Recently in personal expression platform Category

There is a very real prospect that the sweet sweet deal the Mediajunkie publishing empire has had these many years with Tiedrich and associates may need to replaces by something inevitably not half so sweet.

What this means is that I may need to find a new host for my multiple and various web experiments. I don’t need things to be up 24/7 as long a I have long-term persistence, but I do like to have free rein (within reason) and unlimited domains (or close to: 10 is not enough, 100 is more than enough).

I’m working on a little comparison spreadsheet. In the budget range I’m looking at there seems to be roughly two tiers. Oddly, the cheaper-tier providers offer more generous limits, so I’m probably missing some important factors.

Advice?

Yeah, what she said: FringeHog: In Praise of Slow Blogging.

Or is it a he? There’s no byline and several authors for the site.

Whatever.

Also, should I get an OLPC (one laptop per child) XO laptop in the buy one / donate one program? They look like they might be a great conference tool. Seven hours of battery life.

Since I started at Yahoo my workaday routine involves riding a shuttle from Oakland to Sunnyvale with a big laptop computer crammed on my lap so I can work, browse the net, or as I’ve been doing lately, blog.

For some time I’ve been thinking that an upgrade to my smartphone, something with a qwerty keyboard, such as a blackberry, treo, t-mobile whatsit, or pocketpc might make a much less bulky alternative.

This past weekend I got myself an iPhone (or jPhone as I like to call it), so now I’m on that bus, bypassing the overloaded wireless, and look my I’m blogging!

It’s not superconvenient. I’m still getting used to the fatfingers virtual keyboard, though the guess-ahead feature, whatever it’s we, definitely helps.

I’m also studying the phone’s interaction design, of course, looking for interesting interaction patterns, but I think I’ll wait till I have a real keyboard in front of me before I elaborate on what I’m discovering and noticing about this new handheld.

Inspirational typo: hamdheld

Now to try to insert a picture or even a link… the hard part.

(Picture was too hard to manage via the jP, so I added the one at the top afterward, on arriving at my desk. Ditto for the link above to the interactive gestures pattern library wiki.)

I’m trying to do more “real” blogging here these days and I feel like my Delicious links just drown everything else out. (Also a twitter follower mentioned being interested in people’s blog posts but not their bookmarks - I am now having my blog posts send notices to twitter - and that kinda made sense to me.)

I am putting a delicious link badge in my sidebar, though, so people interested in my daily (or nearly) bookmarking habits can still find those links there, complete with tags and notes, when I add them.

In reply to apophenia: Twitter questions (curiosity is killing me…):

First, the practical question. Can i quote you?
[ ] Yes, and you must use my real name.
[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information.
[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.

Hmm, those options have an excluded middle. I’d say “Yes, feel free, and you may use my real name, my online handle(s), or whatever other descriptor you find useful.” If I have to pick one I guess I’d pick the first one.

1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?

I use it to jot down my thoughts and narrate my day and to keep up with what some of my (online) friends are doing and thinking about. I like the ambient intimacy, to quote Leisa Reichelt.

2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.

I think my followers are reading them. Is that a trick question? It’s a perfectly OK audience for me, since it’s opt in. There are people, like close friend and family whom I’d like to also read them (if they were willing of course), but there is no invite feature.

3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?

I read them sometimes via twitterific, sometimes from the Twitter website, sometimes receiving them as text messages. I don’t always read all of them but I do tend to read down till I reach familiar territory, much like the way I catch up on a blog I haven’t read in a while. (Having said that, I scan - I don’t read everything carefully.)

I read people whom I’ve met and a few whom I find interesting or appealing. So I don’t know them all but I think I know (meaning have met in person) 90% of them. I don’t expect any of them to reciprocate necessarily. That is, it doesn’t bother me if they are not interested in following my thoughts.

4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?

I haven’t thought about it too much. I go by instinct. I guess some descriptions of graphic bodily functions might not necessarily feel appropriate to me, at times. Beyond that I think it’s fair game and the character limit kind of helps.

I have thought about tweeting something and then decided not to, usually because I think it’s too random or trivial, because I’ve ceased to find it amusing in the first few seconds since thinking of it, or because I’ve posted a bunch of tweets lately and don’t want to be spamming people.

5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?

My tweets are public. I like doing things in public and don’t mind people paying attention. Therefore (back to the appropriateness thing) I probably won’t be tweeting about things that are illegal or offensive or humiliating (unless I can’t resist because it’s so entertaining or revealing). I don’t mind people coming across what I write. I expect it’s all out there and people will see it and even form opinions about me based on it. It’s all good.

