A Note On Comments

This blog has been up for four days and already Aksimet has imprisoned over 5,000 spam comments! I hope that will explain why I don't post all your comments immediately. The first time you post a comment it's held for approval, but once you have one comment approved future comments will go up immediately. It's actually a pretty cool system. One more reason to love Wordpress. Incidentally you do not have to register to comment - in fact, I'm not even sure what the point of registration is. I'd turn it off if I could figure out how. Some people have asked me if I'll still post on Pownce and Jaiku. I'm not really sure. I think I'll probably put some things up there - TWiT alerts and so on - but my plan is to put most everything else here. I will definitely use this instead of my old Vox and Tumblr blogs. It's kinda cool to see all the old posts here going back to 2001, and I think I'd like to keep that kind of record going. (There are currently 949 posts and 19,548 comments, contained within 35 categories.) I have been able to import all the Vox posts thanks to Blogbackuponline.com. (Cool service by the way.) It crawls all the old posts and spits them back up as RSS, which Wordpress can import. All the original videos and pictures are still hosted on Vox, though, and I can't get them back. There are also some formatting issues which you'll notice whenever there's an embedded video from Vox. But it's better than nothing. I can only get the last 20 Tumbléo posts - but that's fine, they're just ephemera anyway, not personal posts. Someday when I have some time I'd like to go back through all the old posts and clean them up - tag them and so on. Unfortunately all the really old comments are now anonymous (and you'll have to read the Vox comments on Vox) but at least they've been preserved. Which raises an interesting question. If I embed links to photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, etc - in other words if I don't host the media here - what happens in a few years when those other services disappear? I was thinking, for example, of occasional video posts which I'd host on videoegg.com since I can't afford the bandwidth myself. But those posts won't have the longevity of plain old text posts. I guess I should stick to prose? It makes me think there will be a lot of audio and video blogs which will won't be available in 20 or 30 years.

Credits

Thanks to my pal and video grunt, Craig Syverson for the masthead for this blog. Craig and I squandered three hours together in the Vancouver airport waiting for our flight home to San Fran. He had a script to write, so naturally we turned to such time wasting pursuits as trying to decipher which font the New York Times uses for its masthead. (It's hand drawn and copyrighted, but Craig found a free font, English Towne, that's a reasonable facsimile). He also helped me with resizing the front page image (he had Photoshop CS3, I only had the Pixelmator beta, which doesn't yet have a size-constrained selection tool). The Laporte Road title image is part of a larger photo by Chris McMullen from Cambridge, Ontario. He writes,

My family has a cottage just over the border in Quebec. We drive up Highway 63 in Northern Ontario and for years every time we pass "Laporte Road", I have said that I should take a picture and send it to you. This past weekend we where up for Labour Day and I finally remembered to stop.

His email arrived in my inbox at exactly the moment I was despairing of finding something appropriate for the blog. It's perfect! Thanks, Chris!

The New New Thing

If you've stumbled upon this blog, fear not. It's not some old remnant of Leo's web life. It's actually Leo's new improved blog. Or it will be once I get all the posts moved over from Vox, tweak the theme, populate the About and Archives pages, and so on. I decided I wanted one place for all my various personal postings - so this blog will consolidate stuff that's existed on Tumbleo, Vox, Jaiku, and Pownce. And one advantage of this site is that it will incorporate all my postings since I first started blogging in 2001. So it will be the definitive source for Leo history. I'm moving all the data by hand, so patience!

Tumbléo

Dvorak calls me a "joiner." Someone who signs up for every new site he sees. True dat. But sometimes they're really worth signing up for, and how do you know until you do? I'll give you an example.

I've always wanted to do a Tumblelog, somewhere - not quite as formal as a blog - to stick all the random cool stuff I come across day to day. The coolest example out there is project.ioni.st (don't click that link just yet because you'll never return - it's that engaging), but there are several others like the original, Anarchaia.

The canonical way to do this is to install Ruby on Rails and Ozimodo. It's very easy unless you're using Apache. Then it gets a little harder. I just don't have the nerve to mess with either of my production servers (TWiT.tv or techguylabs.com), so my dream of creating a TWiT tumblelog has been thwarted. Until now.

tumblr.com makes it trivial to create a tumblelog. Merlin Mann did it first. He inspired me (in more ways than one) to use tumblr to create tumbléo.com. I'm not cheating on you Vox, honest. I can love two blogging engines at once. Hey, I've got six sites running on three different CMS systems and two different forum engines right now.

So now between Vox, Twitter, and Tumblr, there are no limits to my self-expression.

Ideally all this stuff would be collected into a single site. And someday I hope to do just that.

The first step is to move the the radio show site and my home page, both now in PMWiki, to Vox's sister platform, Moveable Type. Once that's done (hello Apperceptive, where are you?) I will merge all my old blog postings (now in Expression Engine format) into Vox and crosspost into MT.

Phase two will be to find a Tumblelog template for MT (got one?) and incorporate tumbléo into the site.

Twitter will just have to stay a widget on the site.

That's three sites reduced into one. What about the other three sites? I don't anticipate moving TWiT in at this point; Drupal is working so well for it. And the message boards for TWiT and Leoville will stay where they are, twit.tv/forums (running Vanilla) and leovilletownsquare.com (running FusionBB), respectively.

Meanwhile enough voxing around, I've got some cool stuff to post on tumbléo.

Chicken Soup and Pickles

Nosh

5 comments

I was on my way to the Vista launch party in Times Square when I made a short stop at the Carnegie Deli for a matzo ball soup and cream soda. Mmmm. I met with the New York office of Premiere this morning and it looks like we'll launch with stations in LA, Tampa, San Antonio, and Houston. Most stations will take only one day - Saturday or Sunday. KGO in San Francisco is still negotiating, but I'm hopeful. The show goes nationwide on 2/17 and I'm so excited. This has been a lifelong dream. It's Chicken Soup for the Talk Show Soul.