ivantohelpyou

Yes, I like having a blog. But for the month-and-a-half I've been away, it was also nice to not have to think about what I would say to you each and every day. I didn't have to consider the ramifications of how you would react every time I wrote something. It was nice not worrying whether I might say something one day that would bite me in the rear later.

Who are you, anyway? Let's face it, we don't know each other very well at all. We've been seeing each other for a long time now, and it's just been a one-way conversation. It's like pulling teeth to get anything meaningful out of you readers, isn't it? Frankly, I'm tired of it. OK, maybe I'm not the best listener, and sure, I didn't have comments turned on. But still.

Sure, sometimes I would blabber on about things you may not have had any interest in whatsoever, such as the latest technology stuff or what I saw at the movies. Well, that's what was on my mind, and that's what a blog is for, right? Excuse me if not all of my thoughts are completely profound.

I think we need some time apart. So I'm going to hang out at Facebook for a while and see what happens. Meet some new people, that kind of thing. But let's face it, this blog here, it's done.

I hope we can still be friends.

Labels: blogging

I've been a regular visitor to the Greater Vancouver area for the past nine months, but next week it'll be time for me to head back East to re-enter the fray. And just when the weather's getting nicer, too.

Just wanted to say "Arrivederci" to all of the great people I've met in the blogging, web design and software development communities here in Vancouver. You've got a great thing going here, and I'm glad I was able to get a taste. I'll be back, and will try to time my visits around the fun stuff.

Ambitious travel schedule planned.... Do keep reading, and stay in touch!

Labels: blogging, softdev, vancouver, web design

I've commandered Boris Mann's office to write this at the Super Happy Grow-Op Dev House (an idea born in San Francisco Super Happy Dev House) here at Bryght Headquarters in Vancouver. I know it's Boris's office because his Northern Voice badge is on the table, as is a post-it note that says, "BORIS, YOU ARE THE SEXIEST DRUPAL BITCH EVER! - JOHN BOLLWITT." We'll get to Boris later in the post.

I found out about the event by bumping into Luke Closs from Socialtext on the plane back from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The basic idea of the SH(GO)DH, scheduled from 1pm to 1am today (a Friday), was to invite the hacker elite of Vancouver to a single space to work on stuff together, while scarfing down a few pizzas and a keg of beer. And wouldn't you know it, people were actually working on stuff.

I showed up at the event with my laptop, but figured that the best way to do something productive was to keep the laptop holstered and take out the pen and paper to do some old-fashioned reporting.

The Bryght offices in Vancouver's Gastown feature a long workbench-style desk where about 24 people at a time can plug in. On the other side of the open-plan office, there's the NowPublic offices, with a similar arrangement. Along the wall, there are a few private offices, including the one I commandeered to do my writing. I'm so past open-plan workspaces. Unless there's a nice paycheck with benefits attached to it.

Anyway, I walked up and down the workbench, asking people what on earth they were doing here. After all, there was a keg of beer and a few hot dogs upstairs, and so it had to be something pretty compelling to get people to work at a communal social event.

Here's what I found:

• A developer building a GUI test harness using Flapjax. Remind me to Google "test harness."
  
• Luke figured out a way to store information from unit testing on a wiki. Every time I talk to Luke, he's figured out a way to put something new on a wiki. Luke loves wikis, let's face it.
• Chris Simmons refactoring a UI.
  
  Now, in my day-to-day existence, someone refactoring an UI would get a nod of fake comprehension. But today, I just had to ask, "what's refactoring?" And I'm glad I did. I got a good lesson on the concept of extreme programming.
  
  It's a three-stage process: RED-GREEN-REFACTOR.
  1) RED - Write unit tests. This is basically a list of the things that a program has to do before it's complete.
  2) GREEN - Write a program that passes the unit tests.
  3) REFACTOR - Rewrite the program using better programming practices.
  
