Surplus words

That’s right folks, turns out this weblog is the place for posting del.icio.us feature requests. Now, I have been a user for a long time, and like just about everything about the service. Like it well enough to ape some of the features in proposals to clients sometimes.

Still, some things just are not perfect, for me. Recently, I noticed that I can now mark my post as “do not share.”

I think; however, that this option does not serve me all too well. More often than not I do not mind sharing the post. After all, the links I bookmark are on the public Internet already. What I do mind sharing, sometimes, are the tags, or specifically some personal tags which I do not necessarily want others to know. For example, if I am doing some research for a client project, I would like to tag relevant links I find with the project name, but am afraid to do so because I do not want to accidentally divulge priveleged information. Often a great deal can be inferred about a project based on the links I catalogue.

So, I would like del.icio.us to add private tags. Just like I can create tag bundles right now, let me mark some tags as private, which means they do not show up as tags for users other than than myself. I can then continue safely tagging items as “software” or “SocialBookmarksForNerds”, and then quietly smile with quilty pleasure when I add the “IdeasToSteal” tag as well.

I have been blogging, under various semi-transparent nicknames for over two years now. Two years ago, it was pretty simple to get started - not too many people blogging, sharing their intimate thoughts for everyone to see. Still, the key to success has aways been to post continuously, according to some easily discernable schedule. Stick to the topic you know something about, etc.

To gather search engine rankings I should now declare that there are 7 rules of blogging guaranteed to make you a success.

(amazingly google does not find any entrees matching that string. yet.)

(more…)

One of the reasons I sometimes feel like writing is to express my old-timer’s dissatifaction along the lines of “worst website ever.” I am sort of an old-timer for the Internet, and increasingly it feels that way. How do I know? Well, when I see the same idea making rounds for the third time, having ignominously died twice before, and pitched by different people but never anyone over 25, I get a strong sense of deja vu.

Sometimes, however, I feel like this whole Web thing might work out after all. I still (sometimes) get the same thrill from using Amazon as I did in 1996. Then it was the sheer exhiliration of ordering a real book through virtual ether. Now, it is the quiet happiness of a parent who can find and order four different books and have the receipt for it in under one hundred seconds and truly expect them to show up at the house in three days. Sure, I handed over all sorts of information to the good folks in Seattle. They have my birthdays, addresses, even credit cards. But then I can order four books in one hundred seconds (I warned you about deja vu) and go have tea after a stressful day.

Tomorrow is another one. See you then.

One of the benefits of starting anew is the shameless way in which old content can be reused. Below is a photo near my house taken in late November 2004.

… Allow me to introduce myself. This is definitely is not going to be a witty post (just look at the time) or an informative one. In fact, I would be very surprised if anyone ever read this post. Based on my previous experience, it will take a year or so before this content is “authoritative”, meaning stale, enough to be pushed up in any kind of search by Google. Still, I will list some things I expect to be true of this weblog.

• I hope to gain publicity by mentioning names of other bloggers and well-known books
• I may transfer some of the better, IMO, posts from my other blogs here in order to fool readers into thinking I am writing new content
• I am a serial blogger-starter-upper. Every other time I have failed to post continuously, and have let the site die a slow, twitching death. (Actually, one of them is doing better the longer I do not post…) . I am hoping that I will have more luck updating my own website than I did unrelated URLs. Perhaps shame will spur me to more action.

I am new to WordPress, and hopeless in Web design, so I apologize for the look of the side-bar. I installed a nice template but then screwed it up by trying to customize. The “subscribe to feed” form is particularly heinous. The “LinkedIn” profile button is not much better.

Interests… Right, this is a personal site now… I am avery amateur photographer and so expect to see pictures of children, flowers, and streets. Or not. The photography page on this site contains some basic links for my photographs.

Welcome & Enjoy.