The plugin I use for updating the blog with my twitter updates is currently broken due to an issue at Twitter. If you need to follow my twitters updates, be sure to view my main Twitter site.
Information about Twitter Tools not working right now.
2 comments September 1st, 2007
Blogging. Back in the early years it was fresh, cool, and exciting. Being able to tell your friends and family, even the world, what you were doing at a moments notice was great. I don’t know about you, but I feel as though blogging has lost it’s excitement, it’s luster to now other methods of real-time communication.
Twitter. Simple and fast. I love being able to post a quick message and have it show up in real-time as I’m doing something in real-time. I expect to leverage this quite a bit while we’re in Hawai’i. Twitter didn’t exist last time we were in the great island state. I made close to daily blog posts about each days events and activities. I uploaded pictures and videos. It was very time consuming to spend upwards of an hour a day blogging all this information. Twitter will allow me to send quick messages as we’re doing or moving to a new activity. In real-time I can say we’re on a boat, etc, etc. At the end of the day, I can upload quick videos or pictures minus the lengthy post.
Facebook. This one I haven’t quite got my head around yet. I joined today to see what all the hub bub is about. What exactly is Facebook? A blog? A twitterish real-time communication tool? A photo sharing site? A community? I believe it tries to be all of these things but I’m not quite sure yet when that’s helpful. This blog has all of those features plus I can add or integrate other ones easily. Facebook seemed very busy, lots of things to click and add text to. I’m not even quite sure yet how to post a simple message a la Twitter.
Flickr. I’ve been a big user of Flickr for quite sometime now. I use to use Gallery on my own server before I realized that I was mostly sharing my pictures with only a handful of people. With Flickr I can share my photos with a large community and then my family photos with just my family. The ability to post pictures while on the go is very important to me and Flickr provides a great interface for doing so. I’ve thought about moving back to Gallery several times but for daily photos and sharing Flickr is the way to go.
YouTube. I’m not a big YouTube user at all. I’ve posted two videos to YouTube and watched about 100 total videos in two years. I see it more as a community of people trying to out do each other than one that is about sharing experiences. I know there is a video blog community within YouTube and also quite a few FAQ type videos, which are what I’ve watched most. Overall though, I see a lot of competition towards users and posting the next “big thing” on YouTube. The thing is, I need a video sharing site. I’m becoming more and more interested in shooting short videos about my life and things I experience yet I don’t have a good place to publish them yet. I’ve been referred to PhanFare but I’m not sure I want to pay for a photo sharing site which does video since I’m an active member of Flickr.
Viddler. Learned about this site today in fact. After signing up it appears to have some promise. Not only can I post videos but it will link my Twitter and Flickr accounts on my profile page which is a nice integration touch. Another cool feature is it will post a tweet when I post a new video, just like Wordpress will post a new tweet when I post a blog entry. Viddler will also post a blog entry for me when I post a new video. These are the types of features I need. I don’t need to feel that joining an online community forces me into a cave. It’s needs to integrate with existing and upcoming tools.
Community Overload. I’ve discussed seven community based tools that I’m either actively involved with or thinking about using in the near future. This is completely ridiculous in my opinion. When blogging was at it’s peak, that was all you needed to stay connected. Nowadays blogging is third or fourth, perhaps even more reduced on the list of community based tools. So what is a fairly internet savvy guy suppose to do? I’m leaning towards continuing the path of blogging occasionally, twittering actively, and continuing to user Flickr for photo sharing. I really need a video solution though so I’m open to any suggestions (Although I think I may have found Viddler to be that solution).
Add comment August 17th, 2007
I’ve seemed to have lost the blog bug and now I’m bogged down whenever I try to write something. It’s not like I’ve lost touch with the “inkernet” or anything, I actually post photos to flickr quite often and I’m plugged into the internet everyday for work.
I use to write to about a variety of different things here because it was new and exciting stuff to me. Ever since we moved away from the “big city”, life has slowed down for us and I’m not as active in the new and exciting technology scene now days.
Life here in the Northwest has been a lot different for me since we started this journey 10 months ago. I no longer have to commute to my job; I walk down the hall about 50 feet to my office in my new home. I get to see my wife and kids a lot more now, being able to see them right after work stops is a great perk as well. The kids can play outside without fear of being run over by speeding cars. We have a dog. We have a backyard. It’s colder here, much colder. And yes, it’s wet a lot.
Much of this leads to me not having the drive to post on the blog frequently. I’m too busy after to work with the family or playing basketball at the local gym which is less than a mile from our house. Blogging for me use to be about cool technology and new games. I think now I’m going to focus more on my photography, family life, and hopefully more leisure travel. I hope that I’ll be able to post more frequently and not feel as though I have to write about tech or new/exciting things.
