Category Archives: General

General

Attention Efficiencies, Consistent User Experience, and the Labs

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I came across an article the other night explaining how to create a daily post of your del.icio.us links on your WordPress blog ‘automagically’. I have been looking for a pre-fab way to do this for about a week and a half now and finally came across this article explaining experimental functionality in del.icio.us itself to do this.

This is one thing I’ve always liked about Cote’s blog, People Over Process. You can get a lot of interesting information from someones bookmarking habits.

Now that I have the posting created by del.icio.us daily, I have removed the link splicing from my feed that Feedburner has been providing. This follows my removing the Flickr feed splicing in my feed a couple of months ago when Tom the Architect had mentioned that he would get my pictures up to three times when I posted to Flickr, once in my main feed spliced in from Flickr, once from his subscription to Flickr to receive updates from his contacts, and finally when I decided to post a picture to the main blog. I also felt that having the del.icio.us links posted to the feed via Feedburner without appearing in the main blog seemed kind of inconsistent.

This change creates a huge attention efficiency for me in creating content (since I can do it as part of my normal daily activities), while at the same time makes the feed reflect the same content as the blog does, which I think results in a better user experience all around – as you don’t have to subscribe to the feed to get all of the information around what I’m looking at day to day. Increased transparency all the way around.

This activity is one of the reasons why I have been looking so diligently for a del.icio.us extension for Camino. I really like the Camino browser, but have lost the attention efficiency that the FireFox plug in afforded me. At this point, I have to change contexts in order to bookmark, whether it be via Cocoalicious, or del.icio.us itself.

Now I just need to find the time to dig into WordPress to find out why its stripping all of my CSS from pictures I choose to blog from Flickr so that I can cease the extra activity of re-editing posts created from Flickr. Hopefully I’ll be able to get to that soon.

The ultimate goal is to be able to expend the least amount of energy possible in order to increase transparency consistently across the blog, the feed, and any other piece of my life that I have outsourced to a third party.

The Digital Life

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In November of 2004 I wrote a posting up here called “Web based email on your home network” where I mentioned some of the control issues I had around being able to manage most of the technology I used and not depending on other services in order to have things I want.

As I started thinking about this recently, I realized just how much of my digital life I have “outsourced” over the past year. When I think about it, I’ve outsourced my picture storage to Flickr, my bookmarking to del.icio.us, my contact management to LinkedIn, my email to Google Mail, and Jonna and I have recently started tracking our schedule on a shared Google Calendar. Hell, I’ve even outsourced my goal tracking to 43 Things. Even most of my entertainment is retrieved from the Net, as I haven’t listened to radio in months opting for programming found through podcasts.

The network is becoming the one area that I cannot live without, because most of the relevant things that I need to track about my life is on it now. I no longer have to search for files on my hard drive and ensure that I get that notepad text file with all of my contacts through the years. Its on the net. I no longer have to worry about backing up my digital photos, because thats all taken care of for me by Flickr.

My how the times have changed since late 2004. I’ve actually moved away from the control issues that I used to have about having to run and maintain everything I use here in the Labs. As a matter of fact, I am now dependent on the whole network in order to know whats going on with my life.

Just a brief observation. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit lately.

Chinese Dinner, The Zodiac, and Continued Self Reflection

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Photo by rbieber

To go along with the Tickle Test Results, here is a description of me from the Chinese Zodiac, taken from a placemat at the chinese restaurant Jonna and I had dinner at last night.

You are very intelligent and are able to influence people. An enthusiastic achiever, you are easily discouraged and confused. Avoid Tigers. Seek a Dragon or a Rat.

Definitely an enthusaistic achiever, definitely easily discouraged. I take great umbrage at the confused comment, but I can’t figure out whether its true or not. Oh, whatever — I give up.