Joe is selling our beloved SanDiegoBlog.com. After all, we don’t live there anymore. Time to make the change. If you want it, make an offer to Joe.
Two Things
1. Jon has a thoroughly uber-rad step by step post up about how to get your photos looking awesome using Photoshop.
2. Tampon Crafts. Need I say more? Well, no. But I feel compelled to tell you that this information will very soon find its way into conversations with my kids. Some parents show naked baby pictures in front of friends. I talk about guns that shoot tampons at the dinner table. (via Schmutzie)
Two Things
1. New changes and updates over at Blogger Network. Thanks, Digital Pixie.
2. Have you seen the new JPG Mag? It’s a totally new way to appreciate your contributors. In my opinion, Derek and Heather are really on the cutting edge of the way things are going in online media to print. I love the new format of JPG and can’t wait to contribute. And, it’s not just photos. Are you a writer? Ya, they want that, too.
Two Things
1. Tom Coates at Plasticbag.org highlighted the new Flickr cards from MOO.com. I ordered the free set of 10 which you can get if you are Flickr Pro. I can’t wait to see the quality and $20 for a set of 100 doesn’t seem unreasonable if the quality is good. I think they are fun. The discussion here in the comments is funny to me since no one said the cards were meant to exude professionalism. They are fun and the application makes it easy to crop and zoom to get the look you want.
2. I use Rock, Paper, Scissors all the time with the kids to decide important matters such as who sits shotgun, what tv program we watch and even who gets the last bit of ice cream. Nice to know I’m in good company. Via Kottke
And She Bid You Adieu for a Short Time
I think my son may be too old for the Tooth Fairy when he walks up to me, shoves the tooth in my hand and demands a dollar. Methinks the shine has worn off the ritual a bit. And shouldn’t he be giving me a dollar? I paid for his dentist bills for that sucker.
I just took off a complete set of fake nails this evening. The beautiful white and long talons that once were are no more. Now, I have only the small stubs God gave me along with the chunky residue left behind from glue.
Digital Pixie rocks. She is doing some construction on BloggerNetwork.org and things are only going to get better.
I’ll be gone for a few days. My parents have gone and done stayed together for 49 years, which means next year will be their 50th wedding anniversary. Sounds kind of like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? I’m meeting my brother, who now lives in Missouri, at my parent’s home to do some filming, photo taking, scanning and printing in anticipation of the best darn video ever shown at any 50th celebration anywhere ever.
See you next Thursday. Miss me.
xo
Two Things
1. The Geek dinner was great. Heathervescent has done a really great job of keeping the LA geeks together every month. It was nice to see her at Bogher in San Jose, too. And Danah, too!
While at the dinner I sat by the very funny Michael and I was lucky enough to meet lots of nice and smart people including Eric whom you must never tell that he looks kinda like Marky Mark, because C’MON that gets old. So don’t do that, Leah. (Oh, wait. That’s me. Sorry, Eric.) But he was very adept at getting the spoons to do amazing things.
2. I met Tantek Celik (shown here with the lovely Heather) for about 5 seconds and wished for much more time to talk since I think he is great. He has a recent post on his blog called ‘8 steps to serving better (X)HTML’ . It’s a good list. I aspire to have clean code that validates on my websites. Not there yet, but getting closer all the time. I find it gets difficult the more hands in the pot, you know? Sometimes following up after a number of coders doing the same project takes time.
Dandelife
A long time friend of Joe’s (and then luckily, friend of mine by default) has created Dandelife, a place to store your memories. Kelly Abbott calls it a Social Biography Network. He didn’t just create this as a hobby. He believes in it so much that he actually quit his job to do it full time. You could say that Dandelife is his life. (I know. Sorry.)
I tried it out a while back and realized that I could really use a place like Dandelife. It’s different than a blog in the way that you can chronologically write in the memories and stories of your life instead of what you ate for lunch yesterday. You can capture your story so you don’t forget it, and put in the details you might not want to go into on your blog but you do want somewhere. And, if you’re like me, it’s fun to see who else was doing things around the same time and where.
I asked Kelly a few questions about Dandelife and he was nice enough to answer.
LP: What was the inspiration for you to create Dandelife?
KA: Loved blogging a little too much, you could say. That’s the short version. The less-short version? Dandelife Origins – I’ve got 11 posts and counting on our blog that create some kind of picture as to why I would drop everything for Dandelife.
LP: What does Dandelife mean to you?
KA: What is it to me? It’s my baby. It’s funny, but I’ve been giving birth to this idea for many years. You can read some of those stories here. But what Dandelife means to me deeper, I suppose, than just a business. I often joke with people that it’s the culmination of my being. I love photos. I love storytelling. I love the Internet and community building online. In a way, Dandelife is the logical progression of bring all of those desires I have into one place.