2 comments December 29th, 2006
I’m right here, of course. Ok, ok; I’ve been playing obsessive amounts of Hello Kitty for Gamecube…
Not buying it huh? Yeah, I’d hope not. The World of Azeroth has once again grasped my neck and choked me down the rabbit hole. It’s actually been a lot of fun lately. More fun than I’ve had in a long time playing WoW honestly. Playing with old friends, visiting new dungeons and then some general mayhem in Battlegrounds. Last night in Warsong Gulch was extremely fun, playing on my Horde Hunter we didn’t lose a single game all night. ^.^
So, I went from walking away from the game to now being completely submersed again. These games are addicting, no doubt about it. But at least it’s fun, yes? Oh and a few people are asking about my next podcast. I almost forgot how to do one and I haven’t listened to one in over a month. Has anyone seen the wagon?
5 comments September 13th, 2005
Gah, I really hosed that one. For some reason, I have no idea why, but my podcast feed was borked and Feedburner didn’t tell me about it until today. So, erm, yeah. The RSS feed link is still valid but if you weren’t getting any data before you should be now. Not sure what changed… because I swear it worked before. Honest.
3 comments August 3rd, 2005
If you haven’t already noticed by now, I’ve redesigned Snapturtle recently using the latest version of Wordpress and the impressive Blix 0.9.1 theme.
While researching the availability of Technorati plugins, during which I found the Technorati Tags Plugin, Seyd pointed me to some more excellent plugins WP Tiger Administration, FancyTooltips, and Twilight: AutoSave. I’m very happy with the results so far. The design isn’t too over the top yet a little more colorful than my previous default theme. I’ve been working on some custom CSS changes to the theme, nothing major, just mostly widths and borders.
I’m still working through all the photos from our 6-week vacation, with over 2,000 photos I have a very long way to go. So until I finish, the photo gallery will just contain the randomness album unless you get the access password from me. Contact me directly for the password. If I know you, the password is yours. If I don’t know you, tell me a little bit about yourself and why you’d like to view my family photos. If you don’t hear back from me within a week or so I probably didn’t want you viewing my photos. Nothing personal, I just consider photos of my family more private.
4 comments July 20th, 2005
Gah fine. Instead of playing “Brothers in Arms”:http://www.brothersinarmsgame.com/ on my new fucking Xbox (don’t ask) or watching “must see t.v.” with my wife, I sat here and figured out how to fix all my borked links.
I’d been looking through numerous blogs and etcetera for the last couple of days but nothing was working correctly. I finally found “someone out in the blog-o-sphere”:http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/wordpress/2004/05/17/redirects-and-rewrites/ that had the same problem last year. Thank you miss wearer of yellow shirts, the links are now unborked.
I’m sure I didn’t fix them all nor did I really intend to right now. I figured I caught the 80-20 rule which is good enough for now. Still working on linking up the photo gallery (permissions will be required), photo blog, and whatever else I had that was lame.
Yeah, so I’m back in the saddle. Or somewhat closer than say 3 months ago. Life is an interesting journey and I must admit that I missed some of the ride last year. Stupid game.
2 comments March 7th, 2005
The first step for me to start blogging again was to rid myself of “Moveable Type”:http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/. As you may have noticed, I’ve started that process and I’m now using the excellent “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org system, thanks to the recent 1.5 version upgrade.
Time will tell if this really is a good product for me. I’m still very worried about those bastard comment spammers. With that in mind, you must now register in order to post comments. Sorry about that, I really tried to avoid any type of registration system but it really has come to that. The old blog was getting upwards of 100 comment spams a day hence why “I turned off comments”:/wp/archives/2005/01/11/comments-disabled/ in January.
There will be broken links related to this move. I’ve working on getting a script of some sort to help reduce them amount of errors, but frankly, I don’t care enough to spend a lot of time on it. It took me long enough to get this new blog going, so I’m stopping for the night. Slowly but surely I’ll start moving the other blogs over to WordPress but I wanted to get the main site working as it’s been a long time coming.
Man, I have to admit, this really is a nice system. Very clean and well thought out. Tasty goodness and it feels good to be back.
March 4th, 2005
“Are you there?”
“…”
“Are you there?!”
“…”
“Stop playing that damn game and post something already!”
“… (muffled) I’m no longer playing that damn game.”
“Wha? What?!?”
“(clears throat) I’ll be back.”
March 3rd, 2005
Due to a massive influx in comment spam recently I’ve disabled all comments for the time being. Sorry but I’m deleting more than 100 per day and it’s getting to be highly annoying. Blame the prick comment spammers. Bastards.
January 11th, 2005
Twitter