Tom’s Wordpress Blog

I wrote about my lukewarm experience with Blogo a while ago. Today they’ve released a new updated version. It’s much better, at least in the little bit of time I’ve been testing it.

Works well with this Wordpress blog, at least.

I was looking for a quick blog posting client. Specifically I wanted one that would pop up when I needed it, take dragging in links and images.

I read the Blogo could hide on the edge of the screen like Sidenote and then you could call it out simply by positioning the mouse. And it does let you drag in links.

But there’s no blockquote, at least not that I can find. And that’s bad because I use blockquotes frequently, as I imagine most blogger’s do. Curious omission.

I also understand that an image can only be formatted for one paragraph, not the entire post. Also not good.

I don’t know what the developer’s were thinking when they designed this. It certainly isn’t for anyone who has blogged for more than a week or so. It needs more stuff.

If they can figure out how to put in more formatting options and keep the interface as simple as it is, I’d jump on it. But as it is, I’m wary.

A clever approach to learning to draw is in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. One of the ones I remember best is upside down drawing. For a non-artist like me, it’s downright daunting to attempt to draw something exactly as you see it. “There’s no way I can do this” I usually think. But when I turn the original drawing upside down and simply draw the lines I see(and the relationship between them), a passable copy of the drawing begins to appear.

The instructions have you change the context you’re approaching drawing in. Rightside up, my brain can’t seem to figure it out, but upside down, a very different context, it’s just a bunch of lines, and I can draw lines.

We use this sort of approach in Feldenkrais work, changing the context of movement to offer outselves and our clients new options for movement. Often, the outcome is pretty creative and useful. Sometimes dramatically useful for us or our clients.

I don’t normally think of this context-changing approach when I think of comics. But one of the most widely distributed comic artists does just that when faced with losing his speaking voice permanently.

Scot Adams writes about discovering a clever learning approach to a condition called Spasmodic Dysphonia after a doctor told him no one ever recovered completely from the condition. Adams somehow came up with the idea, in his words, of remapping his brain. Changing the context of his speaking has done the trick, at least so far.

Adams first began experimenting with the voice he had left, changing pitches, looking for patterns, singing some words. Then he disovered a kind of jumpstart that really got him going with his natural voice - speaking rhyme.

But the best part of Adam’s description of his process was what he calls reestablishing the connection between his brain and his speech:

When I say my brain remapped, that’s the best description I have. During the worst of my voice problems, I would know in advance that I couldn’t get a word out. It was if I could feel the lack of connection between my brain and my vocal cords. But suddenly, yesterday, I felt the connection again. It wasn’t just being able to speak, it was KNOWING how. The knowing returned.

Adams blog post is worth reading: it’s not only very well-written, but really conveys the passion of someone left with only learning as an option to the life he wants to lead. That’s a big change in context.

This weblog has a different look due to using Sandvox to assemble it. Previously I had been using Tinderbox (and their relatively immature blogging client Flint) to manage the content and my own css design to publish. 

Though the Sandvox designs are limited in number, I finally figured out that their designs were much more elegant than anything I could put together from scratch. And I like the outline structure Sandvox uses to manage the pages, at least in a weblog.  

Blog Design Solutions is the book I’ve been hoping to find. As a recent convert to Wordpress, I’d been looking for a manual that could reveal it’s workings and how to change them if I wanted. To be sure, there’s lots of Wordpress stuff online, but I’ve been finding myself working pretty hard to dig out the useful bits. It’s probably because I’m not versed in PHP, mySql, or really much on anything on the server side.

Enter Blogging Design Solutions. There’s a chapter on Wordpress that takes a lot of the mystery out of playing around with themes, markup and exactly how the damn thing works. Very useful and that alone is worth the price of the book.

But the real value for me was the clearly written explanation of how to get Apache, mySql, PHP and even myPHPadmin running on my local machine. That’s allowed me to put a copy of Wordpress locally so that I hack with it to my heart’s content and not screw up the blog running on the server.

