Author: Nadreck

Ex-game industry, ex-dbx, currently technical writer turned tools developer. Sucker for learning random things. Tends to talk about social computing, online identity, internet culture, and life.

Ira Glass: Creative Work

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. Ira Glass

The Gift of Dyslexia

When someone masters something, it becomes a part of that person. It becomes part of the individual’s thought and creative process. It adds the quality of its essence to all subsequent thought and creativity of the individual. Ronald D. Davis, The Gift of Dyslexia

Utah Phillips on Work

That’s when [Fry Pan Jack] told me – you know, he’d been tramping since 1927 – he said, “I told myself in ’27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” Hah! You don’t have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, “I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it’s true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?” Fat chance! Utah Phillips

Two Content Columns, No Sidebar

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there is no sidebar on this site. (The closest we come are the widget space in the footer.) Instead, we’ve got an extra wide window, with two columns of content. This was something that grew out of sitting in the Post Formats session at WordCamp Portland 2011 (liveblog transcript found here and here). Basically, post formats allow you to format different types of posts in different ways (similar to how Tumblr works).

If you are already sorting content by type, why not take it a step further and sort content within the page layout as well? For me, it made the most sense to sort my content into long-form and short-form sections. That way, no matter how many links or tweets I post, longer articles still get the time and attention I’d like to afford them, despite being more infrequent.

The process of doing this wasn’t too bad in execution, though I did end up spending a long time exploring the WP_Query entry on the WordPress Codex, since I’ve not done much query tweaking in the past. Basically, I tweaked the CSS of the page to be wider tweaked, the div this template wraps the sidebar in to be wider, then commented out the sidebar itself. Then I made two queries, one for each column. The second column simply searches for the last 20 posts in either the “aside” format, the “status” format, or the “link” format (basically all posts that should never be more than, say, a short paragraph). The first column searches for the last 10 posts that AREN’T in “aside”, “status”, or “link”. This was necessary because “standard” posts have no searchable post-format slug to query against. Simple, eh?

Sherry Turkle on Social Media

Social media, for all of it’s bounties—and I’m very enthusiastic of all the bounties of social media—it also gives us an opportunity to hide. We perform ourselves on social media, and that is different from being ourselves on social media. That ability to perform yourself is also an ability to hide. It leads to something that I call “Fear of missing out.” You’re always watching what other people are doing and you begin to be jealous because they’re showing their best selves and you’re showing your best self. You almost become jealous of the life you live on Facebook. You have to remind yourself that it’s your life because you’re showing your best self. Sherry Turkle

Twitter Archiving on WordPress

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Yahoo Pipes.

There are a few different backup services that allow for backing up your twitter feed. You may or may not be aware, but it’s actually rather difficult to back up and archive your tweets, if you have passed a certain threshold in number and age (the magic number currently being 3200 tweets). If by some miracle, you manage to get a more complete archive (I signed up with BackupMyTweets a while back, and they managed to go all the way back as near as I can tell), there is then the task of figuring out what to DO with those archives.

Personally, I wanted to put them into a WordPress install, and then use a plugin to keep it up to date going forward, because I’m a fan of a consolidated media identity (come to one place, which I manage, and get all the data you want or need). The problem was that while BackupMyTweets had all my tweets backed up, their download options left something to be desired (PDF, CSV, XML, and JSON, none of which in formats that could be easily imported into WP). I could have used a different service, like TweetBackup, but they were limited by the 3200 tweet cap, and thus it wouldn’t be all of my tweets. If I was going to bother doing this consolidation, I wanted to do it ONCE, and I wanted it to be as complete as possible.

I spent some time doing research into this problem, and wasn’t really happy with any of the solutions. I’m not really a programmer, and so the notion of writing a perl or python script to parse the archive xml format into what wordpress needs seemed daunting and unreasonable. Ultimately, I discovered a really simple and easy solution: Yahoo Pipes. If you haven’t played with this service before, I highly recommend it — it’s not really doing anything a good programmer (or even scripter) couldn’t do, but it takes a lot of the pain out of that process and gives you a visual method to track all the transformations and parsing you might be applying. Case in point, I’ve put together a CSV to RSS converter that takes the Twitter CSV archive from BackupMyTweets, and parses it into an RSS feed that I could then import into WordPress. The end result: a blog with ~4200 one-line posts.

A few caveats:

  • If you are going to use this method, be sure to set the default category to “tweets” (or wherever else you plan to put them) BEFORE you run the importer.
  • You may need to break your RSS feed into multiple files, as there is a database timeout that you might run into otherwise.
  • Titles on tweets are kind of silly. I recommend using a theme that supports the “status” post format and removes the titles for status posts.

If you want to check out the pipe I made, it can be found here. It’s pretty simple: pull from a csv file stashed on a site, map the columns to the correct fields in a “Create RSS” widget, do something to solve the “what should the title be on a tweet” question (I did a truncated version of the tweet), output the result.

Indie Web Wishlist

I’d like to self-host everything, and then broadcast those materials out to the relevant locations (rather than vice versa). With that in mind, these are my wish list services I want to replicate in a self-host+broadcast method:

  • Status Updates — broadcast automagically to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google+, including long-form article notification
  • Gallery (media management) — with broadcasting to 500px and flickr.
  • Bookmarking — with broadcasting to delicious and google bookmarks
  • Identity management — tracking what services I’m connected to, with notes as to which are broadcast TO, and which are still broadcast FROM (plus aggregation of all these services into one self-hosted spot wherever possible)