revjim.net

blogging

Feedback

Sep 25th, 2009
by Jim Reverend.
21 comments

First of all, I’d like to point out the fact that, I love comments. Even if just a “me too” or an “I like this” or a “I disagree” or a “stop being a douche”. Just knowing that someone cared enough to read through something I’ve written makes me day.

Secondly, I’d prefer that you comment HERE on this site. When I write, a little stub get sent to LiveJournal. A notification also gets Tweeted. Friendfeed also picks it up. Facebook republishes my Friendfeed, but I also make it a point to “share” the link on my Facebook page too, so if there’s a photo you all get to see a snippet of it. Some of you subscribe via email, so you read it that way. Most importantly I want comments. And if that means you write it on a cocktail napkin and mail it to me, then so be it. But, if you can be troubled to leave them HERE then I benefit from the fact that other people will read what you’ve written and maybe have something to say about it too.

Thirdly, I’ve integrated lots of ways to login to leave a comment so that it’s easy. You can log in with Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, Disqus, Yahoo, Google, or any OpenID provider.

Finally, I think my comments are broke right now, and this is a test to see if that is true.

Update: I figured out what was wrong with the comments. Feel free to leave one and test.

anti motivational message

Aug 3rd, 2009
by Jim Reverend.
4 comments

There is far too much bullshit on the Internet.

Too many of you assholes see something on the internet and think, “HEY! I can do that too! I’m gonna be fucking rich!”.

No, you can’t. And no, you’re not.

Just give up now before you litter my precious Internet with your crap. And before you start saying “but my idea is new and better and different”, just stop right there. It’s not new. There is nothing new. It’s all been done already. Yes, all of it. And it’s not better. It’s not even as good. Someone better looking, with more money and more time already did it. An no one wants different. We say we do, bit we’re lying. If you make something different, that just means it sucks that much more.

Save us all the trouble. Don’t clutter the Internet with your crap. Just give up now and go back to eating Cheetos and playing “Left For Dead” on an XBox that you didn’t and could never have invented.

Protected: Test Protected Post – ask for password

Mar 18th, 2009
by Jim Reverend.
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tell me where I can put it

Dec 12th, 2008
by Jim Reverend.
No comments yet

In the long, drawn out battle of where to put what when it comes to my online writing, it seems the dust has begun to settle with the exception of one remaining factor: life.

As I see it, there are really only 2 options.

  1. My own website powered by WordPress
  2. LiveJournal

The big deciding factor between the two is whether I want to write in public or private, and how much I want to cater to lazy people.

First, the lazy factor.

I’ve found that, for entries about Life, I get far more comments in LiveJournal than I do on the same entry posted on my website. It seems that LiveJournal users are either too lazy to click the link and read at my site, or are too lazy to bother to comment once they do.

Question 1:
Do I want to cater to this? Do I care?

Secondly, there is security.

If I’m going to really get deep into the “locked entry” writing, LiveJournal makes the most sense because it has tons of features in this arena. It means that some people will be excluded if they don’t have a LiveJournal account or know how to use OpenID. It also means I’d lost a lot of control over the look, layout, and functionality.

If i just intend to write something locked once in a great while, I can find some other means for distribution or use WordPress password protection and not really worry about it. In which case, I could just write on my own website like I’ve been doing and call it good.

Question 2:
So I ask you, do you think I write enough about my personal life? Am I candid enough in public? So you think I’m too candid in public? Should many of my life entries have a lot more filter on them?

I’m really twisted over which way to go on this. Your comments are appreciated.

you mean, like, every day?!

Nov 3rd, 2008
by Jim Reverend.
No comments yet

I figure, if Kristy can do it then I can because I’m a way better person than her. Ok maybe not.

But I’m going to try anyway. NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month)! Sure, I missed two days this month already, but, at least I’m starting you out with the right expectations.

Every time I look at the “word” NaBloPoMo it makes me think it has something to do with blood. The “Blo” is obvious there. I guess I think the “Po” is some take on Phlebotomy. Who knows.

Last night I saw two amazing artists in concert.

First, there was Kaki King. She’s a brilliant, beautiful woman, with some mean guitar and a voice that is pure magic. She’s got some amazing music videos on YouTube worth checking out. The art of the videos themselves really compliments her talent. And, if you just want to be in awe of her guitarist prowess, check out this live clip of her playing on David Letterman. Simply amazing.

She was followed by The Mountain Goats, a totally different variety of brilliant. With strong lyrics and emotive vocals, John Darnielle leads the audience through an amazing setlist, perforated with Kaki King on guitar playing some of the tracks from their collaborative album, The Black Pear EP, including the amazing Mosquito Repellent (sorry for the bad audio in that link).

Aside from the show being incredible, it was performed at the Granada, in my opinion, one of the bestmusic venues I’ve been to in DFW. Not only is the building interesting well laid out, the sound and light techs there always perform an outstanding job.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, I got to claim the beautiful, amazing, incredible Erica as my date. She was dressed pulling no punches whatsoever. I considered taking a photograph to share with you all and then decided I would just keep this one all to myself. Consider my selfish. I don’t mind.

The only problem with such an amazing yesterday is that today stands such little chance of living up to that standard.

C’est la vie.

are WordPress Stats and Google Analytics broken?

Apr 6th, 2008
by Jim Reverend.
4 comments

Are WordPress Stats and Google Analytics broken? It seems that the stats I get from one service disagree with the other. And both of those services disagree with my raw sever logs.

(more…)

on separation

Apr 2nd, 2008
by Jim Reverend.
No comments yet

CarpeAqua has hit the nail on the head (thanks for the link, Ryan).

