It was a pretty crazy week. Started off pretty nicely with a good article on Salon about tagging, and it included a pretty nice section on 43 Things. Then I got a call at 7am the next morning from the reporter, and I was completely unprepared for the slew of questions that came at me (I was in "the site must be broken" mode, which is the only reason I'd normally get called at that hour). Needless to say, I was incoherent, groggy, unprofessional, and nervous, and ended up making a pretty big fool of myself. Woohoo! My new tagline is "Nobody's supposed to know about that." Yikes. My coworkers had a good laugh about that one, but for a while there I was feeling pretty low. At least now I know not to answer unrecognized phone calls at 7 in the morning... and I have a good "embarrassing story" to put in my Nerve Personals profile. Not every day that one gets publicly humiliated on the front page of a big news site. Good times good times. Thank you to everyone that stood up for my lameness.
A lot of discussion over on the Robot Co-op blog about the Amazon investment in our company. I don't really have much to add at the moment other than that I feel like I'll be happier if I remain blissfully unaware of the traps and strategies of publicity and the media. Part of being an amateur is about staying focused on what you love, and not getting distracted by trying to appear effective and professional to the outside. I'll trade a bit of ineffectiveness for happiness any day. But if anyone will take the word of a dumbass... I can understand why people want more information, but I hope it's enough to know for now that our intentions are good, and not evil.
Part of my continued obsession with outsourcing as many things as possible, from books to music to movies to cars, has now moved to outsourcing my blog. I used to write my own blog/wiki back in the day. Then I moved to Movable Type. But blogging turns out to be so much more than a single blog can handle. My online presence is scattered across a dozen different sites, some which can post to my blog, others that can accept pings from my blog, but for a while now this hasn't felt good enough because I actually end up using different sites for different audiences and experiences.
Since all of them seem to be offering RSS feeds, I thought I might just use those as a way to collect the rain drops into a bucket and pour the aggregate into a little shot glass every hour... I'm not describing this well. I'll just say what I did. I made a folder in Bloglines that has all of the RSS feeds around the web that have stuff that I've written/done. Then I used the Bloglines Web Service to get an aggregated, normalized feed of all my content in one stream, and used Ruby On Rails to easily store and display this content over here. Of course, it only makes sense to then roll all of this stuff up again into a new feed, pass it through FeedBurner, and offer it up again as a pretty pretty feed with stats and everything. Currently, I have zero readers, so if you want to have access to way too much Erik Benson than is healthy, subscribe to this. In any case, now, all of my stuff is being stored on other peoples' servers, and yet I'm still pulling it all together on my own server. This is probably only exciting to very few people. There's a list of all of my sources on hello.erikbenson.com.
In the meantime, I've also integrated more of my Morale-O-Meter stuff into it as well. Now, I'm displaying my monthly and daily averages alongside all of the other content. For example, check out February's In-progress Report. I want to make an RSS feed for these monthly things too, but it's a bit too computationally expensive to compute averages for 12 months on a single page load at the moment. I'll have to refactor a bit and get back to that later.
Anyway, so a pretty nerdy end to a fun week. I wanted to write about taste tests, Aeron chairs, and brainwashing, but that'll have to wait until later I think.
Wow, you've done an amazing job remixing and re-designing your blog - and with the Bloglines API no less! You da man. I find it interesting (in a nerdy way) how you've gone from roll-yer-own software to MT to Typepad. I replaced my linkblog with delicious early Jan and did other Web 2.0-ish things, but you've raised the bar. Oh, re Feedburner - you can re-direct all your current subs across to that with some htaccess dohickey. So you get a count of all subscribers, not just the new ones.
Also, I thought that Salon article totally sucked - especially after the first article that was positive. A low blow. So good to see the Robots are taking it in their stride.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | Sunday, 13 February 2005 at 05:09 PM
Thanks Richard. Yeah, it's definitely been a strange road from trying to do everything myself to letting the people who know how to do it best do it for me. It'll be interesting to see if this recombination of all my content will make me less apprehensive about having such a fragmented identity. The cool thing is that almost any new thing to come in the future is bound to have an RSS feed, so I can just add it to the mix and continue along.
I'll take a look at the redirection stuff... do you have any pointers for the best syntax to use in .htaccess to get this effect? Probably a simple 302 (or whatever the number is) with a quiet redirect will work?
I am bummed about the recent press, but we have no choice really other than to hope that our intentions will be something we can prove a little better as time goes on.
Posted by: Erik Benson | Sunday, 13 February 2005 at 09:03 PM
I have a feeling you got the redirects working because I got the burned feed instead of the plain old on this past evening. This is something I feel like I might do as well because I'm starting to spread out a bit on the web. Now that I know it can be done, I'll probably make this my new personal project.
Posted by: Ryan | Monday, 14 February 2005 at 12:10 AM
Re the re-direct, there are some handy links at the end of this post I did last year:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/002350.php
The main help post from Feedburner is this one:
http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/000425.html
I think you may've done it already, judging by my Bloglines this evening. But those are the refs in any case (sorry I should have noted them in my first comment)
Re the recent press, I suppose looking on the bright side - the 43 Things brand is out there now, even if it was by sensationalistic coverage. And most people will recognize the second Salon piece for the tabloid rubbish it was.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | Monday, 14 February 2005 at 12:28 AM
Awesome. Yeah, I got it working... though, I realize now that by combining all of my feeds and then forwarding some of them through feedburner, I'm now aggregating feeds through feedburner which in turn aggregate feeds from several other places. Yikes. I wonder what would happen if I created an infinite feed loop.
Posted by: Erik Benson | Monday, 14 February 2005 at 02:28 AM
I'll keep an eye on the server load charts! (smile)
Posted by: Eric Lunt | Monday, 21 February 2005 at 08:09 PM
I read your blog on outsourcing. This blog is quite informative for my business, even I have blog on outsourcing so can we exchange the links to share our knowledge resources.
Posted by: bhavna | Wednesday, 23 March 2005 at 08:57 PM
Hello erikbenson.typepad.com.. It's pitty, but I'am fat a little:) I wanted to start a new diet two days ago, and when I search for it i found this [url=http://www.buydietbook.com]low carb diet plwn[/url] site... than I read about this diet on another sites and it looks to be true.. why i'am here? - cause I visit yoru site those weekend and saw a theme about diets, but I can't find it now.. emm.. sorry for offtopic..
I want just to know is it true that I can lose weight a little quickly & for a for a long period with this [url=http://www.buydietbook.com]free low carb diet plan[/url] or another diet..
oh.. please give me know that it's true... thanks & have anyone a story or [url=http://www.buydietbook.com]free 3 day diet plan[/url] like this, the main question is how to loss weight quickly without trainings?
ps. yeah, I'am blondy :) Goodbye!
Posted by: unconrege | Sunday, 12 August 2007 at 10:57 PM