GlitchNYC.com

Aaaaaand, We're Back.

Well, this little server certainly isn't immune to some downtime here and there, and last week it was down for a few days. The beauty is that google felt so bad about my server being down that they decided to take their's down in a show of solidarity. If that's not nice, I don't know what is.

11:00 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

The Difference Between Writing and Blogging

I've been blogging in this format for almost a year now, sticking to punditry and rants and backing off the personal stuff, for one main reason: I've always wanted to be a writer.

Not a writer just in the sense that I write this blog, but a writer in the sense that I weave stories, fictional or not, that people are interested in. In the world of nonfiction, this means finding the angle - finding the people behind the story or the undercurrent that led to the events you're reporting on. In the nonfictional world, it means telling a tale in a way that keeps the reader wanting more while painting your imaginary world for them in vivid imagery..

The problem with blogging is that I'm not doing this full time, and even saying that is an understatement. I'm doing it in stolen moments in the doctors office, on trains.

If I were a full time writer, I would have taken that Merck/Singular thread and followed it out, called people involved, gotten interviews and found out what it was really like to work on that project, what challenges they've faced.

Instead, it's hurriedly typed into the perfect little portable palm/keyboard pair I've gotten for myself, and slapped on the blog with barely enough time to run aspell -c on it.

At times, I've considered slowing down the pace of my blogs and really working on them like stories, releasing one or two well written pieces a month. The prospect of writing articles that are more fleshed out and interesting to read is appealing, but I'd have to give up the story-nugget/link format and the nice readership growth curve I've been nurturing with timely articles.

I'm interested to hear other blogger's takes on this. Which is better, lots of really fresh content bits, or a few well written pieces here and there?

3:21 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 1 writebacks |

Incoming From Google! Angry Water Slide Owners.

Over the last week, my logs have shown an influx of hundreds of people from google.com researching the Six Flags Banzai Falls Water Slide and coming across my pithy article. It appears the oversized inflatable Slip N' Slide is showing signs of suckage, and random net-dwellers are flocking here to see what I had to say about it.

Poster Lisa Cox writes:

I have had to replace the Banzai waterslide twice now. The 1st time was for a minor hole. The 2nd was a dangerous blowout that my 9 yr. old had when she went down the slide and hit the bottom of the slide. The whole bottom blew out and deflated the slide while my 4 yr. old was waiting at the top! This slide needs to be 3-4 ft. longer at the bottom and needs to be put together a little better than a string of single line stictches. The force that you come down the slide with can only withstand so much! Now I have very upset children and no slide!

Not quite the "older kids with pointy sticks" I predicted, but it appears that this overpriced fun-nugget is causing quite a stir. Any other googlers have similar problems? Perhaps the slide is due for a recall.

12:52 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 4 writebacks |

Setting Up a Staging Site for Blosxom

I use the Blosxom blog-engine here at GlitchNYC both for its simplicity and its flexibilty.

The core system is super-simple: just put a file in a directory (say for example ~/blog/politics/) and it will show up on your front page. Eventually, it will get pushed down the page by newer articles, but is still accessible by topic (in the example above, the article was in the politics directory - that also becomes its category online). You can also access old articles by month or year, going back through the archives using the calendar plugin which you can see on my site.

In the wake of the recent Movable Type price hikes, I'm glad to be using an open source system, and I love being able to tweak the innards of blosxom myself.

Recently, I was griping about the fact that I will often post an article filled with typos, broken links, and missing images, simply because I can't see the article until I make it live. It turns out that Blosxom is so simple I only had to make a few minor changes to set up a little staging site.

See more ...

12:08 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

Double Posted

Arg - my site is syndicated on LiveJournal through a "feed" and gets picked up roughly once an our. This generally leaves me a window to throw a piece up, edit it, and have the edited, complete version be the one that gets aggregated.

Tonight, I got smited by the gods of fate, and my Mame piece went out to the Friends lists without pictures, with typos, and will now be double posted when the aggregator hits my site again. Grrr. I need to set up a "Staging" site where I test out articles before they go live.

10:11 pm | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 1 writebacks |

Pinging Technorati from Your Blosxom Blog

Technorati is quickly becoming one of the best ways to track what blogs are linking to eachother, which news items are being talked about the most, and who is linking to your blog.

Telling Technorati that you've updated your blog is fairly simple, and there's a multitude of ways to do it, from filling out a simple web form each time you update to using the XML-RPC API they provide to automatically "ping" the site.

This is already set up for users of LiveJournal and other popular blogging havens, but the "blosxom setup" section has been woefully empty since technorati came back online a few weeks ago. I finally decided it was time to "put up or shut up" and figured it out myself.

See more ...

1:52 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

Me != Cool.

So, I was getting all excited about my 908 unique visitors last month and the fact that blogging in general, my job, my life, etc, were all going well.

By the time I stopped talking with my old friend Jason, I felt like I had some serious catching up to do! Holy crap has this kid been busy.

Just since I've talked to him last, he's done 3 things that are on my "must do before I die" checklist:

• Perform at Carnegie Hall
• Get Published in a Serious Tech Mag (online)
• Get Slashdotted for yet another article

He's always had an awesome edge by maintaining his status as a great MS beta tester, and it's certainly paying off now! Kudos to him!

12:48 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

The Clever Little Secret of Blogging

Something just occured to me while I was in the bathroom, much in the way that the flux capacitor came to Doc Brown, although I was spared the head injury and was allowed by the fates to substitue a massive bowel movement instead.

Bathroom humor aside, many times, blogs seem counter-intuitive to the the best interests of the blogger. Sure, they're fun to read for friends and family, and can sometimes build communities around them, but in general, employers frown upon the practice (especially if done during work hours), and they can be very personal yet are very much out in the open.

This is especially true when vying for employment. I can't think of any blogger I know that would willingly give out the address of their online journal to their potential boss. There's just too much real life in them - they aren't exactly putting your best foot forward. Imagine a conservative, critical hiring manager reading your recent hotheaded rant about the future of AI or going off on why you can't get any. It seems that anyone who HAS the jobs isn't going to be too keen about learning that type of information about a potential hire.

This is where the twist comes in.

See more ...

10:53 pm | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 4 writebacks |

No More Stingy RSS!

I've just made a minor hack to the "Seemore" plugin I'm running to allow RSS feeds to be the full text of the article, rather than resorting to the "see more" link that the rest of my site uses.

"See more" is useful for keeping the index clean and letting casual browsers see the headlines, but for those reading via aggregators, having to click for the full text sorta defeats the purpose.

Let me know if my rambles are too long for your aggregators and/or friends pages, and I'll consider turning the seemore links back on.

2:19 pm | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

Since When Does LJ Syndicate?

Awesome - you can now add me as an LiveJournal friend:

Add glitchnyc.com to your friends list on LiveJournal.

Looks like they picked up my RSS feed somehow. Cool. Thanks to whomever did the grunt work!

3:53 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 3 writebacks |

Some Minor Changes

You may notice some minor changes around here as I finally start to do more than just use basic blosxom and a stock theme. In particular, check out the Friends and Linkage sections on the left. More to come...

12:00 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

The jump

Well, I'm finally making the jump off of free open diary. I'll probably convert all of my old entries there and place them here for posterity, but it's just driving me crazy that I don't have any control over my own blog.

See more ...

12:08 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |