Category: Blogs/Weblogs

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Blogs/Weblogs Living

Ten Years of Blogging 2001-2011

Next week, this little blog of mine turns ten years old. In some ways, this seems hard for me to believe. It actually feels like I’ve been writing here forever – but, of course, that can’t be! Perhaps it’s the sheer number of blog posts I’ve done over the years – many more over on PaymentsNews.com than here – but plenty here, on my recipe blog ScottsKitchen.com, on InMenlo.com, PaymentsViews.com and a few others.

Adding them all up, I’m sure I’m in the 10,000 hour club that Malcolm Gladwell talked about in Outliers: The Story of Success when it comes to blogging!

The first presence for my personal website in the Wayback Machine is dated December 5, 1998 – and, from the text on that page, looks like it was originally posted on October 19, 1998 – over thirteen years ago. Ah, those were the days!.

So, as we think about things to be thankful at this time of year, I’m thankful for blogging and how it’s worked magic in my life. By writing, it helps me clarify my muddled thoughts. By sharing with others, I often hear from them – even from strangers. And I welcome the increase in serendipity in my life that blogging contributes to in a meaningful way. Maybe writing here isn’t the best thing I’ve ever done, but it’s plenty good! And many thanks to those who inspired me to write and taught me many new things along the way. Lots to be thankful for!

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Apple Blogs/Weblogs Books iPhone 4 Photography

Blogging, Crowdfunding, Kickstarter and The Glif

Yesterday, I attended the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA) meeting in San Rafael to hear Joel Friedlander’s presentation about “Author Blogging.” Joel’s an independent book designer who we worked with at Glenbrook to design our book “Payments Systems in the U.S.” – he did an amazing job for us and I highly recommend working with him.

Joel’s blog “The Book Designer” is a wonderful resource for those interested in book design, self publishing and more. You’ll find him on Twitter as @jfbookman. In his presentation, Joel told of his experiences having started blogging just 15 months ago – and doing so has opened up a whole new range of opportunities for him – a great story told with great advice for other authors!

The GlifAs Joel and I were talking, he pulled out his iPhone 4 which had a little device attached to it – something called “The Glif“. The Glif slips over the edge of the iPhone 4 and provides a number of ways you can “stand up” the iPhone. In addition, for us photography nuts, it’s got a tripod socket – so that you can use your iPhone on a tripod. I ordered one immediately – from my iPhone naturally!

Turns out there’s a wonderful story behind the development of this little device. After prototyping their design, the founders, Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost, used KickStarter to raise the initial capital required to launch – and to find an initial market. KickStartr is a great way to publicize interesting projects and raise capital “from the crowd.” If the story is good enough and you reach the project threshold, funding happens – if not, it doesn’t. Simple but powerful idea! The Glif is a great example of KickStartr in action.

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Blogs/Weblogs WordPress

Playing with Child Themes

Just created my first WordPress child theme – to allow minor tweaking of the style.css for the Twenty Ten theme. Cool stuff!

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Blogs/Weblogs Business Living Payments

What a Week!

Two weeks ago I transitioned this personal blog of mine from TypePad to WordPress – and, in the process, began to get back into the swing of things in terms of regular posts. There’s something important about doing a daily post, IMHO – it’s the perfect cadence for a personal blog.

This week, naturally, I fell off that wagon. Completely fell off the wagon! No posts since last Saturday! WTF, as they say? I ask myself!

As it turned out, this week was one of those “perfect storms” of work – beginning with an all-hands partners meeting offsite on Monday, a private advanced-level Payments Boot Camp on Tuesday, a regular public Payments Boot Camp on Wednesday-Thursday, capped by an intensive client work day today. Exhausted… Heck, I’m writing this to just decompress – and yo look back at what an intense week it was!

While it was an intense week, it’s like an intense workout. You’re exhausted – but it’s that good tired feeling.

Frankly, for me, our Boot Camp sessions are just a delight. As instructors, we pour ourselves into them – and we get a huge amount back from everyone who attends. They’re pretty amazing experiences – as almost everyone who comes is an expert in some aspect of the payments systems we’re teaching – so it’s a joy to be able to draw on that expertise as the teacher.

