revjim.net

February, 2008:

poll revelations

A special thanks to those of you who took yesterday’s Poll on your revjim.net reading desires as well as those of you who took my LiveJournal poll regarding content separation from the day before. I don’t have much to offer except my thanks and my art. So… THANK YOU. I will be emailing the revjim.net readers and making a locked post for you LJ people in the near future with a coupon code that will allow you to get some prints from my online gallery at cost.  It’s not a huge savings since they are already dirt cheap, but it’s the best I can do right now.

Now to interpret the results.

The vast majority of respondents to the revjim.net poll were LiveJournal users. This means that either most of my revjim.net readers are actually LiveJournal users, or that the non-LiveJournal users are either less vocal, or just don’t care.

Additionally, ALL respondents indicated that there were interested in my life. And at least half of them indicated that they were interested in my photography. This means that the majority of my programming minded, technical readers from days of yore have either gone away due to lack of content, or are less vocal, or just don’t care.

The remaining respondents that don’t use LiveJournal are either VERY special cases and represent a statistical anomaly or they use RSS readers. This formulates the answer to the first question.

The vast majority of the readers that are interested in my personal life are on LiveJournal.

This means I can very easily either move my personal life content directly over to LiveJournal, convert revjim.net to a personal life ONLY type blog, or create another domain entirely to host the writings about my personal life, as long as they can be fed into LiveJournal. Of course I still have to figure out how I want it, but at least it’s just a matter of personal taste.

Now, moving on to the LiveJournal poll I learn that everyone wants something different. Only a handful of people responded there but I’m pretty sure I didn’t get the same answer twice. So, that allows me to formulate the answer to the second question.

The vast majority of people who read my writing want it in different ways. 

This means no matter what I do someone isn’t going to like it, so I can basically do whatever I want.

So there you have it. After all that time, effort, thought, and two user polls, I’ve reached this grand conclusion:

I should do whatever I want.

Man.. I’m a genius.

Expect some changes. I just don’t know what yet. Maybe I need to register a new domain… or 10.

Yesterday’s Tweets

  • 14:26 Wooooooo! Golden Delicious is here. #
  • 20:10 I want your privates and my privates to do a high five. #

(Cooked up Fresh and Juicy just for you by the fine folks at LoudTwitter. Text “follow revjim” to 40404 on your mobile phone to follow all day long.)

revjim.net reading survey

As you may have noticed, revjim.net, and my entire online presence is having a makeover. While, ultimately, I’m going to do what suits me best, with some information from you regarding how and why you read this site, I can make much more informed decisions.

Please take a moment to take this quick survey  and provide me with a little information. There are only two questions and I promise it won’t take long.

revjim.net reading survey

Thank you!

Yesterday’s Tweets

  • 06:51 still very sick to my stomach. #
  • 12:46 feeling a little better. not much. looks like Jess has two babies in the house. #
  • 15:04 Still blowing my nose, nursing my headache, and trying to figure out what goes where in all my online places. Yeah. It consumes me. #
  • 15:07 I hope I get a chance to get out this weekend and get a little mud on the tires. (ha! Jet!) #
  • 15:11 @sivatonight, yeah! you never know where one might be. and there’s a lot of places that are hard to reach. #
  • 16:24 If I sneeze again, I’m pretty sure that’ll be the end of me. #
  • 16:45 Jess pre-ordered me Mike Doughty’s new "Golden Delicious" album. I thought it was going to be here today. It’s not. :( #
  • 02:19 The problem with going to bed early is that I always wake up early too. And I still feel terrible. #

(Cooked up Fresh and Juicy just for you by the fine folks at LoudTwitter. Text “follow revjim” to 40404 on your mobile phone to follow all day long.)

Where’s Jim/Daniel/Daniel James/That Hot Guy?

Lately, I seem to have rekindled my public internet voice. It’s not that I ever stopped writing, it’s just that I practically stopped writing anything of importance to anyone outside of my circle of friends. But, I feel change coming, which is a good thing. Furthermore, as time goes on and the face of the Internet changes, the places that I’m publishing content changes with it. Therefore, here’s a list of the places where you are likely to find content from yours truly. Along with each item is a description of the kind of content you can find there, or, will be able to find there in the near future.


revjim.net: The topic is, officially, anything that interests me. Generally speaking this contains longish articles that have to do with one or more of the following: Technology, Science, Photography (and other Art), Fatherhood, The Great Outdoors, Gadgets, the World Wide Web, Software, Books and Movies, Music, Poetry, and Local News and Events. Occasionally I even post regarding life events of a public nature. I intend for these to be well-written, polished articles suitable for publication in a magazine, newspaper, or trade journal. Thankfully, I use a content engine that allows me to divide my media into categories so you can pick and choose which parts you’d like to follow.

Daniel James Photography : Someday, this will contain a listing of my photographic services, model requests, photo adventure announcements, a portfolio, and a print gallery.

Arranging Light: One photo per day, taken by me, posted 5 to 7 days a week. Content can range from landscapes to portraits and from polished work to experimental images. Commentary will accompany each Photograph and will vary from a description of the image, to some history about the location or event, to a piece of poetry or prose to accompany the image.

