At first, I was thinking to just scrap the ol’ blog, but then I figured that I might give it one last try. But instead of duplicating what’s already happening on the social networking sites, I am simplifying philomyth.us back down to the basics of blogging. I still haven’t decided what I’ll be posting, but I am leaning towards more long-form open-to-the-public articles that need a home.

Design-wise, I went with Yoko, an HTML5 theme which is more adaptable to different screen presentations (monitor, mobile or tablet). I got rid of most of the extra social widgets. But I included some social links in case people wanted to use them.

Over this period of time, WordPress has also been updated to version 3.3 with greater usability on the front and back-end.

Here’s hoping that this cleaned up direction will lead to some more actual blogging in the year to come.

After complaining for over a year about IX Web Hosting, I finally got off my butt and did something about it. Over the course of a couple of months, I have consolidated most of my domains over to GoDaddy and have transferred all my blogs over to DreamHost. I am hoping that this serves as a more reliable and stable setup than IX, which had constant security and stability problems.

Of course, all these changes are in the background, so if it worked (unlike last time), you guys shouldn’t notice anything except hopefully faster load times and perhaps less downtime.

Here’s a list of reminder notes for the next time:

• One-click Installs are cool, except when they forget to tell you that they use customized database prefixes which don’t match previously backed-up database pointers.
• Mirrored domain pointers and temporary database hostnames are helpful in transition but have to remember to clean them up and not leave any broken “links” once you go live.
• Webshell on IX turned out to be a blessing, saved time on backing up the complete blog directories.
• Apps used: Filezilla for FTP and PSPad for code editing.

Time for another design update for the ol’ blog. It’s been almost 2 years since the last makeover, which along with less frequent blog posts is a likely result of increased facebook / twitter usage.

WordPress, the back-end to this site, has made some significant progress and is now at version 2.8.x. The developers and community have done a great job making it more user-friendly in posting, managing and maintaining. Version updates are now one-click as well as plugin installs and updates. No more fiddling around with zip files and FTP.

For this latest re-design, I went with a theme called Carrington that I’ve been keeping an eye on and wanting to learn more about. It is developed as a complete CMS theme framework, which is way beyond what I need, but interesting to look into (at least for me).

The layout of the front page is pretty similar to the previous version. The biggest change is moving the moblog pics to the top bar. I have also jazzed up the Archives page to make it more visual.

There are more changes to the secondary pages due to the new theme, such as Tag, Category and Date Archive pages, which can be accessed in the sidebar. And partly with the new theme, I have made some of the page elements context sensitive depending on what type of pages you are on. For example, when you are on a post page, you can see a list of Related Posts in the sidebar, along with the clutter of front page badges hidden.

So far, this re-design looks to be pretty functional and stable. As always, if you see something that isn’t working, please let me know.

P.S. I meant to publish this post last week, but I got distracted trying to do some integration of posts and comments with Facebook, but the coding is just not quite there yet as a workable solution.

As in everything that the internet touches, both good and bad, it makes the “worlds colliding”  feeling accelerate quickly into the unmanageable. I think that whatever we put on the internet is inherently public, but with so much content out there it used to be virtually trivial. However, with the increasing ubiquity of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, connecting web content to real life identities has become a bit too obvious.

Facebook does a decent job of controlling the visibility of personal content. But twitter by design does not. So in an effort to establish my social networking boundaries, I have made the first step of protecting my twitter updates. This has the primary effect of privatizing my tweets (through which I have started to announce different blog posts) so that I am not publicly visible on twitter, and thus shutting it down as a public conduit to my web content.

However, Facebook is not off the hook. After having lived on Facebook for a couple of years now, I am reviewing how I want to use it in managing my personal connections. I am moving towards being more conservative with the people that I connect with through Facebook. I also like the idea of keeping work connections on a separate site like LinkedIn, but it does take extra effort, which may be worthwhile once it is all setup.

This issue of social networking boundaries is an evolving one, and more than likely, this post will be irrelevant or at least outdated in the very near future. But, I just wanted to get my thoughts down so that it gets me to act on them, and gives me the opportunity to review them down the line.