6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?

I can’t get the IM interface working and I would find it useful during the workday. There are many people I’d enjoy sharing with on Twitter who are not on the system but I can’t be sure they’d like it (so many people don’t) so I don’t feel comfortable evangelizing.

If you’re an experienced blogger in the Bay Area and would like to work for a cool startup recently acquired by Yahoo!, in Berkeley, then you may want to apply for this new community manager role: The MyBlogLog Blog: Seeking: MyBlogLog uber-user for long-term relationship

They seem to grok the Craig Newmark idea that customer service is a key part of growing their business.

I got tired of the old design and wanted to take advantage of some of the new-er features of the blog software I’m using, so I’ve temporarily redone the design with one of their canned themes. Soon I’ll start tweaking the typography and colors and spacing and such and adding back in some of the features stranded in the old design.

While I’ve been neglecting this and many other of my Mediajunkie blogs in the past year and a half (excuse: full-time work, baybee), I have actually been blogging. While at Extractable I launched a spearheaded a user-experience focused blog called Extra! Extra! and wrote something for it nearly every workday for about a year.

Actually, my commitment was to make sure something was written in it every day, and about 10 to 15% of the time other Extractable folks wrote great content for the blog as well. I just backed it up and made sure there was always something fresh.

Anyway, I am making a job change now. I am currently taking a week off and next week I will start a new job, more about which in due time, so yesterday I used Eric Pierce’s WPexport plugin for WordPress tp expprt all the entries, remove the ones that weren’t mine and then export them into this here blog (wake up!).

I added that link just now because all of this is context-dependent. For example, this entry will be echoes at X-POLLEN (aka xian’s running monolog) and then when it says “this here blog” it will actually be lying (well, sort of, because recent imported entries will also show up there). I mention that because as I imported the entries I noticed that many of them are written from a “we’re here at Extractable” perspective that will probably sound funny in this blog. In fact I removed the posts bragging about site launches - most of which were written by others anyway - and a few other entries that were really company-specific.

I thought about whether the posts belong here or elsewhere (say, at RFB or The Power of Many) or even whether I should launch a new web/user-experience related blog, but that way lies madness. As I’ve written recently, I am now on the consolidation tip and I am going to start either retiring blogs and/or folding their content into this one, so people will know where to point to me and look for my latest stuff, etc.

So I just created a new master “user rexperience” category here and then replicated all the Extra! Extra! categories under it, though I think the exporter lost multiple categories and assigned only one to each entry, but oh well. So this blog is going to become less of a personal journal and more of an omnibus of whatever I’m currently thinking about. I may not need the monolog anymore, either. Have to think that through. My brain hurts. And this is supposed to be my day off.

For some odd reason both of the outgoing mail servers that route mail for me from my various addresses are stalling out repeatedly at the moment. This means I have about seven or eight messages in my queue that aren't being sent out.

This means that I may be trying to reply to email from you but I may be unable. I'm a little distracted today, printing out sample documents for a long meeting/interview, so diagnosing the problem isn't high enough on my priority list at the moment.

Rest assured, I am receiving incoming mail just fine and I'll figure this problem out probably by tomorrow, unless, like so many other Internet issues, it decided to just go away on its own.

I tore down the monolog at x-pollen and built it back up as a new standalone blog. It was a fake blog before. Now it has its own blog number in my system and for the time being it will only update when I update it manually (at least until I get a crontab working).

I'm going to play around with the new dynamic page generation features in MT 3 and see how they work. If I can get them doing something interesting for monolog then I will probably apply what I learn to Telegraph.

It's tempting, though, to just use something like CivicSpace which has a built-in news aggregrator and seems to know how to the do the cron stuff itself without asking. It's gotten very easy to install and even though I'm not a social movement, for the sites that combine content from multiple blogs it might turn out to be the best solution.

Hallelujah. Jeff's Spleen is producing its... er, bile? once again! But that design, it's so 2003....

I'm the same way. I love it when you can talk about all music as popular and good, popular and bad, unpopular and good, or unpopular and bad. I love magic squares. Is it because they're very small databases?

The constant music is a reminder that I like to sing, especially when no one else is around to here, and that I like to dance, alone and in company. Singing unlocks my voice somehow my light-opera expressitivity, my comic whimsy, it loosens my neck and shoulders. Dancing gives my body a way to tell me where it feels sore and where it feels stuck. I have to pay attention. I at least don't make the patterns worse that day.