Flickr: All of my images. They are broken down into Collections and Sets to make it easy to find what you’re looking for if you’re looking. All the work found at Arranging Light will be found here, as well as additional images, larger sets of similar images and personal photographs. The “privacy” features of Flickr are used occasionally so being a member of the site and listed as one of my contacts there certainly doesn’t hurt.

Jim’s Tumblr (for lack of a better name): I’ve been using Diigo to keep track of the various links, photos, comics, videos, and music that I find interesting. However, I don’t really care for the service. This Tumblelog will be a replacement for that. I’m not sure if it will take on a scheduled feel (new Foto Fridays, Tight Tune Tuesdays, etc) or simply be a log of what I found when I found. This is still a work in progress.

LiveJournal: LiveJournal is basically a required element in today’s online society, though I’m really not sure why. I have an account. However, in as long as I can remember I’ve only made one post directly to it. Everything else you see there was published first in some other location. I find LiveJournal to be a decent service, however, it’s not particularly awesome at doing any one thing. It has blogging, a friend reader, photos, communities, etc, but none of those services are the best of breed. It’s simply one service that has managed to combine them all together in a fairly decent fashion and happens to be quite popular amongst my circle of friends.

However, I also realize that there are aspects of my life that should probably be kept more private. Therefore, I intend to use LiveJournal for its “friends-only” features. It’ll be a lifeblog, of sorts. You’ll want an account there and you’ll want to have me befriended, otherwise, you’re not likely to get much out of it. If you know of another service that provides this same “friends-only” feature, I’d love to hear about it.

Lots of my friends use LiveJournal and make “friends-only” posts. As much as I’d like to be able to read those posts outside of LiveJournal, everything that is possible isn’t any better. So, my friends list is full of the LiveJournal’s I choose to read as well as those that I wish to allow access to my content.

Twitter: I use this service as a mobile microblog. I update what I’m doing when I’m doing it and expect the same from those that I follow or I’m not likely to follow for very long. I get my updates from this via SMS and I assume that most people who follow me do as well. If you aren’t interested in the minutiae of my life, then this probably isn’t for you. In the future, this may become private.

Facebook: This is the only “social networking” site that I check regularly. There are hundreds of others (Linked In, MySpace, Friendster, etc), many of which I am a member. However, none of the others seem to get it as close to right as Facebook. The service is not at all useful, but it’s silly and fun and a nice way to keep in touch, and that’s basically its purpose. Leave me a silly wall post, drop me a Facebook mail, poke me (but only if you’re female and attractive), leave a note in my honesty box, send me pictures that’ll have me turning off my monitor at work and then checking to make sure no one was looking. Whatever makes you happy. I have to have one of these sites on my list and this is the one I choose. Hate it if you want. I don’t care.


I also need a place to put short, lifeblog style entries that I intend to leave public. Maybe that’ll go in the TumbleLog. Maybe that’ll go in LiveJournal.

Maybe I’ll find another place for that stuff. Thoughts? Options?That probably seems like a lot of sites to you. Maybe it is. But that’s the current state of my online affairs.

What do you think? Your opinion matters… sometimes.

Yesterday’s Tweets

  • 09:02 At the Irving office today. My arms still hurt from yesterday. Ow. #
  • 11:11 hungry. #
  • 11:38 This just in: Ryan Abrams is my lord and savior. That is all. #
  • 12:14 Still hungry. #
  • 12:33 Going to find lunch. My friends rock. #
  • 13:29 back from lunch. #
  • 16:04 I have a headache. #
  • 02:39 I think I’m sick. Don’t feel good at all. Went to bed at 8PM last night. Can’t sleep now. #

(Cooked up Fresh and Juicy just for you by the fine folks at LoudTwitter. Text “follow revjim” to 40404 on your mobile phone to follow all day long.)

JS-Kit: a hosted commenting system

(ed note: I’m writing these words to you at 4am as I am unable to sleep due to a sort throat, sick stomach, and terrible headache. I apologize in advance if they are utterly unreadable, deviate greatly from the topic at hand, or turn out to have nothing to do with JS-Kit or external commenting systems at all.)

As the fight for the highly coveted comment space here at revjim.net (a member of the Jim Reverend  family of sites) rages on, another contender raises it’s head from above the crowd: JS-Kit. I’ve taken a few moments to look over their offerings and give it a good test.

I really only have one criticism to offer, but it’s a big one, so I’ll start with it. The service and it’s feature set takes the same approach that was taken in developing a name for their service: JS-Kit is straight and to the point with little in the way of frills, user interface, or design. Some examples, perhaps, are due.

Adding comments to a page is as easy as dropping in two lines of code into your page template. With this process you can add comments to any page, anywhere, at any time. You can even add the same set of comments on two different pages with little to no trouble. The flexibility offered by this straight-forward no-nonsense approach is staggering. The same type of simplicity is available for adding ratings, reviews, and even polls to your site.  You can even customize the look and feel of this, giving you the ultimate in flexibility.

