Blog Posts About: This Site

Last night I was one of 25 speakers at an event called Ignite Seattle (Flickr Tag) which is the brainchild of Bre Pettis of Make Magazine and Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Radar. What an awesomely geeky and fun-filled time. It started with an "egg drop" contest with a giant slingshot being used to shoot objects at a brick wall. Fun stuff, or as Bre called it "Egg-Night Seattle".

The talks were also fascinating and it's the first time I've spoken under such constraints. Each presentation has to be 20 slides long and each slide shows for exactly 15 seconds - the presenter has no control over the slides - they auto-advance. 15 seconds on each slide is not very much time, trust me.

Sachi shot this 5 minute video of my talk about how we used technology on our trip around the world last year.

I mentioned a few blogger that we met along the way and I want to point you to them here:

Mongkol from Cambodia (currently a Fulbright Scholar at Boston College) [More on TwinF]
Gen Kanai in Tokyo [More on TwinF]
Dina Mehta in Mumbia India [More on TwinF]
JF Groff in Southern France [More on TwinF]
Robin Good in Rome, Italy [More on TwinF]
Wanna and Vuth in Hanoi [More on TwinF]
43 Places and Guarav [More on TwinF]
Jake Ludington from Seattle [More on TwinF]

I've had an issue with broken comments on this site that was related to MT-Blacklist (a now-obsolete tool that helped curb spam). Sorry about that. Instead of trying to fix it, I'm just going to turn off the Blacklist and leave comments open on the most recent posts.

What does this mean to you? It means that if you'd like to comment, please do so quickly, before I turn them off. I'll stick to this strategy until Common Craft moves to Drupal.

Thank you for your attention.

UPDATED: In a not-so-ironic development, the comments on this entry are now disabled thanks to repeated spam comments.

Before this blog went into hibernation in 2005, I knew the blog platform (Movable Type 2.65) was in need of an upgrade. A year later, it's obvious to me that I'm driving an El Camino when everyone else has upgraded to a Prius. A change is coming soon to Common Craft.

Movable Type (MT) is a great product and it served me well for a few years, but after using Drupal for all of 2006, I count myself among the firmly converted. Going back to the old version of MT from Drupal 2.6 has not been fun. Here are a few of the differences I see between the two.

Movable Type is, at heart, a blogging platform that can be used for content management. Drupal is an open source content management platform that also does blogging and community functions very effectively.

Every time you post or edit an entry in MT, you have to wait for the site to rebuild. What a pain. Drupal posts immediately.

Editing a page in MT is only possible through the control panel and it takes 4 clicks. You cannot visit an entry and click "edit" directly from that page. In Drupal, the interface integrates admin controls into every page.

While I prefer the way MT provides the html code when an image is uploaded, I got used to simply dragging and dropping my photos from Flickr into the entry using the rich-text option in Drupal. We made this video "How We Do It: Manage a Travel Blog" that demonstrates how it works.

I like to change what appears in the right side bar of my site and MT 2.65 relies on templates to make it happen. Managing where items appear on the right bar means dealing with messy programming code. Drupal's "Block" system takes the geekiness factor down by making each part of the sidebar very manageable without contact with code.

MT was perfect for me in 2003 when I got started. Since then, MT has become a different sort of product while Wordpress, TypePad, etc. have become the choice platforms for individuals and small businesses. I'm choosing to move to Drupal because it does blogging well, but also comes with a huge selection of modules that offer an amazing set of capabilities. By moving Common Craft to Drupal, I know I can take the site in any direction I want in the future.

So, I'm becoming a Drupal fan boy, but I know it's not perfect. I still think the organization of the administration controls are overly complex. The process of uploading images is goofy, the learning curve can be quite long and it's still just a little too geek-centric for my taste. Thankfully, with each version it takes another step closer to becoming the killer app of community building tools.

If you want to play with Drupal 5.0 for free for 30 days, Bryght can hook you up. And, no, this is not a paid advertisement. :-)

Northern Voice is good, good fun and I'm not sure how many blolgging conferences I can honestly put in that category. I generally have fun at conferences, but there is something about Northern Voice that gives it a homey, we're-all-here-to-talk-about-the-stuff-we-love feel that reads low on the pretension meter.

This year the festivities officially start with Moose Camp on Friday, February 22nd but I'm here to tell you that if you really want your mind completely blown, come early. This, of course, is because yours truly will be the evening entertainment over a big spaghetti dinner at Heritage Hall on Thursday, February 21st. Was there ever a more potential for mind blowing that a $5 (donation only) spaghetti dinner and fun stories from a year of geeked-out world travel? Me thinks not.

Sachi and I both hope that we'll see you at Northern Voice. Register Now, it's only $50 for the whole she-bang.

I have fresh, exciting ideas to talk about on my blog! Oh, um, no I don't. Wait, maybe THIS. Hmmm. (deep breath)

That's the basic conversation happening in my head when I've sat down to post a blog post on Common Craft lately. After a year away from the blog world, I'm coming in pretty cold. I don't have the benefit of hindsight - the last year of my profession-related memes, discussions, issues, ideas and conflicts are just not a part of my blogging ammunition to date.

It's a little like coming into a new project team that has been working together for a year without you. I picture coming into the project and during the second meeting saying "Why don't we just do XYZ", which causes eyes to roll. Later I hear that the issue I raised was resolved 6 months ago. Not a fun feeling.

But it's all good. It's actually a bit liberating. I suppose I have less blog baggage and a real opportunity to share a fresh perspective. But, I may need a little help along the way. If you see me beating a dead horse, don't hesitate to let me know, OK?

Wow. What a wonderful experience it is to come back after a year, post two paragraphs on Common Craft and have a group of friends welcome me back into the fold. Thanks so much for the welcome home comments. I'm still getting my feet under me in terms of writing for Common Craft, but I'll be back in full force soon.
For the rest of this week, I'm going to put a lot of effort into getting our TWINF travel blog ready to be frozen in time this coming Saturday, the 6th. After Saturday, there will be no more new posts, comments or photos. Between now and then, I have a number of posts lined up that will hopefully help us end with a bang.
I have to say, it's quite strange and a little scary to freeze a blog in time after using it to document something like a year of travel. It makes for a nice little package I suppose, but there is no continuity. The conversation just ends. I will continue to change and mature, but TwinF will stay the same - a snapshot of our lives, perspectives and values. This lack of continuity is what makes me nervous. I'm used to looking back at old blog posts and saying "boy was I naive" or whatever. In those cases it was fine because I understood (and had faith my readers understood) the continuity that accounts for past indiscretions. It's like a normal blog can always say "that was me then, but this is me now - I've changed."
TwinF captures, in vivid detail, how we reacted to the world, how we dealt with foreign cultures and food, where we were weak, where we were strong and where we were fools. It revealed more about us as people than we ever have before and perhaps ever will. When it becomes frozen, all those experiences will be out there without any continuity. I won't be able to say "I was wrong" or "I have changed". TwinF will just be what it is - a year long snapshot of how we reacted at the time.