I wondered recently if our sinews in our muscles can get twisted like a telephone wire. There are times when repeated backward Pete Townsendish windmill armswings feel as though I am unspooling a tightly wound rope of jute through the shoulder joint.

Christian Crumlish's personal weblog, most recently called X-POLLEN, has been renamed. It is now called wake up and has been moved to xianlandia.com, as a more appropriate domain for Christian's personal effects. Christian feels strange writing about himself in the third person and will stop now.

You can also call it "xianlandia" or Christian's blog or really anything you like if you don't like the name wake up, which just came to me and who knows how long I'll stick with it? I'm fickle like that.

This, really, is the switcheroo I promised a few weeks back.

I just explained where the X-POLLEN blog went but what happened to the x-pollen.com domain? For now, I'm parking the site that aggregates all of my weblog posts, the site I call monolog or xian's monolog, there. In fact, it's not really all of my weblog posts, but just those published by the (Movable Type) software that runs on that same server and hosts a number of group blogs and guest blogs. I try to include writings from other sites in the sidebar, but I haven't come up with a universal solution for that, especially when you factor in blog comments posted elsewhere.

I might move it over to a me-specific subdirectory at the site, eventually, and turn x-pollen.com into a showcase for recent entries from all the blogs hosted on the site, featuring all the great writers I'm hosting. (Then I can relaunch Mediajunkie as an aggregator site featuring external feeds.) One step at a time, though.

As is inevitable when not doing a three-step switch between two items, I munged something along the way. In this case, the monolog stylesheet. So the site's design is raw old-skool vintage 1993-era HTML right now, till I come up with something new.

orkut is still pointless but at least now the friends you see on your home page are random intead of nine princes in amber.

now i'm paring down my communities, most of them have little or no action or real point at all:

it's kind of like a patchwork quilt or the ersatz coat of arms the confirmation workbook from my progressive Catholic school encouraged me to invent to symbolize the important milestones or themes of my life (as of age eleven, I guess).

Freaky software malfunctions are currently making it nearly impossible for me to reply to email in the normal way, so if you need to hear back from me soonly, try calling me. If you don't have my number or don't know anyone who does, then that's probably just as well.

There's a weird dislocating feeling, having my ordinary email-reply method broken. It's like a phantom limb, but it's also a release for tense brain muscles that have been poised for incoming mail for about 11 years straight without much relaxation. I've been warming to the phone lately, and am finding that face-to-face still takes the cake, but the competition for that time can be pretty fierce.

I am receiving email, so don't worry about me not getting your messages. Other ways to reach me include posting to your blog (and pinging me so I know to look), contacting me via orkut, or looking for me in the chat-o-sphere. I usually check into Yahoo! Messenger and #joiito at least once a day.

Need an invitation to orkut? Let me know and I'll send you one.

Once consequence of my "damn the torpedoes" approach to web presence is blundering ahead and trying stuff without knowing what the final shape will need to be. I hope to learn from the consequences and if my tools make the work malleable enough and I pay attention, things will keep getting closer to what I would dream of if I didn't have insomnia.

So, I am about to do a little renaming among my personal sites. At various time I've kept my personal journal (stuff about my life, stuff I only expect people I know to find interesting, but stuff nonetheless that I am willing to have anyone know about me) under various names: Breathing Room, Still Breathing, Shallow Breathing, bodega, x-ism, and most recently X-POLLEN. More recently still I rededicated xianlandia.com to be a multhithreaded view of my various bloggish writing (anything I'm managing on my own server, with links to stuff hosted elsewhere).

But originally X-POLLEN wasn't supposed to be a journal blog. It was one of the names I toyed with for my e-publishing presence, and in fact my Movable Type content-management installation run from that domain. It just makes more sense to me that the more whimsical, less semioticky xianlandia (pronounced the way Latino DJs say "discolandia" - "ehhh-see-own-lon-deeyaaa!) should be the name for my drivellous personal blog, and let x-pollen go back to being grand central station for stuff i'm doing and connections I'm making. So be it and so it will be.

For the six readers of my various blogs, this may be momentarily confusing. people looking for monolog may find my personal journal there instead, and not notice the absence of scintillating political analysis, blog gossip, and anemic arts news. People used to reading my personal blog will find at that address or in that RSS feed the whole panoply of stuff I write about ("who knew Christian was an anarcho-syndicalist entrepreneur?") and not notice the large sign i'm sure to add to my templates saying "looking for my journal? it's now at xianlandia" at x-pollen and "looking for my full feed? it's now at x-pollen.com" over at xianlandia).

There may be a few bumps in the road, but now, all six of you, you can't say I haven't warned you when it starts happening.