The downside to this is in the backend features. The dashboard and moderation panes are ugly, cluttered, and difficult to navigate. As a discussion participant, if I commented on more than 30 JS-Kit enabled sites, following this using JS-Kit’s dashborad would be cumbersome at best. There seems to be no sense of community or a social aspect to the service they offer. But, then again, I don’t think that’s what JS-Kit was building.

Another example of this utter simplicity: JS-Kit knows what sites you manage by a cookie present in your browser. Lose the cookie and you have to reauthenticate via email. This isn’t really that big of a deal, but it points  out even further just how plain their system is.

But you know what? Plain isn’t always a bad thing. From the site owner standpoint, even though the data presented isn’t pretty, it’s in one spot and seems to be easy to read. The simplicity of this system is incredible. If you’re looking to add comments to a site without any hassle and aren’t interested in the social aspects of commenting outside of your own site, JS-Kit is probably the easiest way to do that.

For revjim.net, however, and my other sites, the point of using centralized comments is not to get a working comments systems — I have that already. The point is to improve that system, add functionality and flexibility, and make it easier for users to not only comment here, but to comment all over these world wide webs. To this end, JS-Kit isn’t the best fit. However, I intend to keep it in my bag of tricks to be used for many other more suitable situations.

Now… that ratings and polls module they offer… well… you might just be seeing that here in the weeks to come.

Thanks, JS-Kit, for helping to make the good ole WWW more diverse, more interesting, and more feature filled.

by the awesome power of my readership

Clearly, the sheer abundance of my loyal revjim.net readers and their eagerness to test this new commenting system has overloaded the poor monkeys that power the Disqus servers as the entire site now seems to be down.

This presents the first problem with a centralized comment system. As a result of the combination of Disqus now being down and the way the Disqus plugin for my content engine (WordPress) has been written, my site, revjim.net, now also appears to the outside world to be down. I know it isn’t. I’m writing this post now using it. But it sure looks that way.

Feel free to discuss these circumstances… just as soon as Disqus comes back up (or I get tired of waiting and get rid of it).

Centralized Comments: Intense Debate vs Disqus

A centralized comment system takes the commonly seen discussion portions of a weblog, online journal, or other such device and offsets it to a centralized service. In other words, instead of using the comments built into WordPress, Flickr, Tumblr, LiveJournal, or whatever other service you might use, that functionality gets offset to some other centralized service. It still appears in all the places it used to and makes it easy to group the discussion with the original content. But, additionally, it provides a lot of extra functionality for both the content creator and those participating in the discussion.

To those participating in the discussion, it provides a clear path toward having a single account (or only a handful of accounts) for comment creation. For those that regularly comment on many blogs, this will be a huge timesaver and a reduction of frustration. It also allows users to keep track of what they write in various places online as well as those comments that have been replied too. Additionally, it allows them to keep track of comments that their friends and other respected people may have left on other blogs.

As a content author and media creator, the concept of a centralized comment system may not seem immediately useful. However, providing a clean, consistent interface to commenting and making it as easy as possible to do so fosters more participation — and more participation only means more traffic. Additionally, it can save you some server load as you no longer have to host the meatier portions of those features. Finally, it can allow you to provide features you may not have been able to before including adding comments to a site that wasn’t even comment-enabled before.

Currently, there are two centralized commenting systems that seem appealing: Intense Debate and Disqus.

Intense Debate seems the most interesting to me at this time. First, it supports OpenID making it that much easier to get people involved. There also seems to be more momentum behind the project than with Disqus and the developers seem to have a similar mindset to how I would build it if it were mine. There is a planned API (so that Javascript is less required) and importers planned for many platforms. It’s not all the way there yet. Without the API, content authors can’t benefit from the Google-Juice that is provided with the discussion being a part of their site. And the current wordpress importer simply doesn’t work for me. It formats the comments poorly, and fails to import all of my entries. But, it’s a work in progress and I understand that. I should be getting a beta version of the comment importer later today to test.

Disqus is more independent. You could use discus as a threaded discussion forum without an accompanying website, if desired. For some, this is a “pro”. For others, it doesn’t matter at all. There’s no OpenID support in Disqus either and they don’t even have broken and/or experimental comment importers to test. But their API is complete and they seem to have a nice handful of features planned for the future.

Unable to decide which is better, I’ve decided to give them both a test drive.

I’ve installed Disqus at revjim.net. I’ve installed IntenseDebate at Arranging Light. As soon as I put the final touches on my TumbleLog, it’ll be using IntenseDebate as well.

Let me know what you think of these tools. After all, it’s as much for you as it is for me.

Yesterday’s Tweets

  • 05:52 Despite the rain I’m going out shooting this morning. #
  • 08:03 Rain. Boo. Getting breakfast in Arlington. Then stopping at camera store. then heading home. #
  • 08:36 Still raining. Breakfast over. 30 minutes to kill. Should have brought a book. #
  • 09:18 "I ask ’cause I’m not sure… Do anybody have real tits anymore?" #
  • 10:42 "my juice is sweet like Georgia peaches… Women suck it up like leeches." #

(Cooked up Fresh and Juicy just for you by the fine folks at LoudTwitter. Text “follow revjim” to 40404 on your mobile phone to follow all day long.)