  We kept talking, and I learned something else. There's a programming language called Haskell, a "functional" programming language that basically takes a mathematical proof and turns it into a line of computer code with a minimum of fuss. For someone like Chris with a math background, that's good stuff. For me, I'd need to hack through an entire page of code to accomplish the same thing.
  
• Roland Tanglao from Bryght was trying to put a Python compiler on his Nokia N93, which would let him hack a way to get the camera to do something that it originally wasn't built to do. We'll call it "Snakes on a Phone."
  
• A French blogger and web designer demonstrated how he develops web sites. Not with Dreamweaver or anything like that. He relies on a Firefox plug-in called Firebug, a Mac program called TextMate, and that's it. We also talked politics given the recent election of Sarkozy.
  
• People taking pictures of each other for the inevitable Flickr stream.
  
• A blogger encouraging Vancouverites to spend locally.
• A developer studying at SFU was helping the above blogger to build a Drupal site. He's also involved in the "Google Summer of Code," with the intention of writing a Drupal module to allow people who run Drupal sites to get a sense of which Drupal modules are burning up the most bandwidth and processing time through the use of automated test cases. Very meta. We also talked about Plone, which he said requires a lot of overhead. Then, I asked about the difference between Ruby and Python. He said that Ruby on Rails was popular because for many developers, it was their first framework. But that doesn't mean it's the best. However, it also has more "scaffolding" to minimizes code during initial development. Django, which is based on Python, and which I mentioned in a previous post, can do a lot of the same stuff, but it's still prior to the 1.0 release and it needs a bit more scaffolding. (Don't you wish you were there?)
  
• I went upstairs for some more beer, and ran into Mack Hardy and Boris Mann (whose office I am currently pilfering) working the grill. Mack (from affinitybridge.com) talked about OG2List, a Drupal plug-in which clones the functionality of Yahoo! Groups. We then talked about the desirability of running your group on your own site, rather than on a commercial site like Yahoo! that's going to spam your membership, place ads in-between messages, and who knows what else they have buried in those terms of service. And then I had a long talk with Boris, who preached the Drupal gospel like I've never heard it before. He has a nice office but not a lot of good stuff to pilfer, as it turns out, short of his car keys.
  
• I met a coterie of Vancouver's finest bloggers, including Retrocactus, Miss604 and John Bollwitt. We talked about the benefits of blogging. For instance, do you put yourself out there in a blog, knowing that potential employers might read it? Well, in Miss604's case, she was hired as a result of her skill as a blogger. Bottom line: You have to be yourself, and if someone doesn't get it, you probably don't want to work there. Then, we talked about how the traditional formula for public speaking ("Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em what you told 'em) translates perfectly to blogging. You can do one post before you're going to do something, one post about what you did, and then another one later to say, "hey, look what I wrote." Three-for-one.
  
• I spoke with someone from the Committee for Open Source Technology and Applications Research at Simon Fraser, about applications that allow people to work on the same document (e.g. word processor, spreadsheet document) at the same time. We also talked about the state-of-the-art online apps, and he said that they're not yet good enough to replace your desktop apps. That'll make my next article for SmallBizResource a little easier.
  
• Dustin Sacks hooked me up with his Risk-like board game, Lux, which is going to be an AWESOME timewaster. We talked about the good old days of Risk on the Mac, including the challenge of beating a whole world of neutral players, or any of my high school friends who were foolish enough to challenge my global dominance.
  
• Ifky from Freegeek, wearing her radioactive-chartreuse safety glasses, gave me the full Freegeek reuse pitch. They take your old computers and either redeploy them in the field, or take them apart in an environmentally-friendly manner. And if you contribute 24 hours of work to the organization, they'll give you a free Pentium 3-era computer! Whether you're a potential contributor of your time or your old computers, check them out! And if there's no Freegeek near you, start your own!
  

And that's my report.

Labels: blogging, shdh, social networks

I'm really happy to have a daily outlet for writing in public. But I also recognize that the ivantohelpyou blog isn't the ultimate destination in blogdom. After a few months of blogging and regularly reading blogs, I'm starting to think that the best ones are those written by people who have jobs outside of the technology or publishing industries.

