…to see if the Android mobile app still works after my host migration.
Category Archives: Meta
Imagery
So, ever since I upgraded WordPress, I’ve needed to re-do my “theme” as a “child theme.” Because when you don’t do it that way, all your customizations get blown away in any update.
I’ve now done that.
I’m proudest of the header images. They’re all drawn from photographs I’ve taken, except the ones of me, which were taken by Ulrika.
Disqus
Just to let everyone know, I’ve implemented the Disqus engine for comments. I’ve set it to expire availability 30 days after a post has been made, as it’s the older comments that can be a bear to manage when it comes to comment spam.
Feel free to use this post for tests.
Disqus allows sign in from multiple providers — Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. So you don’t need to set up an account with them — you can use an existing account if you wish.
Let me know if you need any help, or if you find anything you think I should look at.
Just checking it out
Using the WordPress app on my rooted Nook Color.
I need to internalize this
Jon Stewart has a great interview with Rachel Maddow. But, early in, he says something about The Rally that I really, really needed to hear just now.
“Whatever you put out, you can only control your intention. You can’t control its perception or how people receive it.”
1st New Year’s resolution
I don’t generally do that sort of thing, but there it is.
Anyway: For the entire span of 2011, I resolve not to post in the comments of any blog, journal, diary, etc.
I’m doing this mostly because I’m finding so much of online discourse to be an offshoot of Deborah Tannen’s The Argument Culture, or perhaps David Brin’s “Dogma of Otherness” gone horribly awry. That is, one could post 2+2=4 in comment thread, and many would contest it. Not because they even believe 2+2=5, necessarily, but because they think truth is only arrived at through oppositional argumentation, or because to allow such a secular concept as arithmetic into any conversation leads to a slippery slope where the USA will cease to be Righteous and God-Fearing Nation, or because they think 2+2=4 was first promulgated by Hypatia and any acknowledgment of female accomplishment is “misandrist,” or… — well, you get the idea. (By the way, this is why comments are turned off for this journal — doing the needed maintenance and vigilance is just too much work for my tastes just now.)
As it happens, Seth Godin had a great post (as he so often does), and it went like this:
Two things are always not true:
Everyone likes this.
No one likes this.
If you try to please everyone, the few you don’t delight will either ruin your day or ruin your sense of what sort of product you should make.
And if you believe the critic who insists that no one is going to like what you made, you will walk away from a useful niche.
I’m a pleaser at heart, and I know it. So this is just an attempt to control my own impulses.
In 2011, any comments I have on other people’s posts (or events in general) will appear here.
The advice of Cicero
Cicero once wrote in a letter to Atticus, in January, 55BC:
“When there is nothing for you to write, write and say so.”
Consider this entry a placeholder, writing to tell you I have nothing to write lately.
{quote sourced here at the Gutenberg Project}
This is not a blog
Let’s face it — when you get a new domain that’s your name, and you start a journal at it, you end up name-checking yourself on Google a lot. Or at least, I have. It’s mostly to see how quickly Google is picking up on this space being “me.” (Right now this page is the #3 hit on my name… Which ain’t too shabby, given the page has existed for only 5 days.)
As part of that name-checking, I’ve been browsing earlier posts and comments I’ve made. One of them is this page from 2005, where the claim was made, “Technorati the No.1 blog search engine.” That seemed nonsensical to me, for a bunch of reasons:
* Technorati until that point had largely been an “inside baseball” kind of operation. They only indexed you if you explicitly opted-in, and to do that, you had to know they existed in the first place. Of the millions of blogs, journals, and diaries that were in existence even at that point, Technorati never seemed to me to represent more than a thin slice of the total action.
* On the other hand you had Google. For good or for bad, Google indexes everything. And it has high mindshare among the general public.
I also found this thread with Scoble from 2008. I’m too much of an asshole there (and my apologies, Robert, should you ever see this), but the thing was, Scoble was conducting a quasi-competition to see if his readers could “beat” Louis Gray at analyzing who’d been fast-growing start-ups that year. I had no idea who Louis Gray was, then or now.
So the other day I went over to Louis Gray’s blog to address that lack, and read over a few entries. He seems like a reasonable guy. Most interesting was this post congratulating Fourquare on their recent outages, on the theory that no one gets to be big without going through a stage where outages are frequent. In passing, Gray says this:
Back in 2007 and 2008, Technorati was as much known for its Technorat Monster escaping as anything else. This cutesy downtime message foretold the demise of the service, which had to strip out much of its functionality simply to stay up, and was pretty much abandoned by all but a core of users who watched the company evolve its business model and reduce their technical demands. And so far as I know, Technorati never launched a status page. They didn’t do what the many other successful companies (above) did when push came to crash.
I’m telling you all this because, hey, I’m a reasonably knowledgeable guy who’s been around the online block a few times. Since I was starting a new journal, I decided to opt-in to Technorati, just like I said above. These days, it seems that means they then have a human being assess whether your site is appropriate to be listed by them.
Their opinion?
According to their “blog claim” page, “This site does not appear to be a blog or news site.”
So, there you have it. This is not a blog. Technorati says so. Apparently they’ve taken Dave Winer’s maxim — “People come back to places that send them away.” — to a whole new level.
I’m not sure if going back to them ever again would serve a point anymore, though.
I don’t think this is a blog, either. But I’ll write about that another time.
From little acorns, etc.
As my great-grandmother Ruby Side Thompson once said, “This is my twentieth beginning of a journal. All the other beginnings are in limbo.”
Then she kept one for 50+ years. Go figure.
We’ll see how it goes.
NTKO — What Is It?
The idea for this blog came from a scene in the BBC comedy series Black Books. Manny is just about to finish his first day at a new job at a bookshop. Bernard, the owner, gives him an assessment:
Bernard: Manny… I think it’s about time you and I had a little chat about this whole (first day of yours), and how we think it went.
Manny: All right. I think it went very well.
B: You… sold a lot of books.
M: Yeah.
B: You got on very well with the customers.
M: Thank you.
B: I’m going to have to let you go.
M: What? But, but… I sold a lot of books! I got on well with all the customers!
B: It’s (gestures with fingers)… not that kind of operation.
(”Manny’s First Day,” Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan)
After many years of observing American business, I think this puts the finger right on it. Very few businesses are really set up to make money. They’re much more often the product of the owner’s (or CEO’s) ego, and the money that happens to come in is largely a side effect.
When it comes to making money — they’re Not That Kind of Operation.
In this blog, we’re going to be looking at all the many ways businesses pass up making money. Or, just how often markets don’t work, even by their own logic.