Our data is on dozens of sites and for some it may be hard to keep track of every little thing you do online. [...] We feel some sort of internal need to share every single bit of our lives through every avenue we are afforded to ensure that every single person we’re connected to sees what we do. Rest assured. You are not that important. [...] Your friends will find you on the sites they are interested in joining. You don’t need to spam other sites with crossed data.

– CarpeAqua // Your Twitter is not your Blog is not your Tumblr is not your FriendFeed

Many of you think I’m a bit nuts for obsessing about separation like I do. Well, this is it! This is exactly why! Let’s say that, by chance, Mr. CarpeAqua finds my photography absolutely amazing but, despite that, he has no interest in knowing that I had no water this morning when I woke up. Maybe he could care less about my troubles with Portable Ubuntu, but finds my writing regarding my own internal struggles coping with a hectic life an an overactive brain (unlocked just to link here) incredibly interesting and enlightening. I’d rather know that he is uninterested in some aspects of me and that he is taking the bits and pieces of me that he enjoys and engaging himself fully in that than to know that he is so overwhelmed with information from me that he has no choice but to ignore it all.

I understand the need to cross-post data in cases where two services overlap and you want to participate in both. For instance, I want to share my photography with the Flickr community, the VFXY community, and with the LiveJournal community. So I post in my photoblog, and cross post to accounts on each of those services. But I try to do so in a way that separates content, either with communities, or with separate accounts entirely.

I’ve seen people doing this between Pownce and Twitter or between their blog and their LiveJournal account. This makes sense. In each of these cases the syndicated content is either a copy of the original, excerpts linking back to the original, or a subset of the original. It’s not a situation where multiple sites and multiple services are dumping all manner of content into one pile of madness. Imagine if my LiveJournal updated every time I posted a Tweet?

For those places where the lines are a little blurry I like digest posts. If I have a blog about my life, and I also happen to use Twitter to account for a very detailed breakdown of my life, making a digest of Twitter posts in the blog about my Life just makes sense. If I happen to use Tumblr to post interesting tidbits of interest to Technically minded people, then a digest of that finding its way to my Technical blog makes sense.

Having all of your content in every place all of the time is just silly, wasteful, complicated, and annoying. But, if that’s what you want, there are services that do this and do it well, like FriendFeed. Taking a look at my FriendFeed, you can see how annoying having everything in one place might be for someone who was only interested in black and white photography of the female form. But, of course, if you want EVERYTHING, then FriendFeed works for you.

So yeah. Reading the thoughts of others on this has encouraged me to separate even more. If you can’t handle a few more adds to your LiveJournal friends list or a few more notches in your Google Reader, then maybe you aren’t all that interested in the first place.

hmmm… this article seems really familiar

Aug 25th, 2006
by Jim Reverend.
4 comments

Dear “Bloglines”:http://bloglines.com/ –

No, I don’t have 1,350 unread items in my daily folder. I’ve read all of those already. The first time you suggested that I did, I reread all 1,350 of them. The second and third times I thought you were just trying to be certain. The fourth and fifth times you brought it up I thought you were being funny. Now this is just ridiculous.

(Actually, Bloglines claims I have 1,414 items in my Daily folder that are unread. But I decided to clear out a few of my subscriptions before taking a screenshot. A guy can’t give away all of his secrets.)

Further more, Bloglines claims I have 11,032 items in all of my folders that have not been read. That’s absurd.

I’ll continue to deal with this digging for gold to find interesting nuggets through today, but if it’s not cleared up by this evening, I’m going to find another RSS reader. I’m very tired of the problems Bloglines has been having lately.

Arranging Light: almost finished

Aug 4th, 2006
by Jim Reverend.
2 comments

My Photoblog is almost finished. It will be called “Arranging Light”.

If you look at the code, “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org/ is really just a bunch of pieces of really bad, procedural, brute-force style coding tied together with a thin thread that they call an API and wrapped in enough global variables to leave even the most experienced coders in a state of confusion. However, it offers the most out-of-the-box functionality, is easy to extend if you don’t try to write good code yourself, and, despite its highly inefficient code, it still runs faster than most other alternatives. Therefore, it powers this site, and will be powering my new Photoblog.

I wrote a plugin to give WordPress a few more features that I needed in a Photoblog that weren’t available from other plugins or in the core WordPress system. It took me a while to convince myself not to write the code well. After several frustrated and failed attempts due to the poorly written WordPress core, I eventually decided to look at the code as a short term solution that was allowed to break all of the commonly held conventions. 30 minutes later, I have a very handy little plugin. I figure, if I’m still using the code 5 years from now and haven’t updated it enough in that time-span to understand what it’s doing anymore, I can easily rewrite it in another 30 minutes.

I have a few more changes that I need to make to the plugin so that it can lend a hand on other sections of my site. Once that’s done, I have a few more cosmetic changes to make to the site and it’ll be ready to go live. I’m very excited about this.

I’m not sure if I should release the plugin or not. I’m sure other’s considering “PixelPost”:http://www.pixelpost.org/ for their Photoblog needs would find it useful, especially if they are already fans of the WordPress feature set. I’m reluctant, however, because the code is so bad. Then again, if you’re using WordPress you’re either oblivious to bad code, or using it knowing that the code is bad as I am. In both cases, the feature is probably more important than the method of invocation.

where to write

Jul 20th, 2006
by Jim Reverend.
3 comments

I’m not quite sure where any of my writing goes any more. So, I’ll just keep writing if you keep reading (and commenting or emailing for the love of God). If it’s rambly or disjointed or unintelligible hopefully we can work together to figure it out. Eventually, everything will find it’s place again and we’ll all be a lot happier.

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