How to be a Zombie
by Warren on Feb.05, 2010, under News
Step 1) Bring your blog back from the not-so-long dead
Step 2) ???
Step 3) Avoid Cliches
Currently working on a custom designed theme just so I can say I designed my own WP theme. In the mean time, check out the lack of content at my other site, http://warrenbutt.com/
p.s. didja notice I found a working backup copy of my old posts? YAY!
Double your Dollars
by Warren on Jul.22, 2009, under Internet, Social Media, Technology
Why does it seem like every site I visit lately has removed content to double the amount of advertising and senseless branding in the last month? This is a phenomenon I’ve observed before, but never in a synchronized manner such as this, coming right on the heels of everyone thinking they can make money off of Twitter.
How much advertising is too much advertising? It’s no surprise that sacraficing content in the name of branding is usually going to loose you more customers than you gain in ad revenue, but what is the threshold at which you can really start to profit off of your reader base?
You could always make something so addicting that people don’t care about the advertising, but as anyone who’s survived high school knows, popularity is a fickle mistress. It’s cool to like the uncool, till the uncool becomes popular, at which point it’s no longer cool, but still a decent cash cow worthy of milking till something else comes along.
Or you could take the other approach and become so popular that people just throw money at you because you exist.
Dummy Proofing your Applications
by Warren on Jul.15, 2009, under Internet, Technology
I recently came across a problem developing an application that I hadn’t thought of before (mostly because it’s not something I’ve ever had to do before) but is, in its generic sense, a problem as old as computers themselves. That problem is, of course, portability.
No I’m not talking about the dreaded Windows/Unix/Apple debate. I’m talking about something as simple as database technology. I was surprised to find out that PHP didn’t natively support database driver interchangability! Even Java supports it (to an extent), yet I was 3 weeks into my project before I realized that my testing server was running MySQL, but the production server was going to be running PostgreSQL.
Google Street Spies
by Warren on Jun.18, 2009, under News, Technology
I saw my first Google Street View car cruising around Regina today, and the first thought that went through my head was that of looking forward to seeing all the confused looks of my fellow citizens as the car drives by with a giant high definition 360 camera strapped to the top. I entertained this thought all afternoon until I got home and did a little research, only to find out that Google Canada decided to blur all the faces in the images.
(continue reading…)
Death of a Medium
by Warren on May.04, 2009, under News
Imagine yourself reading a book. Imagine the feel of the paper in your hands, the ease with which you turn the page, the thrill of wondering what comes next.
Now imagine yourself reading a newspaper. Imagine the paper as it resists your every attempt to keep it straight, the woman next to you on the bus glaring at you as you elbow her once again trying to read that last comic or check the sports scores.
Newspapers as we know them are going the way of the dodo bird, and the newspaper industry is doing all it can to try and make sure we know that. And while they slowly waste away in to nothing, where are people really getting their news?
Blogging Made Easy
by Warren on May.01, 2009, under Technology
In honor of the weekend I figured I’d take the liberty of trying out a few new blogging tools which may or may not make your life easier.
First on deck we’ve got Zemanta, available as a Wordpress plugin or, for those not using Wordpress or unable to install plugins, it’s also available as an extension for Firefox. Zemanta will automatically search for contextualy related articles, links, images, and videos avaialbe under Creative Commons licences or fair use, or lets you search for an image of whatever you want, say a cat. Notice the fancy popup attributions?
- Image by law_keven via Flickr
Zemanta takes a lot of the headache out of finding and attributing content and images for your blog and suggests other blogs that have written about similar content to make researching faster.
I’ve also been using Prism by Mozilla Labs. I’ve been using it to run Web2.0 sites like Google Reader and my Wordpress control panel. Prism gives you a clean, fast, stand alone environment to run them the same way you would run any desktop application. Prism makes it easy to keep web applications open that you use all the time such as your RSS reader or Hootsuite.
Finally I’d like to make a quick mention to Incollector, a free program I use to keep track of notes, ideas, and references with a searchable and tagable database.
What programs do you use to make your daily life easier?