There are other chapters on Moveable Type, Expression Engine or Textpattern. And there’s even a chapter on how to cobble together your own content management system.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Consensus Web Filters made a big impression on me. And it’s not just me; there are lots and lots of links to that post all over the place. So when I stumbled across Man vs. Machine in Newsreader War, I was hungry for the information.

This article focuses on whether future collaborative-style news sites will depend more on human-edited or algorithmic sources. It pretty much picks algorithms over meat. Sites like Digg and its ilk depend heavily on submissions from web surfers.

But it seems the filtering services offered by these sort of sites are both too broadly and too narrowly focused at the same time. Mary Hodder of Attention Trust (a fascinating topic on its own) like the current sites, but thinks they’re too narrowly focused:

“Digg and Memeorandum are definitely an order of magnitude better than anything we got from any top-down news organization, but when I look at them, I see all the things that are missing,” said Hodder, CEO of the video aggregation startup Dabble. “Digg and Memeorandum are catching one slice, and it’s fantastic and a total breath of fresh air, because it’s not The New York Times or the L.A. Times. But it’s still only one slice. If you are really going to nail this, you have to have thousands of slices.”

The gist of her argument is the limitation imposed by submissions from a limited group, and suggests than many more perspectives need to be taken into consideration for the filters to be really useful.

Almost to support the algorithmic approach, I checked out a new filter mentioned in the article, Tailrank. When you join Tailrank, you submit a list of feeds you’ve been reading. The sites secret recipe shakes and bakes though them to make a constantly-updated customized list of recommendations. Though the algorithm isn’t revealed, it obviously depends on links to blogs; the more links, the higher the rank, probably.

A drop down menu on the user’s page lets you select the number of links to use for a filter (this is after you’ve signed up for a free membership). When I selected 2 links, Tailrank returned 136 blog posts, 8 links 28 articles and so forth. So it was a little ironic that when I set the filter to use the maximum number of links (35), it turned up just one article: Consensus Web Filters.

Consensus Web Filters: on the always-cool Cool Tools tackles the relatively new breed of collaborative news sites that have emerged recently. Kevin Kelly talks about how important these types of sites have become to his news reading habits. In a clear way, he describes what they are, how they work and why they’re important.

What really caught my interest here was the idea that the collaborative process the sites use don’t necessarily mean that we just see popular news items.

But most important for me is the large volume of very interesting news that will not become “news.” This is the kind of material that is more interesting than random pages but which lacks an appealing hook to place it on the front page of a magazine or even a news website. Often these items are timeless; they don’t make the front page because they could be run at any time. But they are more valuable than odd curiosities. Because of the voting, tagging, bookmarking process enough people find the item worthwhile that they rise to notice. What emerges for me is a delightful counter-news, or what we used to call at CoEvolution Quarterly, “news that stays news.” I have encountered no other process in the world that is better at surfacing “news that stays news” and “news that will be news” better than these collaborative filtering sites.

I checked out some of the recommended sites to see if and how this might work. Indeed it does. On Digg, for example, you can see (or subscribe to the feed for) items just coming in, before they get “dugg” to see if they’ll make the front page. Other sites Kelly mentions offer similar ways of seeing stuff before (or while) it’s being processed through the collaborative process.

I had first run across this idea of “news that stays news” long ago in Stewart Brand’s book about the Media Lab at MIT. That was published 20 years ago. Things change; things stay the same.

A first post in Wordpress. Wasn’t too much of a mess to autoinstall and sign on, but let me see how it goes.

endo - The Newest RSS Aggregator for Mac OS X:

So this is something new. A Wordpress blog and also using a new aggregator (ecto) and blogging client (endo). I found ecto and endo on Newsvine and decided to give them a shot. WordPress I’d been thinking about for a while and finally took the plunge just now. I’ve always had client-based blogging software before, so this is something new all the way around for me.

Change is good. (I hope.)