.

I’m just an honest blogger who has been honestly blogging for a while. That’s the magic. Now, please, kung fu dummy, don’t ever try to spam my comments again. OK? THNX BAI!

Now to start working on a series of posts about Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, George Foreman, Jack Dempsey, and Sugar Ray…

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…so for all of you who were using old versions of my feeds and thought I’d dropped off the face of the planet when I shifted hosts last week, everything should work again. This means the livejournal feed of my site should be redirecting to the correct location again. Please let me know if you subscribe to this blog and it’s not working properly for you.

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This blog outgrew my old host. It happens. I have a lifetime hosting plan with them and Kristin’s blog and a few other sites that no one ever visits are still over there. The traffic this site receives was hitting that account’s cap and things were timing out, the site was sluggish, and some of the more PHP5 snazzy bells and whistles I’ve been tinkering with weren’t performing nicely over there. So with much fingernail-biting, angst, and trepidation, I took the plunge to move this blog and Screaming Tongue. To my surprise, migrating WordPress blogs is *insanely* easy to do.

Step 1:
Make sure you’re running the latest version of WordPress. Download and install WP-DBManager plugin by Lester Chan (you can follow him on Twitter here). Follow all the directions located here to get it up and running at your current host.

Step 2:
Run a backup of your blog using WP-DBManager. It should backup a copy of your database to a sub-folder of your blog. FTP into your current webhost and download the main folder containing all of your blog’s files, including the sub-folder with the backup copy of your database.

Step 3:
Find a new place to host your site. I went with Steadfast Networks after much researching of hosts online (so far my site is running *much* faster and more smoothly, although exactly 3 days after I switched, all of my sites went down for about 10 minutes as the server hosting them was rebooted after a power outage; they resolved the issue quickly and were very responsive to my phone call about it, so I am cautiously optimistic that this was a rarity for them). Set up your domain with your new host and setup a new MySQL database for your blog, but don’t transfer the DNS yet!.

Step 4:
In the folder you downloaded earlier, locate your wp-config.php file. Open it with your favorite text editor and change the database settings to match the settings for the new database at your new host.

Step 5:
FTP into your new host account and locate the folder for your site’s domain name. Upload all the contents from the folder you downloaded earlier into this folder.

Step 6:
Your host should have an address via which you can reach your files that is separate from your domain name. Use that root URL, followed by /wp-admin/install.php to install a fresh copy of WordPress. Follow the instructions to install your blog.

Step 7:
Login to your newly created WordPress blog and go to the plugins administration screen. You’ll find all your former plugins are there, but not activated. Activated WP-DBManager. Visit the Database tab and click on Manage Backup Database. Select the backup that you last performed:

Then at the bottom of that page, select Restore. Note: Once you do this, you will no longer be able to access this new site using your webhost’s alternate URL. Instead you will have to wait until your domain name is pointing to this new location.

Step 8:
Go to the old version of your blog and write a post that says something brief like “Moving my blog today. Once it happens this post will disappear.”

Step 9:
Go to whoever you signed up with for your domain name and change the DNS nameservers to match those of your new host. Reload your website obsessively until the post you wrote in Step 8 disappears. Once this happens, the transfer has completed successfully.

Step 10:
One final thing to do. Since your site is now on an entirely new server, most likely the mod-rewrite rules that were in place for any custom permalink structures that you were using aren’t going to work. Go to WordPress admin screen and click on Settings—>Permalinks and resave your settings. This will either rewrite your .htaccess file for you or give you the code you need to insert into your current .htaccess file. Perform this edit and then everything should work fine. If you had any other special rules in your .htaccess file, these will most likely need updating too.

It’s really really simple. I was surprised it worked so easily when I did it with a test blog. Then I did it with Screaming Tongue and it still worked. Then I did it with Sample The Web, and here we are. Hope this helps some of you out there who may have been hesitant to get out of a bad hosting situation into a new one.

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Got a Seesmic account? Leave me a video comment on this post (just enabled Disqus).