For instance, soldiers in Iraq have great blogs, and while we're at war, every American with an account at Google Reader should subscribe to at least one, such as The Sandbox at Slate.

Miss Snark, literary agent (which is a publishing job but I'll give her props anyway), recommends Clublife, a blog written by a bouncer.

And after you've had a run-in with a bouncer, maybe you need a nurse blog from the blogroll at code blog. Or try searching for firefighter blogs, police officer blogs (very big in the U.K. it seems) or blogs by anyone who's not sitting behind a desk. Bike messenger, even.

It has become so easy to insulate ourselves from anything but the news and media we choose to consume, surrounding ourselves with perspectives reflecting our own. As we rely less upon the mainstream media, we can no longer blame them for doing an imperfect job in defining and filtering our relationship with the world around us. If we replace the editorial voice of major newspapers with the self-selected voices of the people most similar to ourselves, we're bound to miss out on something important. That would be a shame, especially since blogs have given us an unprecedented opportunity to understand one another.

So, go out there and subscribe to the blogs of good storytellers, no matter what they do or where they do it.

Labels: blogging

So, for the past few weeks I've tried to theme my blog posts around a certain subject, like Accounting, Web 2.0 and Small Business. That's a good idea in theory, but in practice it has been constricting. For this blog, I'd rather just let it flow and then sort it out later.

Plus, I already have a blog for small business.

Get ready for a wild ride. As if accounting isn't wild enough.

Labels: blogging, small biz

Yesterday I looked at the statistics of this blog. One curious stat: there was an almost one-to-one correspondence between the number of items I read in Google Reader and the words I wrote in this blog over a 30-day period. This is probably a coincidence. The two numbers are probably unrelated for the most part, although I would expect that the more you read, the better your blog would capture the zeitgeist. But the more you read, the harder it is to shake off the conversation of the moment to write something truly original.

In terms of blog accounting, bloggers mostly assess themselves by counting visitors and commentors.

I haven't enabled comments on my blog yet, so I'm not really taking full advantage of the medium. This is by choice. I don't regularly comment on other peoples' blogs, and so I'd feel like a hypocrite asking people to comment on my blog.

The other problem is that I'd have to decide how I want to handle comments, a popular topic in the blogopshere these days. Gawker has an interesting approach: If you submit just one interesting comment (per suggestions from Lifehackers guide to weblog comments), they publish it on the blog, and also grant you the right to continue posting comments without prior editing. Then, they thin the herd by "executing" lame commenters (e.g., This week in commenter executions). Posting is a privilege, not a right.

The final problem: What if I enabled comments and nobody said anything? I'd have to spend all day faking it. What a chore.

Labels: blogging

In the spirit of Accounting Week, here's an attempt to quantify what goes into this blog:

Google Reader subscriptions: 438
Google Reader items read (or scanned) over the past 30 days: 13,442
Google Reader items starred: 97
Google Reader items shared: 32
Google Searches in March: 380

Conferences attended since February: 5
Conferences blogged about here: 2

Movies seen in the theater since February: 5
Movies blogged about here: 4

Unique visitors in March 2007: 1,185
Blog posts in March 2007: 48
Number of written words in this blog in March 2007: 13,000+
Number of spoken words in the script of Commando: 3,369

Labels: blogging

Your Blog Should Be Purple

You're an expressive, offbeat blogger who tends to write about anything and everything. You tend to set blogging trends, and you're the most likely to write your own meme or survey. You are a bit distant though. Your blog is all about you - not what anyone else has to say.

Labels: blogging

When I was at CMP, I participated in the launch of a daily Internet video program called The News Show (June 2005 - August 2006). About a dozen correspondents were given cheap webcams, video editing software and instructions to produce at least one clip per week. As you might imagine, the quality varied widely from day to day, and from correspondent to correspondent. Furthermore, the publications began to get a little tetchy about loaning out their reporters to a corporate startup initiative. (Unfortunately, the News Show site still exists but the clips seem to be gone, so you can't examine the remains yourself.)

