The Republic of T.

You may have noticed some funny looking posts that consist of links to other blog posts. Allow me to explain.

I’ve been experimenting with some way of posting regular digests of interesting blog posts I’ve come across, in a way that’s as automated as possible, involves very few extra steps, and doesn’t require any actual writing on my part. My first attempt was to set up a del.icio.us account, post to that, and use its “daily blog post” function. But I didn’t like that I had to switch accounts from my regular del.icio.us account, and that I couldn’t change the title of the post, etc.

So I did some searching, and the closest thing I found was a Wordpress plugin called “Postalicious.” It’s not the newest, but it works with the current version of Wordpress, and it seems to do the trick. All I have to do is “share” posts in Google Reader, and “Postalicious” checks the feed on an hourly basis, and then posts the next five new links. I need to tweak the settings a bit — change the title of the post, and which content gets included — but it’s a solution for now. (It’s not perfect, I know. in some cases the link is to the RSS feed, instead of the post itself, but I haven’t found a fix that fits the aforementioned criteria.)

So, I guess I’m an aggregator now.

Anyway, the holiday is fast approaching, and I figure people have better things to do than read blog posts. So, I’m giving it a rest until Monday.

Unless I read something interesting. Then you might see more digest posts.

Happy 4th. Be safe.

Well, it’s out there. Firefox 3 is ready and waiting for me to download and install it.

In just five hours, the new version of the Firefox Web browser had as many downloads as its predecessor got during its entire first day, the software’s developers say.

Firefox 3 reached 1.6 million downloads by early evening Tuesday to match Firefox 2’s first-day downloads.

In the opening hours, Firefox’s Web site was distributing nearly 9,000 copies of the free software every minute.

Downloads continued Wednesday as Firefox supporters sought to set a world record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period.

The category is new, and Guinness World Records must certify it, a process that could take a week or longer.

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Image details: Apple Introduces New iPhone At Worldwide Developers Conference served by picapp.com

I admit it. I’ve been coveting the iPhone for a while now. I can’t help it. I stop and stare longing every time I see one. I was crushed when I discovered that if I’d still been at my old job in December, I’d have one by now.

But I’ve held off getting one. When it comes to many things tech-related, I’m an early adopter. Too a point.

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No, I don’t mean that kind of lap dance. It’s something else that I refer to as a “lap dance.”

When it comes to work and blogging, I rely heavily on my MacBook. I use it every day and take it pretty much everywhere I go. I start the day with it, getting a jump on the day’s work. I open it up once I’m on the Metro (if I can find a seat) and either continue working, work on a blog post, or catch up on reading stuff I’ve marked to read offline. During the day, at work, I use it about as much as I use the PC at my desk. And in the evening, after the kids go to bed, I open it up to catch up on more reading, do some writing, or get the jump on tomorrow’s work.

This makes for some discomfort. Partly from an overheated lap, and partly from not really having a laptop work station that’s ergonomically correct. Thus starts the “lap dance.” It usually starts with me sitting at my desk. Heat or discomfort causes me to shift from one position to another, until I decide to stretch out on the floor in the family room. Again, not terribly comfortable. So I move to the couch. Again, the lap warms up. Plus, the level of the laptop isn’t quite right. So I’m back to the desk.

This is what I call the “lap dance.” And I’ve been trying to make it stop.

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Ugh. It’s late, and I’m only just now getting around to catching up on my blog reading? What happened to the times when I’d check in at least once a day? Oh yeah. Right. I’m reading stuff going back to May 6th, sitting in my reader. (At that point I just mark everything read.)

These days, I do most of my blog reading on the train, which means I do it offline. Google Reader is still my reader of choice, and thanks to Google Gears I can catch up on things in offline mode. But that’s still kind of limiting. I’d been looking, lately for a desktop reader that synched with Google Reader. Enter ReadAir.

It’s powered by Adobe Air, and it’s not a bad little app. It’s still in development, so it doesn’t have all the functions of Google Reader, but it’s worth keeping an eye on if you’re looking for the Google Reader experience in a desktop app.

[Via Lifehacker.]

I tried to do it last year, and just couldn’t. Now Shutdown Day is upon us again.

Shutdown Day is a Global Internet Experiment whose purpose is to get people to think about how their lives have changed with the increasing use of the home computer, and whether or not any good things are being lost because of this.

The idea of Shutdown Day project is simple - just shutdown your computer for one whole day of the year and involve yourself in some other activities: outdoors, nature, sports, fun stuff with friends and family - whatever, just to remind yourself that there still exists a world outside your monitor screen.

Michael Taylor, the original partner in the idea of Shutdown Day, says

“I certainly could not and would not want to live without my computer. However, I am often drawn into spending hours chatting on MSN, simply because my friends are online instead of socialising face to face. I am often too busy to cook a proper dinner, because I want to see the latest news on digg.com or the latest YouTube video. I know parents who are so addicted to the computer that they spend little time with their children, and I also know children who do not spend time with their parents because they are always using the computer. We are not preaching to anyone to turn off their computers. We are just suggesting that people might like to take part in this experiment, and see what happens.”

Well.

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It’s been a while since I asked this question, but it seems like as good a time as any, since my own answer has changed since the last time.

Are you a blogger? If so, how do you do it? What tools do you use to read and keep track of blogs? What tools do you use to create and post content to your blog?

