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Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site's disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

Now that's pretty darn insightful. Zeldman mentions Jody Ferry's site specifically, and it's a great example: a home page, and then links that take viewers OFF the site.

I've been posting more photos to Flickr than I have to my family galleries. I spend more time on FaceBook - mindless distraction that it is - than I do posting on my own site. And I just joined Twitter, for reasons that I don't know that I fully understand. To what end? I'm not sure.

I see his point - websites used to be all about capturing eyeballs and keeping them on your site. Then people started selling adverts, and it was even more important to keep those visitors coming in and staying in - or leaving through your adverts. Now, with the advent of all these more interesting services, and the ease with which they can be used, more people are just taking advantage of that ease and moving their content elsewhere. Why try to build your own photo gallery - or install someone else's - when you can just point people to your Flickr collection? Why post regularly when you can Twitter? Well, that's not quite the same, but it's similar.

I myself discovered del.icio.us and have all but stopped using the bookmark feature in my web browserS. Why? Part of it is the ease of having my bookmarks so easily available - especially from the multiple platforms and browsers. It's also a lot easier to find bookmarks when I need them - I tag everything going into del.icio.us, sometimes over-tagging them, but it's really easy to find stuff now - rather than spending 20 minutes trying to remember the name of a site, I go to the page for the tag that I believe is the right, and I usually have the link right there.

What does this all mean? I myself have been farming work out to others - and didn't think too much about doing it. Due to the nature of the internet, and the way my account is setup, my photos are public, my Twitters are public, and most of my bookmarks are public. Do I care? Well, sometimes I wonder if I'm sharing too much. But at the same time, I haven't done anything to lock down my family photo gallery - although it would be trivial to do so. I make an effort to keep my bookmarks private when it's not something I want shared with the public. I can do the same thing with my Flickr photos - and have done so in the past. Twitters, well, I guess that's more than a bit like this blog - I can, and do, self-censor. If I didn't, life might be more than a little awkward.

But where does it all lead?

So, I've noticed that there hasn't been any comment spam on the site for a while - like since I made the change to MT 4.1. Upon trying to comment on something myself, I realized that there is a problem: you can't comment.

I'm trying to figure it out, and when it's working, then, well, you'll be able to comment.

Joy.

So, the problem with the new version of the backend that runs this site? It's that it requires a version of MySQL that I don't have access to. That's all geek to you, hopefully, but the long and the short of it is that an upgrade would need to be done to the server before I can upgrade my software. I don't really think that's going to happen anytime soon. This leaves me flustered, flumoxed, and irritated. But enough about that.

I bought a SATA drive a few months ago to go into a USB enclosure. It's super fast, but... not quite fast enough. So then I recently managed to get an external SATA enclosure (two drive) and an SATA Express Card for some super-duper high speed fun (editing a few videos, mostly). I tested it out a couple of times, and it was very nice.

Today, for fun, and since I don't use my computer much at work, I decided to see how long it would take to backup the computer via this new highspeed connection. A long time, apparently.

RIght now, it's doing about 130mb/min. I started it almost 3 hours ago, and it's done just over 20gb of backup, which is about 6gb/hour. That means that for the other 115gb, it would take about 19 hours. That's not... optimal. Of course, I have Mail, Photoshop, and a slew of other programs all running in the background, so that's not helping things. Regardless, it's not as super-duper fast as I had hoped it would. It is, however, still fast. And faster than the USB connected drive.

Now if only I could afford the 3TB of storage that I would probably need for all my data.....

Trouble with the upgrade? You bet. I haven't figured out what the problem is, but I believe it's something to do with one of my entries - a misplaced character that's making the server go all weird when I try to publish the site. i'll be working on it tonight, but who knows how long it will take or what, ultimately, will fix it.

And no, Lee, I will NOT just switch to EE :).

The reason? This image:

Sure, I look like my usual super-mega dork. But the beauty of this image is that it will change based on which webcam I used most recently: work or home. This is merely one aspect of the planned upgrades/changes/revitalization of the website. What does it mean to you, dear reader?

Nothing. Not an electronic sausage. Now, anyway. But soon!

Clearly, it's been a while since I posted. In the post move ruckus, I was dealing with the normal change stuff, but when I planned the move, I seem to have forgotten just how extensive my old website was. All kinds of crazy stuff that I don't recall creating/linking to - but it's there, so I must have done it. Apparently.

Anyway, when I'm not checking out the missing file error log, then I've been tweaking things. Oh, and working on the continued success of raising the kids and all that other fun/crazy stuff. Which reminds me: parentingchronicles.com seems to be offline, largely in part due to the way that the site is configured. Sorry, can't change it now, but that will be fixed shortly (I hope).

What's new.... Well, the kids are almost done with school for the year. We had the kindergarten picnic earlier this week - it went well, I thought - and we also bought a new camera: The Canon PowerShot A560. It's a super-fancy 7.1MP digital camera with 4x optical zoom and some other fancy stuff - like the new Automatic Face Finder thingee, which is all the rage with the cool kids of late. If your camera doesn't have that, then you're camera is old and weak. Really. You should just give up and go home ;).

Anyway, like I said it's a great camera. The LCD is 2.5", which is pretty big - much bigger than we're used to. It makes it easy to see what you're getting a photo of, and makes it really easy to make sure you got the right shot. The only bad photos I've taken so far have been the ones with bad poses - or the usual eyes closed thing - I don't think there's a feature that can fix that, but I keep looking....

We've only taken a few photos with it so far, but as I said, they've been mostly good ones. :noah: has a T-Ball game today, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to get some good photos during the game. If not (it will be me and three kids), then I'm hoping to be able to post some of the photos from Kindergarten picnic the other day.

We've also got some exciting stuff going on in the schooling front. Miss Abigail (Miss B or just plain :abby: ) is making the exciting from pre-school to Kindergarten. We don't know who her teacher will be next year (although we're liking Ms. Griffin after all of Noah's success this year) we're sure she'll do fine.

Noah is moving up to the multi-age program. I think I've covered this before, but it's two classrooms that are both 1st and 2nd graders. It's a co-operative learning environment. I don't know much about the theories behind it, I just know that the school has had a lot of success with the program, they're proud of it, and :emma: had a good time with it when she was in the program. If our luck holds, Abby will be in the program in two years, which would mean that she and Noah will be together in some of their classes. Hopefully they'll do a little better dealing with each other than they do now - but since that's in two years, I'm hopeful that things will be ok.

:ethan: is progressing nicely. We're not doing anything formal with him, but he's a bit of a sponge when it comes to learning things. He's working on colors, knows a shape or two, and is just a great, funny little monkey. He's got more than a few words under his belt, and he's starting to put toddler sentences together, which makes everyones lives easier ("I want cookie" is much more likely to get a cookie and no tears than "That!" and a lot of pointing in a general direction). Plus, who doesn't love hearing "Daddy!" shouted when he spots me coming home and then a big hug from a little monkey? The other kids are all "Oh, hey, your home - can I have a snack?" or something.

Well, I think that's enough updating for now. Emma's got a party to go to, I have to get ready and then get the other three ready for the T-Ball game, and then there's supposed to be some time for some lawn mowing later today, I hope. Well, maybe. Photos and updates, and will hopefully resume on a more frequent basis starting later today - depending on how T-Ball goes, I should think.