ArtLung

Since September 2009 I, and my friend CPG have been posting photos and videos to New City: nuevaciudad.tumblr.com.

It’s been a great chance for me to try out Tumblr. I think it’s a great, focused tool. It’s great for images, and great for social. The downside of posting mostly images is that really it’s rampant with the use of images without the permission of whomever created that images. Anil Dash’s YouTube and the Million Mixer March is worth looking at in this regard. I think increasingly, people ignore the issues of permission and copyright entirely. I think I look at fair use far more expansively than I did at one time. I also think that if someone wants to complain, they will. I worried, for years, about putting up the audio of the Larry King stories–I captured them in 2002 but was only comfortable putting them up this year.

The social aspect of Tumblr, I don’t do much with, other than the chance to group-blog with a friend. I’ve missed that since I sold San Diego Blog back in 2007. It’s fun to see what he posts, and to see if I can find items that similar, though mostly it seems to be about what’s different. It’s kind of amazing how my interests in the subjects covered there have stayed so strong, so long. It seems to be about science fiction, aerospace, space travel, comics, Japan, Blade Runner. My 16 year-old self would be right at home posting to New City, though he would be shocked about the ease with which one can use search engines to find interesting and obscure images, so quickly.

One of my favorite aspects of blogging images is you can do interesting at-a-glance visualizations that give a snapshot of what’s on a site. Here’s Tumblr Mosaic Viewer, on New City:

And as a side issue, “New City” is a very old concept of Chris and me. It was going to be the company name we would use for our world domination plans. Here’s an ancient image I made on the Amiga. Circa about 1986-1988

I am not at South by Southwest. Leah is.

I went, myself, back in 2001. That’s 9 years ago. Austin was a great town and I had fun.

These many years later what stands out is meeting the folks from evolt at Evoltageddon 2. That was fun–really fun actually — The Ginger Man was a great bar. At the time I was an admin for Evolt, a community of web developers. There were a few other people I vaguely remember seeing. My memory is fading. I think I ran into Matt Haughey between panels. I attended film panels and web, or really “interactive” panels. I especially remember going to the premiere of No Maps For These Territories, a documentary about William Gibson. I attended the Webby Awards, I think. I had fun, but I didn’t fearlessly dive into the social aspect. I think had I gone 2 years later I’d have been much more social. I can experience some of SXSW via the podcasts they will release after the show is done. Leah will be promoting her various projects and probably participating in a panel.

I miss her, but I know she’ll have a good time!

Amy Adams recently confessed that she sometimes finds herself acting like her Gisele character from the movie “Enchanted” to please her young fans.

She tells, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain to little girls, ‘Shhh, I’m in disguise!’ One time I was at an airport and I was spotted by an adorable three year old. I thought I’d ruined her life. She looked at me as if to say, ‘You’re not Gisele!’ I thought, ‘I can’t be responsible for her loss of faith,’ so I told her in my Gisele voice that I was in disguise so that Queen Narissa (evil witch) couldn’t find me. And she was like, ‘Oooh!’

(via suicideblonde)

A new site launch, for Tyler Peterson, my stepson who I am extremely proud of. Here’s a screenshot:

Once again, Balsamiq Mockups has proved awesome for quickly getting to agreement about basic layout and design.

Check it out, particularly if you’re a college who wants to give a talented running back, great student, and very giving kid a break!

Leah asked me to implement a simple redesign she had cooked up. She was tired of the heavy and dense site she had, and I am responsible for turning her new design into a clean, purely WordPress driven site. It seems to work well so far. See Leahpeah: flawed but authentic.

I moved a fair amount of stuff around. One thing of note is that I changed her former blog url structure, which included the post_id as part of it. The way we worked this site was she began to input prior pieces of her site, then I would do selective imports of her posts and pages. Some pages did not make the cut.

Unfortunately the impact of that was that all her old urls were then off. Primary database keys are great if you’re going to stick with the original database. If you import it in chunks, the impact is catastrophic for the permanence of links. So last night I made a list of all the former links using a backup of the site, then did the same thing with the new url scheme. This worked great, and now permanent redirects are in place for all 1115 of her old posts (since 2002!).

It was a lot of work, but so far so good. Her blog is the most trafficked part of her site, and that area is slightly different in terms of including footer blog chrome:

Leah is about to get a bit more attention as she’s now appearing on the Showtime website, and fairly soon will be appearing on Showtime itself. A critical piece of being able to handle the possibility (it is not guaranteed) of high traffic is wp-super-cache, which I have active and ready. We’ll see if a) any traffic comes and b) if her WordPress install holds up. Now keep in mind, Leah’s site has withstood a dooce-ing or two.

Oh, and by the way, for the uninformed: doocing is analogous to slashdotting. Or, wait, actually, what is the best metaphor for “a high amount of traffic from one source all of a sudden because of a mention” — digging? fireballing?

One of the things that made this project go so fast was the fact that we did wireframes of the new Leahpeah.com before we started one bit of code. This helped immensely with the process, and aided greatly through the use of Balsamiq Mockups is really a great tool for rapidly putting together a site and getting to an understanding of what pieces and parts will and won’t be necessary.

He says:

if you have had someone close to you pass away in the last few years, i would really like to hear about your experiences related to the web. This can be anything from trying to find a funeral home or caskets, to trying to create a memorial site, or dealing with a remnant social network page. what were good experiences, what were bad experiences, what was missing, and any general reflections on dealing with death in the digital age. thanks.

Go to need some insight on death and remembrance in the digital age and let him know. You know, I met him once, and he was quite a nice fellow.

Apparently this “cloud” thing is made of computers, it’s not just water vapor. Funny video featuring Larry Ellison.

via Daring Fireball

Blogger has done work to create a migration tool for Blogger FTP users and is doing great communication.

You can move to a blogspot blog, (which you could do before) or change from self-hosting to being hosted by Blogger/Google by changing the DNS to point at Google’s servers. This is similar to how tumblr handles custom domain hosting.

The real failing here is that this does not account for whatever images or other multimedia you have in your posts.

It’s great that Blogger is doing all this work to communicate the changes, but I don’t think this migration tool is that great a solution. It’s also unclear to me how well this will work if you were hosting your blog in a subdirectory of your site.

This would not have been a solution that would have worked for any of the folks I’ve recently migrated.