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By way of updating the previous post, I imagine my MacBook’s hard drive ended up somewhere like this around 1:45 p.m. fortunately, I’ve been using Mozy to back-up the stuff that’s absolutely essential. So, I haven’t lost anything that’s absolutely irreplaceable.

Fortunately, when I bought this one I got the extended care plan, which I almost never do. But for a purchase like this, especially for something I’m going to use pretty heavily, It’s worth it. The guy at the Clarendon Apple store said they could replace the hard drive at no charge, because of that. Unfortunately, they had to order the hard drive, which means the computer should be ready by Monday.

Hopefully I can hold out until then.

It looks like I will be taking an involuntary break from blogging.

This is what greeted me yesterday evening. I’d just left a meeting, where I’d been using my MacBook (just bought in September after the old one died) with no problems. I take it with me to work because, honestly, I prefer it. I guess I’ve gotten used to working on a Mac, and it just seems like there are a lot more great apps out there for Macs.

One minute, I was using NetNewsWire, and my computer completely froze. So, I held down the power button, restarted, and got the sign you see above.

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Back to blogging meta, I guess. I don’t know what’s going on up there at the pinnacle of blogging. From where I sit, it’s impossible to see beyond the clouds to the peak. But something’s going on. First there was blog related stress and heart attacks at GigaOm. Now the New York Times is again covering the travails of top tier bloggers, this time with an article suggesting that Gawker may have “jumped the shark.”

“THE ideal Gawker item,” Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, wrote in an instant message last month to a prospective hire, “is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

“And it’s 100 words long.

“200 max.

“Any good idea can be expressed at that length.”

A few weeks later on Gawker.com, the news-media gossip Web site that is the flagship of Mr. Denton’s online publishing empire, he spent 339 words explaining changes at the site, including his decision to take over as managing editor after three senior bloggers had quit, and the hiring of Richard Morgan to cover television.

One day later, on Jan. 3, Mr. Morgan also quit. In an interview, he said that Mr. Denton, in his fixation with attracting new readers, was letting the site degenerate.

The next day a new Gawker blogger assigned to cover pop culture posted 406 words summarizing some of the most popular scatological sex videos on the Web, with links.

Within minutes, some longtime readers were posting comments asking, in a reference to the cliché that has come to mean something or someone has lost touch with its roots and has no more cultural relevance, whether Gawker had jumped the shark.

100 words? Well, that just one more reason I’ll never write for Gawker. But if you read beyond the first 200 words the article gets really interesting when it suggests that Gawker slipped into “Perez Hilton mode” and thus began it’s decline.

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When we take the kid to see Santa tomorrow, I probably won’t sit on his knee, but I might ask him for one of these. I know I wanted a Sony Reader last year, but my “to read” pile is reaching from the floor to the bottom of the window sill, and it’s now 2 stacks deep. I may need the Kindle just to keep the hubby from wanting to turn my “to read” pile into kindling.

I knew it. So, last week I griped about the whole working-at-home-vs.-working-around-people thing. And during my travels in search of wireless internet access and the proximity of other people, I’d started to develop a sneaking suspicion that — with more and more people working from locations other than an office — some institutions that offer the lure of wifi also wield a stick to make sure the “road warriors” among us don’t adopt their space as a semi-permanent office space.

Maybe I’m being paranoid. I mean, there are the obvious, reasonable measures that most places take, like logging you off their wifi after you’ve been there a certain amount of time (that’s if it’s free wifi). I can understand wanting to open up a table for a new paying customer when I finished my latte/frappucino/chai tea a couple of hours ago. But I swear there are some more subtle strategies employed. Like the lack of electrical outlets. And electrical outlet is an invitation for someone like me to sit and stay a while, after all. And if there is an outlet available, more than half the time the seat or table nearest it is occupied by someone who’s not using the outlet.

That’s not a problem. After all, people can sit where they want. But I swear there have been times when I’ve seen people sit by the outlets all day. They’re there when I make my first pass, and they’re still there if I pass by a few hours later. I’d swear that the store owners are paying people to sit those outlets, but I know if doesn’t make much sense. But they are taking out the comfy chairs.

Technorati Tags: books, business, culture, current events, life, work, web

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I haven’t shared this bit of news on the blog yet, but in the past month I’ve made a transition that I’d been told was the next logical step in my career, but that I’d been resisting for almost a year. I’ve become an independent consultant. That is, I’m self-employed. Aside from farming out myself as a freelance writer, I’m primarily working as a “blogging & social media consultant”; a title I invented and started toying with around the same time.

One of the reasons I took the plunge is because Parker is getting closer to school-age, and eventually he’ll have a sibling who will also go to school. As I’ve been paying attention to the kinds of trouble some young people get themselves into, looking back on my own past, and wondering what kept me out of trouble. I think it made a huge difference that I never came home to an empty house. When I opened the door upon coming home from school, there was almost always someone there. In my case, my mom, who didn’t work outside the home. I’d been thinking about how to structure work so that I can be there most of the time when our kids get home from school. Well, I figured out how.

So far, so good. A number of interesting opportunities have already come my way (but not so many that I’m turning some away, yet) , and it helps that my former employer is one of my first clients and has been hugely helpful in sending other opportunities my way. Things look good and likely to get better. And I’ve enjoyed the independence of begin able to work at home or anywhere else that has wi-fi web access. But there’s just one drawback that’s been bugging me lately.

Technorati Tags: current events, life, work, technology, web

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