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I just installed the wptouch plugin for WordPress on this blog:

What is WPtouch?

Simply put, it’s a complimentary theme installed as a plugin on your WordPress blog or website that will format your content with this Apple-inspired, full-featured theme when your visitors are using an iPhone or iPod touch.

I just tested it on my iPhone and it looks pretty sweet. Now I just need to customize the icon for the Theme so you can add a bookmark to my blog nicely on your iPhone. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Update: I added a logo (pictured above). And there’s some pictures after the jump for those of you who do not have iPhones / iPod Touches to check out the new theme with…
(more…)

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My multitalented wife has written a book. A novel, to be exact. She’s currently revising bits and pieces of it and preparing it for a publisher or an agent. Over the weekend, I helped her set up a blog. Kristin will be using the blog to promote and discuss issues surrounding the journey to publishing her novel, North Shore / South Shore. If you want to know what it’s about, I recommend that you read this post: Kristin Sample: An abstract:

Here’s how I would explain what my novel is about. It needs tightening but it’s what I have right now. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. If I can write something good now, it can be what I use to describe my book in future emails, meetings,…maybe even the occasional power lunch. (Although I don’t think I’m in danger of having to attend any power lunches in the near future.)

If you have any contacts in the area of literary agents or publishers, please point them to her blog and reach out to us. Thanks!

Now, to teach her how to use Twitter…

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TechCrunch pointed out that Encyclopedia Britannica Online is allowing web publishers to sign up for free one-year accounts and share the content with their readers via a new program called Britannica Webshare. Well, dear readers, I myself signed up for the service and was accepted. When I signed up, I thought that this would be another very useful resource that I could point to from time to time to add value to whatever I may be blogging about. However, in the process of writing this blog post, I started exploring their site, and quickly found that I didn’t love it. In short, Britannica Online is too similar to Britannica offline. It doesn’t link out. It’s very much a dead-end street on the information highway (albeit, perhaps, as far as dead ends go, it’s more of a nice cul de sac of well-read information). This is not to say that I won’t ever be linking to them. It’s just that I think they could be doing what they’re doing better.

Here’s a link to Britannica Online’s entry for Wikipedia and here’s a small excerpt:

Reliance on community self-policing has generated some problems. In 2005 the American journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr., discovered that his Wikipedia biography falsely identified him as a potential conspirator in the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and that these malicious claims had survived Wikipedia’s community policing for 132 days. The author of this information could not be easily identified, since all that is known about contributors is their computers’ IP, or Internet protocol, addresses (many of which are dynamically generated each time a user goes online).

For comparison purposes, here’s Wikipedia’s entry on Wikipedia and an excerpt:

Wikipedia (pronunciation ) is a free,[4] multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger,[5] it is the largest, fastest-growing and most popular general reference work currently available on the Internet.[6][7]

All the above bracketed numbers are references that I cannot be bothered to link directly from here, but which Wikipedia does link in the actual article. Keep them in mind.

Now, reading the Britannica entry, I’m struck with two things. First, it’s written more stoically. Something about it sounds more like a dictionary than the Wikipedia’s entry. More like I’m getting the definition of Wikipedia from a teacher who has no first-hand knowledge of what a wiki is or what it does. Secondly, they don’t have any references listed with the entry. They do have a short list of related links, but they’re all internal links and they use the following language to introduce the links:

Related Links
Aspects of this topic are discussed in the following places at Britannica.

They’re the Encyclopedia Britannica, so I suppose their ethos counts for quite a bit and we’re supposed to trust that whoever wrote this particular entry for them spent the time to diligently fact check everything.

While Wikipedia definitely has errors, such as the one mentioned by the E.B. article on Wikipedia, that creep up in it from time to time, the facts that are there are thoroughly referenced in most cases. Wikipedia’s Wikipedia entry currently has 141 references at the bottom. If the entry is incorrect, you can double check the references rather easily and carefully weigh any information presented that is not supported by references. On Encyclopedia Britannica, you cannot do that. You must simply trust in the Encyclopedia and know that the knowledge you will gain from it is limited by the knowledge it contains. The fact that the Wikipedia links to all these other resources is what makes it an invaluable resource.

