18 posts from September 2008

This summer I realized that for me, a guy whose job it is to be on the Internet day in and day out (I webmaster a very large online enthusiast community), I was falling way behind and getting out of touch with user technology especially the sharing and social aspects of the Internet. I'm pretty good with the back-end technology, but had traditionally put down what I thought were fad technologies - no longer.

So, I started to explore web tools that could help me do some of the things I was already doing, like sharing nifty web sites with my users and friends which took me to the Delicious.com bookmarking service. I also took time to do a total rewrite of my own personal home page (Scott-Paterson.com) which led me to wonder if I could get my Delicious.com bookmarks dynamically updated on my home page - of course - this was being done all over the web already in the form of Lifestreaming, so I incorporated all my various versions of my online self into a lifestream (AIM, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Amazon, Vox Blog, Last.fm, Netflix, YouTube, etc etc). I also picked up my blog writing. I was a writer by training in college and I did a ton of it for work and I like doing it, so this would be one way to stay in writing shape, although my writing style is naturally rather casual. Anyway, I really liked what I saw, but to get to the point...

I opened a Facebook account thanks to a long lost college friend and my wife. I like Facebook. Half my family is on Facebook (why didn't they tell me they were - their Internet brother - I'm still trying to figure that one out). Now that I've been studying Facebook for all of a week, I've been running into problems left and right. Every other thing I look at seems busted. How many people are on Facebook? 45 Million or more? They get 250,000 sign ups every day? It dawned on me that Facebook no longer has to provide a decent service or make sure that they're not hosting slew of broken third party applications. The thing is a monster force of its own. It's like a black hole. It only has to sit there and do nothing yet continue to grow at an event-horizon pace. On my profile page, Facebook provides an integrated service in which it will automatically import Delicious links (Busted), Flickr photos (Broken), YouTube Video (Not Working), and RSS/Blog Feeds (okay, SOMETMES works). So I tried two third party apps for Delicious links, a number of RSS feeders, YouTube apps, etc etc, hardly anything at all is working in there unless you do it manually... so I tried to share this Hugs Campaign video from YouTube today (easily shareable here)...

LilyBee and Papa get along great!

I'm not usually a fan on Internet cuteness, but this made me laugh out loud...

I've got a 2.5 month old baby (Lily Bee) who is treating me and Elle so well. She sleeps through the night, rarely cries, smiles at me every morning when she wakes up, and loves to sit with Papa at his desk and stare out the window. We're going to try some Baby Einstein stuff later today when Momma goes off to a meeting. I've started a new, fun, non-profit project, I've found a new group of roller-hockey guys to play with on Sundays (they kick the crap out of me because they are all about 20 years younger), I had a wisdom tooth removed yesterday and it was so not painful at all, and if I would just put in a couple days of hard work, I'd be all caught up with m Saabnet.com work! It's a pretty magical time, really. I found a track online in a category called World Music that seems to be the music for my current mood. Through Cinemas by Loop Guru.

Through Cinemas

Latest funnies I've run across...

microblogging

Olympic Medals

This is SOAP!

Gifted

I've run an enthusiast forum on the Internet for 20 years this October. Because of it, I've met hundreds, if not thousands, of new friends that I otherwise would never have known. That's the upside; getting to know people online and becoming friends; better yet, some day getting to put a face to that online nickname! Well, there is a downside too to expanding your social network like this. In 20 years of running Saabnet.com, we've lost at least 4 people. The first person from the forum to die was Mac from Australia who had a heart attack. I didn't know Mac that well, but I preserved a page about him on the site. Later on, two young boys were killed in a car accident - one of them had posted to the site just an hour before we lost him... That was very tough because he was very liked on the forum. We banded together and created a memorial book for his parents and went on to create a memorial award that is now given away at just about every Saab Owners Convention to promote young driver safety above all else. Just recently, a member from Los Angeles went out into a park for a run and never came back - he was a casualty of a mountain lion attack. These all hit home when you can go back and see someone's lively postings preserved forever on a site and then all of a sudden they are no longer participating anymore.

All of this hit home a few days ago when a friend of mine on a new forum I participate on announced that he has cancer and was having an operation to remove a tumor from his chest. I've read up on this type of cancer and it seems like many people recover from it, but it's really scarey. I don't like to think of another friend going dark online. These are not 'virtual' relationships - they are the real deal. Cherish your online friends too.

-Scott

So, I wanted to set up a web site for friends of mine who were part of a social computing network back in the day at Dartmouth College (XYZ).. I needed a domain, a place for it to live, a web site, and a forum, at a minimum, to get started. So, here it is, the long, arduous task of bringing a web site to life:

• 3.5 minutes to get an account on 123ehost.com (my favorite hosting company)
• 3.5 minutes to register the domain name xyzalumni.net with Network Solutions (my favorite registrar)
• 1.5 minutes to configure the domain name servers
• 2 minutes to install phpBB software
• 10 minutes to customize the phpBB software with forums and template
• 1 minute to create a home page

My goal was to finish in under 22 minutes and I had a spare 30 seconds which I used to update my Twitter status. ;-) No wonder everyone and their mother and grandmother has a forum these days. Too bad phpBB really sucks big time at presenting data dynamically.. all these great stores of information on the Internet in a database that is totally underutilized. I need to check out Yet Another BB (YABB) to see if it is any better...

-Scott