P.S. In a further blurring of boundaries, I tried to integrate the comments on this blog with Facebook, but haven’t been able to get it to work, which may or not be a good thing.

In the course of updating some of the plugins for this site, I broke my original e-mail subscription program, so I decided to switch over to FeedBurner at the suggestion of fanster.

For those of you that were subscribed before, you will need to do so again in the form below or at the bottom of the sidebar. If you would like to receive e-mail notifications of new posts, you can do the same. After you submit your e-mail address, Feedburner will send you a confirmation message via e-mail with a link to activate your subscription.

For those of you that are reading via RSS, you can subscribe through the RSS button in the address bar or with the feed links below. I have broken out the different feeds from this site so that you can subscribe only to the ones that you want to read. Here are the descriptions of the different feeds:

• Posts: any new content that I write about here
• Comments: on the different posts on this site
• Moblog: snapshots that I take throughout the day
• del.icio.us/pls: sites that I bookmark
• CoComments: comments that I make on other sites
• Yelps: my reviews of restaurants and stores that I have tried
• GPS Tracks: bookmarks of my bike rides, off-road and on
• GoodReads: my book reviews
• Twitter: my twitter posts
• Flixster: my movie reviews
• Ctrl+A: consolidation of all the above content into a single feed

I realized that those of you reading via e-mail may not be getting the other feeds, even though all of the content from the feeds are also in the site’s sidebar. If you guys would like to get it all via e-mail, I could change the e-mail subscription to include all the other content as well. Just let me know.

I can’t even remember when I first started to save and preserve my internet bookmarks from version to version, computer to computer, and even in the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox (I’m sure it didn’t go all the way back to my Netscape browsing days). Well, last week, I finally went through my old bookmarks that have been stagnating in my Firefox browser ignored and unused.

I used to spend a lot of time organizing and maintaining them, but in the last few years, I’ve slowly moved away from using them, having found more effective solutions online. Hence the title of this post, which is in reference to an increasingly popular concept, cloud computing. This is the notion that instead of storing information, in this example bookmarks, locally on my computer, I save them on the web, or “in the clouds”.

Here’s a list of web applications that I use in place of my old bookmarks folders and some descriptions of how I use them:

• del.icio.us: any interesting sites that I want to ‘bookmark’ go into this account, which I also publish as an RSS feed.
• Bloglines: RSS feed reader to keep up with news items published from websites that I follow.
• Google Maps: geographical tagging of locations which I frequent or would like to check out.
• Google Docs: organized notes of topics that I have researched online
• Google Web History: using the Google Toolbar I have an online accessible record of my browsing history which is also searchable in case I want to find a site that I visited before but forgot to record.
• Remember the Milk: task list of things to do, websites to visit, topics to research, etc.
• diigo: in conjunction with a Firefox add-on, I can annotate and highlight web documents.
• Amazon Wishlist: for products that I am interested in or want to keep track of.
• Review sites: keep track of those items which I have tried or would like to try.
  • Yelp: restaurants and stores
  • Flixster: movies
  • Goodreads: books

By definition, these applications are accessible from any computer or device that can go online. But that is also one of their downsides, since for the most part they cannot be accessed offline. That is until offline solutions like Google Gears are more widely implemented.

Another interesting thing that I noticed as I was putting together this post was that these web applications are more than just a repository for what I used to use as ‘bookmarks’. They provide a richer experience and collection of all the things that I do both online AND offline. I guess I should re-word the title, but ‘Stuff in the Clouds’ just didn’t sound right.

It’s been nearly five months since I last made any significant programming and design changes to philomyth.us. As before, there were some security and programming upgrades for the underlying wordpress site software. And also, since toying with Facebook, I found some features that I could share across platforms.

I also took the opportunity to overhaul the theme design since I never could get the previous theme to work properly in Internet Explorer [get firefox] and the previous theme was also somewhat cumbersome so that I couldn’t easily make changes without having to re-learn the entire setup. I ended up choosing a theme called Cleaker 2.1, which after some customizations and modifications, I am very happy with.

