Fiat Lux

Heading out with Scott to check out the show. Should be fun! I’ll post pix if I get any good ones.

UPDATED: We’re back. Had a great time, here’s a few highlights:

Adam Savage from Mythbusters, taking about his life of making things. I like the show but hearing Adam speak in person and show some of the many non-Mythbusters things he’s done increased my respect for him significantly.

What a cool guy! A true creative geek in the best possible sense of the word.

Those guys from YouTube did a live … performance(?) …. of their demented yet oh so cool pairings of Mentos & Diet Coke.

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Late last night, my food blog got Stumbled.

Holy crap. I thought the traffic I was getting from Alltop (the orange band) was nice. I had no idea.

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Nothing looks different out here, but WP 2.5 is running now. That was pretty easy.

The new admin interface will take a little getting used to, though. I like most of the changes, but I do kind of miss having the ‘”Categories” option to my right when creating a new post. It’s not a showstopper, though. I’ll adjust.

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Here’s a useful factoid for those of you out there who might be considering adding or updating your blog comment policy:

One of the biggest arguments in the debate over moderating comments is that editing inappropriate comments may lead to the site’s liability in defamation cases. The Communications Decency Act of 1996, however, has protected sites from becoming liable for user comments; it is only when an editor changes the meaning of a post to make it libelous that a site becomes responsible.

I used to have a link to my comment policy, but somewhere along the line of the site move & redesign I dropped it. I don’t get enough comments here to need a complex policy, honestly, but in the interest of clarity, here is is:

Comment Policy

I reserve the right to delete any comment left on this site or any URLs left in comments, for any reason or for no reason at all. I pay for the web hosting; I get to decide how my disk space and bandwidth are used, and where my outclicks go. However, I do not edit the words left by my commenters. They remain as their authors wrote them.

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One thing I have been pondering lately is whether I should be doing something more than just blogging. There’s podcasting, and video blogging, and I haven’t tried those at all (with the exception of one very short video clip I did of Scott making ravioli). I’m not on Utterz or Seesmic or any of the other “cool” new content creation sites. I’m just a blogger. Sometimes I worry a little — am I getting left behind? Am I turning into some dinosaur of the Internet because I’m still just typing away?

But there’s a reason why I don’t do that stuff, and it’s not for lack of time, software, or equipment. It’s because they do not add any value to what I’m doing here.

My long-ago college major was in Drama. One of the things you learn when you study theater is that everything you do on stage should serve the purpose of the production. If you do it, say it, wear it, or hang it on the wall of the set — it all needs to be there to augment the essence of what you’re trying to communicate. That essence will change, of course. Your vision for presenting Phantom of the Opera is going to be different than your vision for Othello. But no matter what you’re doing, you need to constantly ask yourself, “Is this serving the goal I am trying to achieve?” And if the answer is “no” then DON’T DO IT.

As John Whiteside points out today,

Video has its place. Video can show you things that would be hard to follow in a written description; the video that Apple put on its site as a promo for the iPhone is a great example (it convinced me to buy one because it made it obvious how many features worked, and it served as a quick start guide when I got the phone home). I’m not saying video is bad.

I’m just suggesting that if you can’t figure out why you shouldn’t be using a simpler, lower-bandwidth, more flexible, and more user-controlled medium for your message, then you shouldn’t be making a video.

I couldn’t agree more.

People have a complete right to be self-indulgent, and to experiment with new mediums of communication. It’s a great way to learn to use technology. The next stage is to learn how to use those tools to do something that people will actually get value out of watching. I hope we get there soon.

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I’m playing around with some possible new themes this weekend, so the blog might look a little odd while I decide what I’m doing.

UPDATE: Mandigo has a silly name but I think I like it as a theme.

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For several years now, I’ve used Bloglines as both my web-based feed reader and my blogroll manager for the blog. However, Bloglines has been getting a little flaky lately, and I’m in the process of transitioning to a new feed reader. Currently I’m using Google Reader, but am not certain I’m going to stick with it.

At any rate, I am not using Bloglines right now, and that means that the blogroll you see as I type this is not the list of blogs I’m currently reading. Call me nit-picky, but I feel it’s important that the blogroll on my blog is the actual list of sites I’m reading, so this bugs me.

I’m going to experiment with exporting my OPML into WordPress, maybe look for a new plug-in to see if I can keep it in synch automatically.

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I’ve done occasional posts on food and cooking here, but recently, as I was reading Bill Buford’s Heat, I was struck by a phrase and though, “wow, that would make a great domain name.”

Being a geek, I registered it. And since my new web host allows me to run multiple domains off the same account, I set up a small food & recipe blog to go with the name. I’ve set it up the way I want it, and gotten a couple of posts up. It’s ready for the world now.

Benvenuto, Profumo Profondo.

A couple of friends have expressed some interest in occasionally contributing recipes, but I expect it will be mostly me, and be relatively low traffic. We’ll see how it goes.

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…picked a new web host, that is.

In recent comments, I got asked how I decided which web host to switch to once I gave up on Powweb. Truth is, it was not easy, and I very nearly re-upped with Powweb again, on the theory “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” But over the last 4 years, Powweb has gone from being a great company to one that I barely tolerated. I couldn’t bring myself to give them the $$ for another year. So I switched.

Finding a new host was definitely not a one-time project. I collected information on and off over the course of many months, from a number of sources. Those include word-of-mouth reports from other web folks on 2 mailing lists (WWWAC and SF-WOW) and reports from friends (like Glen). That gave me some anecdotal evidence to start with. Another site that was helpful for giving feedback and potential hosting company names was the WebHosting Talk forums.

I tended to avoid the various websites that list or rate web hosts, since many of them gave the impression of being basically advertising vehicles for the hosting companies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but I wanted user feedback more than anything else. Basic web hosting is so much of a commodity these days that I was more concerned with customer satisfaction within the price point I’d chosen (under $100 a year) than the nitty-gritty of exactly how many MBs of disk space or how many e-mail accounts I’d get with my service. I also gave bonus points to companies that had an actual customer forum, not just a one-way support desk.

I looked at Dreamhost, Laughing Squid, Media Temple, Lunarpages, 1 and 1, iPowerWeb, and a few others before deciding that A2 looked good. I did some more digging into A2, looking for reports of dissatisfied customers, outages, etc. Nothing bad jumped out at me. So I filed the information away.

As I said, this happened over the course of several months. Periodically I’d re-check, to see if opinion about a company was trending one way or another (increased outages, reports of slowness / overselling, etc). A2 still looked good.

Eventually, my old contract was about to run out, and it was time to push the button, one way or the other. So I took a deep breath and signed up with A2. And here I am.

That’s a little longwinded, but it’s the story of how I chose a new web host. I hope it helps someone.

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I’m settled in at the new web host now — who by the way, is A2 Hosting, and no, there’s no referral link on that URL.

So far it’s been great. The blog and the assorted other web files are all in place. I’ve cleaned out some old stuff I don’t need to keep on the server anymore. I’ve updated my robots.txt to reflect the new site layout. I have IMAP set up on my desktop and my laptop. Everything is running smoothly, DNS seems to have transitioned, and all is right with the world.

I’m even taking advantage of the fact that my new account has more bells & whistles to set up a side blog for recipies. It’s not quite done yet but when it is I’ll post a link.

What’s amazing is how much easier all this has been. When I first set up a website in 1996, this was very much a manual process, and you needed to either have direct access to the server and/or be very comfortable with a command line do stuff like set up a domain name, create a new web hosting account, or customize a website. Today, it’s nearly all web-based and so very painless. I love it. YAY for progress!

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