We’ve recently begun including a case study exercise – dividing into small groups to better understand the perspectives of particular stakeholders in the payments system. These discussions get the juices flowing – as there are a lot of “zero sum” issues to consider in payments.

We also like to try to close the first day of our public boot camp sessions with an entrepreneur who’s actually innovating in and around the payments space. This week, Danny Shader, CEO of PayNearMe.com, spoke to our group – and shared some of his learnings building successful companies. Danny was great – and he got LOTS of questions!

So, I’m tired tonight – but it’s a really good tired. Lots of “good stuff” went on this week – and that’s what matters. The journey is indeed the reward!

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Blogs/Weblogs Food and Drink Web/Tech

Looking at Traffic, Food and Recipes!

I’ve been doing a bit of looking at traffic today – web traffic that is – across both my personal and our Glenbrook web sites.

ScottsKitchen.comFor my personal sites, it’s interesting that my recipes blog, ScottsKitchen.com, has been running about twice the number of page views daily that this blog receives. While I tend to think of sjl.us as my personal “hub” – the web doesn’t. It likes food (and recipes) much better! 😉

InMenlo.comOur hyperlocal blog – InMenlo.com – has yet again twice the number of pages views – it’s become very popular indeed. Fascinating that a significant amount of InMenlo’s traffic comes from Facebook while the traffic to ScottsKitchen and SJL.US comes primarily from the search engines.

Part of that is seasonal – my high heat upside-down roast turkey recipe on ScottsKitchen.com is an annual Thanksgiving favorite! Since I posted it in 2005, it’s consistently been the top page on that site. Our late fall roasted tomato soup recipes were also pretty popular this year.

The other perennially popular recipes are those for oven roasted tri-tip (a Christmas favorite around our house) and grilling tri-tip on our Weber charcoal BBQ.

In my book, the “gold standard” for a superb recipe site is SimplyRecipes.com run by Elise Bauer. She does a wonderful job – combining great recipes with luscious food photography! The iPhone web app version of her site has come in very handy for me many times!

My other go to iPhone app for cooking is Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. The paper edition of this cookbook was my late friend Chris Gulker’s go to bible for cooking! His kitchen copy is delightfully bookmarked, spattered and stained – a real working volume!

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Blogs/Weblogs Photography Travel Web/Tech WordPress

About that Header Image – Overlooking Luggala

When I launched this new WordPress-powered version of my blog over the weekend, I quickly looked through some recent photos to find one that would be suitable for use in the header image. The one I picked, which I’ve loosely titled “Band on the Run!“, was taken on November 19, 2010, in County Wicklow in Ireland. Seems like a near perfect shot for an album cover, doesn’t it?!

We’re standing on a cliff overlooking Luggala – the Guiness estate. We had just jumped out of our tour bus (Wild Wicklow Tours – highly recommended!) and were headed over to capture the views when I snapped this photo with my Canon PowerShot S95. My Glenbrook partner Carol Coye Benson and I were in Ireland teaching our Payments in a Mobile World workshop earlier that week. That’s Carol out in front of the band in the photo!

Here’s a page showing all of the header images that I’ve used over the years on sjl.us.

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Blogs/Weblogs TypePad Web/Tech WordPress

Thoughts on Migrating from TypePad to WordPress

Since 2003, this blog has been hosted by TypePad. They’ve provided excellent service – I have no complaints in that regard.

So, why did I decide to migrate from TypePad to WordPress?

Basically, the TypePad version of this blog had been put together (by me) using Advanced Templates and a bunch of hacks. It worked – but even I couldn’t figure out how to maintain it going forward.

So, I decided to migrate.

Over the last two years, I’ve launched several other blogs based on WordPress – and have become more familiar with the administrative aspects of WordPress. WordPress has just become more comfortable. That’s not to say it’s simple. WordPress is complicated – especially with respect to themes, plug-ins, etc. Be careful.