Now, they've come up with its successor, a weekly program called The Friday ITch. The roving correspondents are gone, and they've replaced former News Show anchor John Soat with the saucy Sian Welby from the Rocketboom school. I'm impressed that actually went out and hired professional talent, rather than counting on amateurs like myself to entertain the troops.

They've given it a decidedly adult flavor this time around. I remember one of my favorite segments getting spiked for a risque comment about Lindsay Lohan. And now they make jokes about your pets watching you... well, I'm still running a family blog here, so I'll leave it up to you if you want to follow the link.

I'm looking into getting a digital camera by the time the Web 2.0 Expo rolls around, so that I can shoot some video for this here blog. If they're any good, maybe I can convince someone at YouTube to publish my clips. That would show everyone that I'm really hip.

Labels: blogging, vlogging, Web 2.0

It's the blogger's dilemma, familiar to any journalist on deadline. Whether to go straight home, to the hotel room or to the business office of the hotel to write up a comprehensive review of that day's activity, or to trust in one's notes and anecdotal memory by following the crowd to the afterparty to make new contacts and friends, with the good intention of following up with promised coverage later. Last night I went for the responsible journalist option, but tonight I opted for the social track. And I'm glad I did.

Labels: blogging

An Event Apart
Boston, Mass.
March 26, 2007

Eric Meyer started the event with a presentation titled “Secrets of the CSS Jedi.” From the beginning, I was a bit cautious. From what I recall, in order to become a Jedi you have to fly to some swampy planet to face down your innermost fears, where if you leave before graduation you’re at risk of succumbing to [deep voice] THE DARK SIDE.

As much as I like the idea of web standards, if everyone on a Web design team has to visit a swamp to learn from a wizened Muppet, it will never sell in the corporate world. Companies don’t need standardization in results. They need standardization in training and equipment. Everyone wearing the same white helmets and body armor, marching in formation, blasters at the ready.

In Eric’s example, he was able to take an HTML page containing a few columns of numbers and then, almost entirely using CSS, he turned it into a vertical bar graph. The process took in the neighborhood of 70 to 100 lines of code. He then showed another version, also hand-coded, with a horizontal bar graph. Now what would it take to make a bar graph using Adobe Flex 2 with Charting or some other non-standard Web framework? Just a few lines of code, once you’re up and running. And if you wanted to turn it into a pie chart or plot it on a logarithmic scale? Change a parameter and you’re done.

So, which approach should the average Web designer choose: The theoretically pure approach with a steep learning curve but impeccable results, or the toolkit-framework approach that gets the job done at the expense of semantic clarity? Or is there a middle ground?

Jeffrey Zeldman spoke well about the importance of good copy, with many illuminating examples. One such example: Basecamp, which instead of prompting for "login," contains the prompt text: "Please log in first and then we'll send you right along." This enhances the brand image as a "fun and easy" tool to handle the "tedious, frustrating and miserable" task of project management. But one audience member pointed out that Basecamp operates as a private label service – in other words, if I want to use Basecamp to manage projects with my clients, I send them to ivantohelpyou.seework.com. Clients see my logo, but with Basecamp's "fun and easy" text. That’s nice, but what if someone wanted the login prompt to say, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" or some other inspirational quote? Not so easy to do with a hosted service. Which means that the insufferably perky 37 Signals philosophy goes viral along with its software.

Jason Santa Maria went through design stuff while I answered client e-mails. I only caught a small segment involving dancing leprechauns.

Steve Krug promoted the concept of usability testing, including demos of how to use Camtasia and Morae from Techsmith. He may have also mentioned something about a book.