That’s one Web 2.0 lesson that I’d like to see Encyclopedia Britannica learn. It’s more important than their new widgets, their blog, or their Twitter stream (which btw has a bio that really thrusts that ethos down your throat: “Encyclopaedia Britannica Webshare: Links and news from the authoritative encyclopaedia“; emphasis mine; they even use the archaic spelling of encyclopedia to sound more authoritative), because they are treating those technologies as just another form of distribution of their “authoritative” information, rather than as a nexus for communication, discussion, and an information hub linking outward to all the other great information resources online.

Here’s my unasked for advice for Encyclopedia Britannica and any other old school media publication trying to thrive in today’s new media: It’s no longer about just being a great resource. You have to be a great resource and engage and participate with the other great resources out there. People like this because it gives them more choice while giving them a sense of community. It’s not how many followers you have; it’s how many people you follow. It’s not how many people subscribe to your RSS feed; it’s how many RSS feeds you subscribe to. It’s no longer about having all the answers succinctly stated in one spot; it’s about filtering and processing the best of the plethora of information out there and providing direction to that information without limiting that information.

Update: Just for fun, here’s one of their widgets; it is on American Literature, pre-configured of course, and there is no way that I can see for me to customize it:

I would really *love* this widget, if I could plug any E.B. entry I wanted into it and customize the look of it so that it matched my blog. I should also probably mention that I’d prefer it not to be an iframe, but that’s just me being overly picky. Also, supposedly it’s not always working for people using Internet Explorer. If you’re using IE, you really should download Firefox NOW!

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Who thinks the main text font of my blog posts in this template are too small now? I’m debating bumping it up a few notches. Vote in the comments!

UPDATE: I upped the font size a bit. Thoughts? Big enough or more?

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Andrew Keen was at Mahalo HQ today to talk about his book Cult of the Amateur and what he thinks of Mahalo and what we’re doing. It was an interesting discussion, which you can watch right here (fast forward until about 45 minutes in as we set up the video early and ended up waiting far too long for our lunch to arrive; it was very late):

As you’ll notice from my question for him (which had something to do with citizen journalism, but even more so with the human need to express what’s happened when something happens), I don’t really agree with his stance, because I think it’s too polarized, hyperbolized, and far too oversimplified. He kept mentioning that the book was intentionally polemic and that he was more interested in the discussions that it has created. Discussion is always good, and I did like that he likes what we are doing at Mahalo.

However, having read a lot of books over the years about changes in communication and media (from the transition from oral tradition to writing, the transition from scribes and scriptoriums to the printing press) and even in forms within different media (the rise of the novel and short story), his arguments sound much too much like the same resistance to change that occur throughout history. The pendulum swings and there has to be some loud counter-swing to pull it back in the middle where the balance of the next steps really lie, but that counter-swing always comes across as too far towards the way things were to be effective. Andrew kept talking about how we have to get to Web 3.0, which I agree with, but I really do take issue with calling the entire Web 2.0 movement “monkeys typing away at keyboards” (I’m paraphrasing here from his book); That’s simply not the correct approach, no matter how much discussion it creates.

Here’s Andrew’s blog, which I’ve added to my reader and will be following with interest. He had an epiphany that sent him into his current thought patterns and, normally, people who have epiphanies continue to have them whether they want to or not. I’m curious to see when his next one arrives if he ends up in some much more interesting place.