Lastly, I updated the plugins (or add-ons), “out with the old in with the new”. Here’s a list of the plugins that I am running currently:

• A Different Monthly Archive Script: posting calendar
• Akismet: comment spam
• Brian’s Latest Comments: comment listing
• flickrRSS: flickr photostream
• Samsarin PHP Widget: php coded widgets
• SparkStats: posting graph
• SRG Clean Archives: post archives
• Subscribe2: email subscriptions
• Subscribe To Comments: comment notification
• Time Zone: daylight savings time adjustment
• Ultimate Tag Warrior: post tags
• Wordbook: facebook crossposting
• WordPress.com Stats: site traffic
• WordPress Database Backup: automatic backups
• WordPress PDA: mobile-friendly site
• WP AJAX Edit Comments: comment editing

As I mentioned earlier, I replaced a couple of plugins with ones that could be shared with Facebook:

• Now Reading -> GoodReads
• Movie Ratings -> Flixster

With any major site revisions, if you see anything that isn’t working quite right, please let me know in the comments.

I have been wanting to put down my normal photo / video sharing workflow so that I can review from time to time and see if there might be ways to improve the process. Unfortunately, I’ve been so behind in posting our family pictures since the summer that I was a bit embarrassed to do so. Anyways, I’m all caught up now to the day, so here we go:

1. Upload from camera
   this has become more convenient with my new Thinkpad since it has a built-in SD card reader .
2. Process and organize pictures and videos
   mostly just rotating and weeding out any bad pictures, now that there is no cost to taking a lot of pictures except of course for the time it takes to view and delete them.
3. Upload to Flickr and organize into sets
   ever since I’ve been hosting pictures on flickr, they’ve only been improving their service. The new web-based uploader is even easier to use and more stable. I just need to be less lazy in adding descriptions and tags to every picture. Too bad geotagging is still so manual.
4. Process videos in Windows Movie Maker
   before uploading, I cleanup the videos and stitch them together to get the right lengths and then save them as windows media video files, which shrinks them down a bit.
5. Upload to Vimeo
   they have also improved their uploading process, but I’m a little annoyed with some of the security settings that can’t be set as default. Similar to flickr with pictures, I should be making better use of the descriptions and tags.
6. Prepare post image using Picnik
   using an online photo editor, especially one that works as well as Picnik, simplifies the process without having to deal with an offline editor, and Picnik can save the modified pictures straight back to flickr, which eliminates a few steps.
7. Create and publish post on ER-Fans
   using WordPress to organize our family pictures has really worked well, because I can aggregate pictures and videos into a combined post for each event or set. Once the posts are published, wordpress will notify any email subscribers as well as updating the RSS feed to keep everyone up to date.

Well, I’ve gone and done it, I’ve been sucked into the dark-side of social networking.

It all started with one or two Facebook invites from different friends. I got a little curious and took a look at what it was all about, but there wasn’t much to see without setting up my own account, which I was avoiding doing at the time. Then a couple of weeks ago, I started getting quite a few invites from different groups of friends, and what really tipped the scale was when Rebecca sent me an invite. I couldn’t really ignore an invite from my own wife .

So I did it, I setup my own Facebook Profile with the justification that this is essentially a glorified contact web application with some social aspects built-in. Turns out there are some well-developed mini applications within Facebook which add some cool features to this whole idea, and even allow integration with some other web applications like Flickr, Del.icio.us and goodreads. I even found a wordpress plugin called Wordbook which will allow me to cross-post from philomyth.us to my Facebook profile.

I’m still playing around with the different functionality and integration, so we’ll see if this turns out to be just a fad or whether it becomes a legitimate web tool that adds value to my daily routine.

I have been wanting to setup a simple process to take pictures from my pda-phone and have them posted to my site (ie “moblogging“). When I saw the new web service Tumblr, I was inspired to act on it. After a couple weeks of testing, I decided that tumblr wasn’t quite what I was looking for. You can still see the test site here: pls.tumblr.com. But at least it got me started.

I now have my moblog module setup where it is working pretty seamlessly from my phone to my flickr account and to the front page of this site (in the upper right-hand corner). Granted the pictures from my phone aren’t going to be very good quality (camera phones still have a ways to go), but I guess that’s not the point. The point is to have a simple way to keep a photographic log throughout the day.