Andrew Kirkpatrick from Adobe spoke about accessibility. It was very code-heavy. My mind started wandering, and I started to wonder whether it would be possible to convert HTML to MIDI, so that a web page could be converted into a catchy tune with lyrics describing the content, and the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns describing the structure and behavior of the site. You’d load a webpage, and the music of the spheres would fill the room; you’d say "pow!" on the downbeat to activate a link, and the music would segue into something new, something wonderful. If you saw me there, my eyes were closed so that I might have some sense of what it would be like to be blind; and if you saw me drooling into a puddle on the hotel banquet table, that was me simulating loss of muscle control. And that smell…never mind.

Dan Cederholm also spoke last month at WebDirections North, at a session devoted to microformats. This time, he spoke about color schemes, typography and favicons before repeating the pitch on microformats. But I wasn’t bored by the repetition – first, it’s an interesting subject, and second, it gave me a chance to listen to how he was saying it rather than what he was saying. He’s an effective speaker, taking what could be a dry topic and relating it in a just-folks, non-techie manner. Yeah, right, he doesn't remember what API stands for. And I think that IPO stands for India Pale Oil.

From my perspective, the main problem with microformats is that I’m too lazy to add them to posts like this one. Sure, it’s easy. But it means that I’d have to go through this very entry and mark-up at least six entries with hCard information, and it has been quite enough effort for me to do this write-up of day one. Maybe if ivantohelpyou gets an editorial assistant, I’d be on board with it. Until then, sweet dreams.

Continued coverage of day two...

Labels: ALA, blogging, NV07, Web 2.0, web design, Web Standards

You can be fired for having a blog. On the other hand, you can also be hired for having a blog.

So far, I've noticed the following after blogging for almost a month:

1. On a Google vanity search, my name appears higher than ever.
   
2. As a corollary to (1), I seem to be receiving more "hey what's up" notes from my past.
   
3. It's easier to write for deadline when you're writing every day, as opposed when you're only writing for the deadlines.
4. Notwithstanding (3), it would be difficult to keep up a blog at this pace were I not self-employed. Not because I couldn't find the time, but because I wouldn't want to convey the impression that I was more involved in personal projects than in the goals of my employer.
   
5. In conversations with real people, sometimes I start riffing on something I had blogged about previously and wonder whether that's a conversational crutch.
   
6. Similarly, during conversations now, I can't help but think about how I could turn the topic at hand into a blog post.
   
7. The question, "Do I want to blog about this?" may have affected my media consumption habits. I need good stuff to write about!
   
8. I've become acutely conscious about what I'm NOT blogging about. For instance, I haven't written about music yet, which is an oversight. And I haven't written about politics, because it's so obvious and I'm a coward.
   
9. It's liberating to write without an editor or even an editorial mission, but it can be discombobulating.
   
10. I'm having fun!
    

Labels: blogging

Until today, I have been an Internet surfer.

Yes, I knew there were ways to streamline the experience, so that instead of hopping from site to site I could simply run one program that subscribes to RSS feeds from multiple sites, aggregating all of your desired content in one spot. And I've even tried several of those programs, in the following categories:

• E-mail client: Outlook 2007 includes built-in support for RSS feeds, and by default subscribes you to four Microsoft feeds. I added a couple additional feeds, which means that as these feeds are updated, I get extra mail. This has contributed to the large size of my Outlook database. Furthermore, having to check the feeds slows down the process of fetching and retrieving mail every 10 minutes or whenever I obsessively click the "Send/Receive" button waiting for incoming. This feature is only worthwhile for your top feeds, and only if you're positive you want to save the content on your own PC.
• Separate application: I remember downloading some program or another on the Mac to read RSS feeds. It worked fine, but it was another application to have to download, install, upgrade and oh yes, remember to launch. More often than not, I'd just go directly to the sites that I had fed into the feed reader. Plus, you couldn't take it with you.
  
• Firefox plug-in: A little easier to maintain, and it's in the browser. But like the application approach, it's not exactly portable.
  
• Website: I used Bloglines a few years ago, but it didn't exactly impress me from the user interface perspective. I tried it again this month and it didn't really look any different.
  