UPDATE: I realized I took a picture of Andrew’s business card. He specifically referenced it at the beginning of his talk, referencing the label “the antichrist of silicon valley” (which he put there himself and which he pointed out that he put there himself); very self-labeling, very British, and given Keen’s background in working in online music, very very Sex Pistols:

Thinking about this more, positing yourself as an antichrist assumes a christ. In a discussion of evolving cultural norms surrounding new media and online media it limits the discussion to an overly simplistic this or that, two option scenario. That’s what’s great about chaos and anarchy when they apply to invention and cultural change: black and white and even grey aren’t enough to paint an accurate picture. What’s odd about Keen’s argument is that he seems to be warning us against the anarchy, when he is actively labeling himself as an anarchist by the strong association with the Sex Pistols. Hypocrisy or a clever trick of the devil?

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Caption time!

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This is pretty interesting. PicApp lets you embed Getty Images and other normally copyrighted (and therefore unusable by bloggers) images directly into your blog posts like the above picture of Madonna. Whoa.

[via GigaOm]

ps—What is Madonna pointing at and why? *raises eyebrow*

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Check out this comment by Noli Novak in reply to the comments left on a post I wrote back in 2005. Here’s an excerpt:

Crap hit the fan the day I decided to launch my own website. Everything stated in it then and now is nothing but true, but KS was (is) pissed for one simple reason: when I launched my website, his monopoly of the online hedcut presence ended, and the whole KS clan targeted me like a pack of hungry wolves. For Sharpie to say I’m branding the style as my own is utter nonsense and I challenge you to point to a link, a sentence, a line ….. anything to prove I ever said something remotely close to that! After all, KS made sure his claim to the throne of hedcut holy fatherdoom is etched in the online annals for the rest of times, but even I still pay my respects, mind you. For instance, I spent hours helping Ann Goodyear of the NPG putting the online hedcut exhibit together (link prominently displayed on KS’s site) and it was me who insisted that he be a part of the story (oh, you’re welcomed!). Maybe he expects the rest of us WSJ illustrators to quit stippling altogether? Not after we toiled over the technique and reinvented it many times since he left the paper over 20 years ago!

Noli sent me an email too, apologizing for the comment thread and her need to defend herself on my blog. No apologies necessary, Noli.

In any case, I have nothing to do with this skirmish, and no desire to be involved in it, but it is an interesting view into an apparently competitive and politically charged field. I just thought it was interesting how conversations like this can find a life in the comments to a blog post that was largely me thinking nostalgically about the choices I made in pursuing English over Art. The comments have nothing to do with the and have a more vibrant life thanks to having nothing to do with me.

Also, check out the last paragraph of Noli’s comment. Pass the popcorn; it’s like watching reality TV.

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Last night, I was on Goodreads obsessively marking up all the books I could think of that I’ve read. I really am loving this website and I had no idea it even existed until we integrated it into the profile pages on Mahalo (here’s some more info on Goodreads). On a whim, I decided to punch in EIMI, which was E.E. Cummings’ great book that had been out of print for over 30 years. I have a first edition copy of the book, and I wrote my Master’s Thesis on it. I was totally and utterly surprised to find out that Liveright finally republished the book and there it was sitting on Goodreads in a paperback form that people are actually reading. I’d written Liveright numerous letters about EIMI in the past, begging them to republish it and even asking for permission to republish it myself, but, now that it’s happened, I have to say that I am somewhat dismayed by the move. I was prepared to self-publish the book online as soon as it fell out of copyright, but now, I’m pretty sure, the copyright will be extended again. If not, I will publish it online, and work on building my own annotated version of it (this was going to be my dissertation project when I ultimately gave up on the Ph.D.), as I’ve scanned the entire first edition. I even made a poster out of it:

In any case, if you like E.E. Cummings and you’re interested in reading what amounts almost to a prophecy of the future failure of the Soviet Union, written from the viewpoint of an author who believed in Being over Unbeing (EIMI is Greek for “I am”; a declaration of existence) when it was fashionable for writers to think the Great Soviet Experiment would be the savior of humanity, then you should read this book. If you like my blog and what I write, consider buying it from Amazon here and thereby putting a little coin in my pocket:

I ordered my copy last night, and Amazon says it’s on the way. Time to read it for the 5th time.

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