LP: What kind of mark do you think Dandelife will leave on the world or with individuals?
KA: The mark that Dandelife should leave on individuals is simple: I want people who visit to be entertained by the stories people are sharing here. For the members who’ve signed up, I want their lives to be an archive of sorts. A trusted venue for housing their memories is important to do right. Which leads to the world at large. I want the community at Dandelife.com to reflect the world as it is. The stories people are sharing are quite different from the stuff you read about in your daily news. The connections being made run deeper than those you make at MySpace. What’s happening on Dandelife is very real – even if it is “virtual.”
LP: What is your favorite part of Dandelife?
KA: My favorite part hasn’t been developed yet. Users are giving me recommendations on a daily basis. That combined with the constant loop of ideas that we have going on internally, there are some pretty creative features coming. I can’t wait to tell you about them.
If you were to put my feet to the fire, then I’d have to admit that my favorite part right now is the timeline you see on the home page. It’s what our members love the most and seems to be what the blogosphere digs the most as well. People just love the idea of seeing their life – visually – at a glance. Keep hitting refresh on the home page and you’ll start to see some pretty neat stories popping up every time. I sometimes find that I’ve wasted an entire afternoon bouncing from one good story to the next. Of course, for me, that’s not an occupational hazard at all. 🙂 For you – I hope it’s a nice diversion from the daily grind.
Thanks, Kelly.
Ramblings
Is there a statute of limitations on how long the dirty clothes can stay in the pile in the middle of the living room? If there is, I think I may be pushing the limit. That and the sacks of used grocery bags, the hundreds and hundreds of used grocery bags sitting by the front door waiting to go to Whole Foods to be recycled.
I could actually pick up the dirty clothes and take them into the garage where the washer is. OR I could ACTUALLY put them IN the washer. Just a suggestion I’m making to myself. Since, you know, I like clean underwear and I might need some someday.
The downstairs bathroom is not working. That is not that big a deal since we have two of them upstairs, but after a few days, it gets OLD running upstairs every time you need to tinkle. We tend to wait until the last possible second to make the trip which I’m sure is hell on our kidneys but looks really entertaining when the Jehovah Witnesses drop by and get to witness the Pee Dance.
So, you might ask, why haven’t we fixed it yet? Well, a little thing called money, as in, not enough of it quite yet. But soon! Soon there will be fixed bathrooms for all!
Tonight is Barcamp Geek Meetup in Santa Monica. I think we will go. I need more geeks in my life.
ps. Go see Amanda’s head in a cowgirl hat keep popping up in her header.
Did You Request a City?
Could I have your attention please?
I’ve got some cities here at the lost and found looking for their owners. The cities are not lost, the owners are. If you are an owner, please report to the lost and found and claim your city.
Thank you.
lpc
ps. your url can’t show up on the bloggernetwork.org site until you have at least one city claimed in your profile.
Blogger Network
UPDATE: 8/4 1:00am: Joe has been cleaning up some code and doing general awesome things all over the place. I’ve gone through the database and tried to add and correct cities to those of you that had them pending since we had to break a few things to fix a few things. Ain’t that always the way? But if you used a different email to request the city than the one you used to sign up, I can’t match you and you’ll need to log in and do it yourself. Photography and Personal are both added as a focus. We rearranged the city/states. The search feature hasn’t been added yet but at least you can read through the cities now without wanting to rip your eyes out. Seriously, thanks for all your great feedback.
UPDATE: 8/3 1:10pm: I’ve had a few suggestions for putting the city name next to the person’s name or url. For example, when you are on the main BloggerNetwork page and are viewing the entire list of the last updated sites, you would be able to tell who belonged to which city before you clicked on their url. From a design perspective, I’m not sure how that looks. If any of you that are thinking along those lines wants to come up with a design to work it in, let me know. I’m happy to see any and all idea. This is turning into quite a community effort and I THANK YOU for you feedback and help. And, yes, I’ll be changing the way the cities looks and having them listed by state option and also alphabetical order option. But probably not today.
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UPDATE: 8/3 11:30am: Some of the cities are not showing up in connection to your urls. Troubleshooting now. You should not have to add your cities again or anything. But if you click on your city on the right and your url doesn’t show, just know I’m working on it. Thanks!
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UPDATE: 8/3 10:15am: (i know, right?) Don’t forget to log back into your account and add your city to your url once I get it listed.
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UPDATE: 8/3 10am: WOW! You guys totally rock! The list of cities is getting longer and longer. At some point, I might need to have only states listed on the right with a city dropdown. But we’ll be adding a search as well, and that might help you to find your city fastest. For those of you asking, ‘Hey! Where is said BloggerNetwork badge to put on my site?’ To you I say ‘Soon.’ And thank you for asking. But you can put a text link on your site now, if you want. KristyK suggested we add an icon for Photography and Suebob suggested a Personal category. Both great ideas and will be implemented soon. Thanks, everyone!