Today, after reading Robert Scoble mention his 577 feeds that he monitors through Google Reader, I figured I'd give the Website approach another try. After all, it's Google. Google Reader.

I spent the rest of the afternoon reading blogs.

Setup was fairly easy, and I've outlined the how-to below. It shouldn't take you more than five minutes. I would say that it'll save you time every day, but what's probably going to happen is that you're going to end up reading more than you'd ever thought possible.

1. Open a Google Reader account.
2. Find an OPML file that appeals to you. For example, you can download the "top 100" file from share.opml.org. For best results, right-click (Mac users, shift-click) on the XML button, and save the file to your hard drive, e.g. "top100.xml".
3. From Google Reader, go to Settings >> Import/Export.
4. Select the OPML.xml file you downloaded in step 2.
5. Press the "Upload" button.
   
6. All of the feeds in the OPML file will be loaded into Reader. At this point, you can start reading. However, I recommend the following additional steps, which will allow you to keep things organized if you load more than one OPML file into a single account.
   
7. Go to Settings. You'll see all of the subscriptions you've just loaded.
   
8. Now, you're going to create a new "tag" to contain all of the feeds in the OPML file. Pick any of the new subscriptions, and then use the "Change folders" menu to create a new folder, e.g. "Top100".
9. Select the "Unassigned" subscriptions.
   
10. In the "More actions..." dropdown menu, find your new tag. Assign it to the "Unassigned" subscriptions.
11. Go to step 2, repeat as necessary.
    

Using OPML files from Alexandra Samuel's blog, OPML.org and Startupping, plus a bunch of my own favorites, I quickly amassed over 300 subscriptions. (Soon, I'll post the official ivantohelpyou OPML file. Watch this space.)

Now, I can either hop from one source to the next, or just lie back and let the endless scroll of the Internet unfold before my eyes.

I no longer surf. Now, the Internet surfs me.

Labels: blogging, Web 2.0

Pertinent to personal bloggers trying to communicate their own diverse interests, here's a useful article (via Arts & Letters Daily) that talks about how to write about obscure academic topics for a general audience.

The author describes the original opening passage of his book, and the dramatic confrontation with his editor that followed:

I had begun with a flourish, emphasizing the excitement created when a young curator at the British Museum first deciphered the Gilgamesh epic, with its seeming confirmation of the biblical story of the Flood: "When George Smith discovered the Flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh in the fall of 1872, he made one of the most dramatic discoveries in the history of archaeology." Sterling ran his pen along these lines, but instead of praising this bold beginning, he tapped the page and asked, "Couldn't you make this opening just a bit more dramatic?"

He was right. I had told the reader that George Smith had made a dramatic discovery, but I had failed to dramatize the scene at all.

Trading Up With Gilgamesh
By DAVID DAMROSCH
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9, 2007

Hmm. Maybe I should rewrite this opening to this blog post.

I just had to find something. Anything, it didn't really matter, as long as I don't disappoint the regular readers of this blog – and myself – by failing to post something during a calendar day. The afternoon was passing quickly, tonight was movie night, and if I didn't act soon I might not get another chance. It had to be now or never.

And there it was, on Arts & Letters Daily, a link to an article about writing clear prose in academic expression. I quickly saw the potential, that the academic problem of appealing to a small audience might also apply to bloggers trying to interest a wide range of people in personal musings on various topics. "But hold on," I thought, "There's nothing in here related to one of the top Technorati searches! How can I possibly interest anyone in an article about Gilgamesh?"

And then I realized. You don't necessarily have to write about Antonella Barba, Youtube, Dell, Myspace, Clay Aiken, Matt Sanchez, Baudrillard, Captain America and American Idol to have a successful blog. All you need to do is introduce a connection to a topic that people may not have thought about before, and you'll do fine. Maintain the element of surprise. Don't let anyone know what's coming next.

"Just shut up and press the 'publish' button already before you give away all of your trade secrets," said Ratt. "Let's go for a walk."

I pressed the button, and the blogosphere was safe for one more day.

Labels: ALD, blogging