look ma, i’m in the paper
June 12, 2008
Oh dear, with a picture and everything. And big thanks to Ed Vielmetti for being a good sport.
Now. Go sign up for Startup Weekend. a
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web, tech & gadgets
Oh dear, with a picture and everything. And big thanks to Ed Vielmetti for being a good sport.
Now. Go sign up for Startup Weekend. follow follow, follow block
April 14, 2008 musings on Twitter, spam, following and blocking
I like Twitter. The main two reasons I use it are keeping up with local people and getting interesting ideas and opinions from a wider circle of interesting people. Another reason I like it is that spam is kept to a minimum by virtue of the way the system is set up. Because you decide who to follow (ie. listen to), it's impossible for someone to send you unsolicited messages. So it's not very easy for spammers to get any traction.
That doesn't mean they won't try, though. The chief way spammers seem to be trying to get their message out is to follow a ton of people. When you follow someone, the system generates ...
new gallery feature in WordPress 2.5
March 30, 2008 When I saw the new image and media management built right into the new WordPress 2.5, I was very excited. It seems a lot easier, at least on the face of it. One problem, however, is that there's precious little documentation on how to use the new features. For example, it took me forever to figure out how to get the nice thumbnail prev-next navigation that Matt shows on his blog. So here's a quick tip for theme developers trying to use the new gallery feature:
You've got a new template you can use: image.php (yee ha!) The new gallery feature seems to set up 'sub-posts' for each of the images attached to a post ...
lijit
March 24, 2008
At SXSW, which seems like such a distant memory now, I had a wonderful rainy-day barbeque lunch with Barbara, Andrew Hyde and Micah Baldwin. Micah explained Lijit to us - it's a search engine tool which allows a reader to search across the content you create at various sites across the net, as well as to search sources you trust. I just installed the search wijit; give it a try. The first results you get will be for occurrences of your search term on this blog. If you click on the My Content tab, though, you'll get occurrences of the term across all my affiliated sites, like my del.icio.us links, ...
splurt
March 13, 2008
Sitting there in the SXSW panel, I don't even remember which one and it hardly matters anyway, I was overcome - and I do mean overcome, with attendant panicky feelings - that I can't stand the web. I mean, I hate the web. No, not the web per se, but websites. If I see one more horizontal navigation bar, I think I'm going to scream. Like, out loud. They all look the same. It's the same damn thing over and over and over again. I am so damn tired of it.
But there's a problem with railing against all that sameness. The web needs horizontal navigation bars and/or left/right side navigation. It's necessary for usability. Given the amount of stupidity I ...
The stars are bright
March 8, 2008
First day at SXSW was a pretty mixed bag. Up way too early in the morning, second flight was really rough. But the hotel room was ready when we arrived and the box of Not an Employee swag that UPS was telling us would be delayed until Monday was already at the hotel. Woot! Didn't manage to nab any free food or drink (EPIC FAIL), but Keith and I had a nice lunch at Habana.
The How to Bankrupt Your Startup panel was a great kick-off for the week - like the old adage about any movie with a monkey in it has to be good, I'm quite sure that any panel with a unicorn on it will rawk, ...
cruel and unusual
January 15, 2008 Twitter goes down just as Stevenote starts. Jaiku also afflicted. Fanboys everywhere are sad, sad, sad.
++++++++++++
More thoughts on this. Some people have talked about the usefulness of Twitter in real time crises where information needs to be disseminated quickly. On a small scale, I'm sure it would work. By small scale, I mean a couple hundred users in a small city like, say, Ann Arbor. But the fact that it completely choked today - albeit in a major stress test of users across the country - does not bode well for it functioning as a back-channel in emergent situations of a larger scale. (Earthquake in a major city, or something like that?) why I like plaxo more than facebook
December 2, 2007 I use Facebook. I signed up originally to get free music from iTunes. I have a umich address, so it assumed I was a student. It's ok over there, my friends are there, but I'm not at all into the goofy pirate/ninja/zombie junk. Luckily, most of my friends aren't either, so I don't get too bombarded.
I also use Plaxo, which began its life as an online contact organizer. It used to be evil, in that it would spam stuff out to all the people on your contact list. It doesn't do that anymore. It's actually pretty cool; you can upload your contact info from gmail or Outlook or whatever, and if it finds other Plaxo users in your list, it ...
realm of the sub-genius
October 30, 2007 I went in to the Apple Store this afternoon to take advantage of my new One-to-One training membership for the first time. I had been collecting questions on a sticky note all week.
It went okay - I stumped the poor guy a number of times. Turns out he was 'just' a Creative, not a Genius. I got a bunch of good tips and information, though.
We had fun with two iMacs in one room both responding to any remote. In Tiger, you can turn off remote control - all or nothing - but in Leopard (at least there in the store, anyway) it appears that you can pair a device with a particular remote. Woo!
The help in Leopard looks pretty cool. ...
the assimilation has begun
October 23, 2007 I write this from my shiny new iMac. Thoughts so far:
Everyone has been so kind - I feel sort of like those Verizon commercials with the network following people around. I asked questions out into the ether and answers came back nearly instantaneously. I was alone in the house, but totally didn't feel it. Thank you - so much - to all of you who answered via Twitter and IM and email. It was so very helpful and I'm sure I'll have more questions as I go on. Yesterday was such a terrific warm and fuzzy day.
The boys' reactions were a fascinating case study in marketing and branding. I guess they really didn't know I was getting a new ...
being
This is Laura Fisher's blog, coming to you from Ann Arbor, Michigan. You might know me as mitten and you can find me in many online communities under that name. Comments are welcome here, or you can write to me more privately via the contact form.
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speed racerForget the old cartoon, forget any hint of serious intent and go watch this movie for the sheer technicolor delight of it. It's beautiful, it's fast, it's silly (in the good way), it's exciting and inspired. Go Speed go!
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@vaguery Thanks! See you all in a week. 5 days ago
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