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UPDATE: 8/2 midnight: The issue is fixed. Please, resume the adding of your blogs and let me know if you find any other errors. Your info is now safe. If you signed up earlier tonight, please login to BloggerNetwork.org and update with a new password. Thanks!
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UPDATE 8/2 7pm: Schmutzie wins as the person to find the first bug. Thanks, Schmutzie! We’ll be back in a few hours when it gets fixed. Something about your personal information being important and all that crap…..
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I hate going on a trip to a new city and not knowing whom of my blogger friends lives there. What if I went all the way there and then all the way home and THEN found out that so-and-so lived there and we could have hooked up for drinks?
I had an idea for a simple and easy to use blog listing by city. Sure, at some point it could be shaped into something with groups, networking, an ad service and whatever else was wanted but the main thing I want it for – is for me. And you, if you want.
So, add your blog. Right now, my son and myself are the only ones there and we are a little lonely. Send suggestions for improvement. Tell me you want to work on the design. (Please! The design!) Tell me anything that comes to mind. Add your city! The San Diego listing will have a ton of names in it in a few weeks because we are going to migrate all the content from here to there. But, if you are already on SDB, go ahead and sign up anyway. It will save me work, and that is totally cool. You can pick more than one city if you so desire. That is mostly for me as well, since I want to claim Los Angeles and San Diego and figured other people might be like me. (what? no?) You can also put in little, tiny (so cute!) icons by selecting up to three areas of focus and also, rss, atom and anything else you can think of to make yourself appear as geeky as possible. Again, mostly for me so I know what you’re talking about and if we can be friends. Also, if you are an anonymous blogger or prefer to use only your first name, totally fine. Just make sure your online published name is not your real, secret name. Capiche?
The whole point is so that I can come to your city and have a drink with you. What’s not to like?
PS. if you find kinks or bugs, please let me know.
I Heart Zooomr
It’s new. It’s fun. I love it. I’m probably jumping the gun writing about it because Thomas told me that very soon there will be even newer upgrades, but I can’t help myself – I Heart Zooomr.
Everyone knows I love Flickr. And I still do. Zooomr does not take the place of Flickr. It instead fills another need I have, which is storytelling with my photos. I can upload my photos to Zooomr and go to the LightMap and actually GEO-place them where I physically took them. Kind of like a little breadcrumb trail of where I’ve lived and traveled and what has interested me enough to photograph. Can you just feel the ideas coursing through my veins? The possibilities??
And adding to that is the option to tag yourself inside all your photos that show you. There are specific guidelines, like making sure a certain percentage of yourself is showing in the photo, but just think what this can do for the vain people (or the teen to young 20 set with the ‘angles’ shots) in the world in helping inspire them to shoot themselves more! And other people that take your photo can add your ‘name’ tag to their photos. And pretty soon you are the most famous person at Zooomr. Ah, fame.
As if that weren’t enough, you can add to the story with a Zooomrtation. What is a Zooomrtation? It’s a sound file (MP3 and WAV) that further describes your image. It could be you talking about where you took the photo or a song to describe how you were feeling. I don’t know if there are any copyright issues with this.
The idea that I could travel inside someone’s head and see what they see, hear what they hear and experience how they feel totally tickles me in ways I can’t explain. Whatever makes me want to interview people and find out what makes them tick – that is the part of me that loves the entire Zooomr concept.
The log in process is a little hard for me. I’m so used to conventional methods, that having all the really cool and (I’m sure) progressive and safe ways to log in is a little much for me. I also get logged out more often than I would like. I would prefer to be able to just keep the browser window open and not get logged out. The community aspect of Zooomr could use some work, and it may be coming in the 2.0 launch, but all in all, I love it and can’t wait to see what happens next.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention one of my favorite parts: Zooomr has an explicit cover image that must be clicked on to show the actual image that has been tagged as explicit. As a mom, I SO appreciate that. You sometimes get tired of the child sitting next to you being surprised by a large set of gazongas that may be art or photographed with class, sure, but large gazongas all the same. It’s nice to have the choice to view it or not. I haven’t uploaded any image that would be considered explicit so I don’t know if this is a voluntary thing or not.
Making Me Feel Old and Vulnerable
Don’t make me get out my glasses and try to decipher your secret code that keeps getting longer and longer and wonkier and wonkier. For, I am not spam. And yet, I feel for you in your quest to keep the spam out. I really do. But, man, you’re making me feel old and vulnerable. I am not a Master Decoder. I am but a mere mortal with limits. And sadly, these limits include no Decoder Ring.