That said, while the posts export and import readily, there are many other issues – like image libraries that don’t export/import cleanly, category archives that have different permalink locations, and photo albums that simply don’t migrate. Not a pretty picture – but no surprise given the current state of the blogging art. Cruft. Crap.

I stopped using the TypePad photo albums a few years ago – when I became such a Flickr fan. But, there earlier links are still around, in the search engines, etc. Want to view my photos? Checkout my Flickr site!

Among other things, my migration initially screwed up the images displayed on another of my TypePad blogs. We’ve figured out a clever workaround for that – but it’s dependent on both the old and new sites being available. No way to cut the cord between the two without a lot more work. We’ll deal with that eventually.

Tonight, I spent time adding a bunch of redirects for the TypePad category archives – to their new locations on my new WordPress instance. This was just another giant hassle – but, with only about 30 categories, something I could get done without a lot of pain. Luckily, .htaccess provides a lot of power for redirection of URLs – but it’s still a giant PITA.

Tonight, I think we’ve got most of the conversion issues resolved. I’m watching the logs to see what URLs from searches aren’t resolving correctly – and may need to add a few more tweaks. Such is the life of the aging sysadmin…

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Blogs/Weblogs Web/Tech

Dealing with the Interwebs!

So, last night I rolled sjl.us over from TypePad – where we’d been since 2003 – to a hosted WordPress.org site. All in all, took about an hour to do the work – and then another couple waiting for the DNS change to propagate.

All of the old post content is now on this site – although almost all of the URLs have changed as a result of differences between TypePad and WordPress handling of permalinks. Unfortunately, the import/export process doesn’t support all of the images in my historical posts either – so we’ll be manually sorting through those over the holidays and trying make things presentable again. Such is the nature of things.

Hopefully, Google will begin making sense of this new site in relatively short order – although at the moment I’m frustrated with Google Webmaster Tools and an inability to force a refresh of the site’s robots.txt fiie. Apparently this only happens on a 24-hour cycle.

What happened to the “real-time web” anyway?!

[Update: I decided to change the permalink settings in WordPress to mimic the permalink format that TypePad used. So far, so good. Some of the archive and category pages aren’t mapping – but the individual post pages are now working nicely.]

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Blogs/Weblogs

The Dropbox Phenomenon

DropboxLike many others, a while back I setup a free Dropbox account – what’s not to like about a free 2 GB of storage “in the cloud”?

On my Mac, Dropbox shows up as a folder in my Finder list of Places – it’s always right there. The Dropbox app starts automatically when I reboot – enabling all of this magic. The Dropbox apps on my iPhone and iPad enable me to easily access the Dropbox folder’s content – while I’m out and about.

On recent trips to both India and Ireland, I took full advantage of this mobile integration enabled by Dropbox. Before my flights, I dropped the key files of interest for my trips into folders in my Dropbox – and then accessed them ahead of time on my mobile devices, marking them as favorites (enabling local copies to be saved on the mobile device) and then read them while I was enroute. My laptop stayed stowed in the overhead compartment. A great use case! There are many others!

Somewhere along the way, I upgraded to the 50 GB option ($99/year) – as I quickly bumped up (amazingly) against the free 2 GB limit. Like many others, I’ve become a real advocate for Dropbox – it’s perfect at what it does. Elegant, simple, just works. Doesn’t get much better than that.

If you’re not yet using Dropbox, sign up here (and both of us will get even more storage in the cloud!). If you are using Dropbox, aren’t you also impressed?

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Blogs/Weblogs Web/Tech

Happy Birthday – Celebrating Nine Years of Blogging!

Turns out yesterday was the 9th birthday of this blog – with the earliest posts being made back on November 25, 2001. Next year, we’ll celebrate 10 years of personal blogging!

There actually were earlier posts – a quick look at the Wayback Machine shows an early page on October 19, 1998 – just a placeholder with no content! So the November 2001 date is really just a placeholder for the content I was able to bring across on to whatever platform I was using back then.

A page from August 1999 shows the actual beginnings of the blog – created back in those days using Microsoft FrontPage! So the true birthday was more likely back sometime in 1999 – but the cruft gets the way of actually seeing it!