RasterWeb!
Inspiration can come from the past. Something that inspired you more than 20 years ago can return to inspire you all over again. Music + Words. Those two things combined can be the most powerful thing in your life. And I’m thankful for that.
See Also Verbal Assault (Affected Me!)
Here’s a video from BarCampMadison, which took place August 28, 2010 in Madison, Wisconsin. The session was titled “Building Strong Communities for Hacker/Maker Spaces” and was presented by Bob Waldron.
Just a note on this video, the production is a bit poor, but I felt it was still worth sharing. I set up the camera, hit record, and ran in and out between sessions. I did the best I could to clean up the audio, but didn’t really edit the image quality at all.
This video is also available at blip.tv and Archive.org and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Vox is closing on September 30, 2010 (via closing.vox.com, great subdomain, btw!)
Vox launched in October, 2006 and is closing down less than 4 years later. Plenty of people have been blogging for 5 years or more, so really, 4 years is not a long time. There’s some information on moving your Vox blog to Posterous or WordPress.com. (I’d pick WordPress.com, they have a longer track record and I see them lasting longer than Posterous, and they also provide a path to export from WordPress.com to eventually host your own WordPress install. Truth be told though, Posterous is becoming a bit of a powerhouse, so who knows…)
This highlights something I’ve been an advocate of for quite a while, owning your content online, and owning your identity online.
By “owning” I’m referring more to owning the place where your content lives. There are prolific producers on the web nowadays who put everything into other people’s baskets. They post on Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, Blogger, Posterous, and all sorts of other sites… none owned by them. If you started a blog in 2006 on Vox and it grew to something huge, you’d now be in the boat with all the other Vox users looking for a new home.
Moving from one domain to another and maintaining your momentum, making sure people know you’ve moved, and are able to find you can be done, but it’s best done if you have control over the old domain, or at least if you can control the old posts, perhaps pointing people to the new home. When services shut down this may not be possible. I’m not sure yet how Vox will handle this…
I wish all the Vox users good luck in their search for a new home… don’t forget that your own blog on your own domain is always an option.
Adam Chernow has a blog on his own site, but tends to use Tumblr more… He also asked me what plugins I use.
chernowa @raster WP is what I have my blog on right now… http://www.chernow.org/blog. What plugins are you running to do everything? →
So I thought I’d give the rundown of the current plugins I’m using. Many of these were added fairly recently. As a bit of history, I started this blog in 1997, first using UserLand Frontier as the publishing tool, and later using a Perl-based system I developed, until about 2005 when I moved to WordPress. I used my own custom theme since then and just within the past few months got around to fixing a few issues that prevented a few plugins from working properly.
So… here’s the list:
I am by no means a WordPress expert (though I know a few!) and this is just the current snapshot of what plugins I’m using here. As I said, some have been added pretty recently, or I’m sort of “test driving” them for a while.
(I’d love a BarCamp session talking about WordPress, and it’s plugins, and overall best practices…)
I’ve come to realize that when I think about some tool I want to build, it’s typically driven by that “scratch your own itch” idea, where a developer does something because they want to solve their own problem. You’ll most often hear this idea attributed to open source software. Often my ideas come about when I think about who controls my data, or the software that I use. I tend to work towards maintaining my own freedom.
But there’s a whole other side… There are developers who develop something, and it’s not because a client hired them to, but because they think it’s a great idea, and sometimes they do follow the “scratch your own itch” idea, but they also think there’s a great money making opportunity worth exploring. Some developers within this realm are fine with creating something, and either selling it off, or letting it die if it “doesn’t work” or doesn’t become popular.
I’m not suggesting that one idea is better or worse than the other, it’s just an observation. I’m really interested to hear what others think…