A New Direction

My interests recently have started leading in a new direction, if not a new evolution, from what they have been in the past. But first, let’s recap.

Two Years Ago…
It was right around this time in 2007 when I was hitting my stride on the creative aspect of my web development. Up to then, most of my web work was related to coding and application development, while the launch of Ka'anapali Dreamin' was my biggest effort put forth in creating a content-rich site.

I was just back from our second visit to Maui, swamped with tons of photos I had taken, filled with the Aloha Spirit, and inspired to spend every waking hour I could on building a great online resource sharing our experiences with the Valley Isle. I like to think it was a success, and regardless of how many visitors there were and where I was in the search rankings, it was a labour of Aloha and a ton of fun to put together and maintain.

Yes, the site is still live and needs a fresh coat of paint here and there, but free time hasn’t really been in my favor for doing some of the site maintenance and enhancements that I had originally planned for by now.  Which leads me to the next stop in our time capsule journey.

Last Year
By this time last year, I was in full swing on Twitter (@webnelly) and earning a tiny spot in the totally cool Hawaii social media ohana. Blogging is where my free time was now being spent, and I was setting goals for myself to try and write on one of my blogs at least once a day. Again, like working on and expanding Ka’anapali Dreamin’, blogging was a ton of fun, taught me a lot about myself, and fostered connections with people across the world.

For me, blogging always was a two way street, with about 80% of my time reading and commenting on other blogs and 20% writing for myself. With so many neat blogs and designs, topics covering all ends of my interests, and interacting with some great people made it very engaging and yes, addicting. My peak blogging rate was about 2-3 posts per day up to our annual trip to Maui in February (2009). There were a few mind/life changing realizations and moments during those 2 weeks in paradise that I won’t go into here, but my writing started to dry up to make way for a newer obsession.

Leading up to…

The Now
All signs seem to indicate that my newest passion started when we first stepped foot on Maui, but it took 3 more trips the islands, a handful of weekend drives up to nearby Door County, WI, some professional hockey games, our cute little rabbits, and a helicopter without doors to realize what was next in my life.

Photography.

That seems like an odd segue, doesn’t it? For the most part, that really sums it up, though. My first serious camera was a Canon EOS 20D DSLR that I purchased prior to our first trip to Maui in 2006. It was right there in paradise where I first fumbled with the controls and still managed to capture some great memories of our trip.

And that really was the initial intent of buying that camera, just to capture memories. Yet, after a few more trips to Maui, and finding more places closer to home to shoot, it became less about capturing memories and more about capturing images. Like other hobbies that have I have found challenging, I began to dive in deeper, read more, practice whenever I could, and push myself to get better.  Which is really where I am today.

While I put up a small photography portfolio, photonelly.com, last year, it’s only been since last February where my seriousness and focus in this craft has taken off. I now had enough (in my opinion) beautiful images of Maui to start a “photo memory” site, Maui by Photo in July, and worked my [you know what] off to find and manage a second job over the summer to afford another trip to Maui for the Maui Photo Festival and Workshops just last month. That was it, I was officially bitten by the shutterbug.

What’s Next
My goal now is to just keep shooting, and practice, practice, practice. Stopping to think about it, photography fits nicely into many of the aspects that my other hobbies have also occupied.

• I seem to have a knack for it, and really enjoy it
• It’s challenging, and something I can continuously push myself to improve on
• The technology and techniques are constantly changing and there’s always something new to learn
• There are great communities around it, both online and in person
• There are a ton of cool gadgets (okay, not a key aspect of all my hobbies, but fun none-the-less)

So now, instead of planning for site upgrades and blog posts, I am planning my own photo shoots and equipment budgets. Much like my the other hobbies listed here, I’m already immersed in photography to the point of saturation, and the feeling of being overwhelmed is pretty much an everyday reality now. On any given day, I have a ton more photos to go through, edit, and post than I ever have time for, and trading sleep and other activities for time in front of the computer is a regular negotiation in progress.

How Long Will This Last?
Seeing that I’ve been doing some sort of programming, either software or on the web, for more than half my life now, I’ve been known to stick with these types of things for the long haul. I can see photography making a strong stance in my daily activity for quite some time. At least for all the time, money, and effort I’m investing in this relatively new hobby of mine, it better stick around awhile.

If you’d like to tag along, or just read a little bit more of what I’m doing with a camera, head over to photonelly.com and check out my photostream on Flickr. Those two places promise to have a lot of activity in the coming months and years as I embark on this new journey of my free time.

Here’s to making a good run at it.
- Kris

Testing Windows Live Writer 2009

A co-worker of mine, and brand new blogger, came across Windows Live Writer 2009 as a way to draft and publish new posts, so I decided to try it out. Even though it’s named “Windows Live”, it is intended to work with more than just Windows Live Spaces. I’m trying it out as a way to publishing to my Blogger account, and my friend has installed BlogEngine.NET for his blog.

This is my first test post with this software, and after I put it through it’s paces, I’ll share my findings (good or bad). I have been growing a little weary of the standard Blogger.com online editor for drafting posts and have even had thoughts of switching over to WordPress as well. We’ll have to see what and when I make any drastic changes like that.

Thanks.

Social, Networking, and Social Networking

I spent much of the latter part of 2008 committing my time to two popular social networks, Twitter and Facebook. While having somewhat different goals for each, I mainly ignored their differences out of what you might consider laziness and mostly treated them the same. I even installed the Twitter application on Facebook to have all my tweets sent over to Facebook, which I guess wasn't always relevant to my Facebook friends and vice versa.

After finally heading out for more ideas about using Twitter, I ended up at the blog TwiTip and ultimately at the post Twitter vs. Facebook. While most of the post was not new to me (although there was some interesting comparisons made), it was sort of the splash of cold water on my face that I needed to get me to realize, and treat, these two apps differently.

The Social

Signing up at Facebook was more about being social with current friends, connecting with maybe one or two of the few from the past, and not so much about finding new friends.  I'm not doing too much on Facebook to network or promote any of my work online, and I'm okay with that. I realize there are some opprotunities out there to spread the word on my life online, and to some extent, it has brought some awareness to friends already in my inner circle about just how much I do online.  Sure, there's a few jokes here and there, but I think it has brought about some sort of respect for my committment and knowledge of this little thing called the Web.

The Networking

By somewhat stark contrast, my use of Twitter has been mainly to meet new individuals out there with similar interests, goals, and habits online. Those interactions have been the more traditional sense of networking, in regards to exchanging information, samples of each other's works, goals, and strategies. While less personal than Facebook, I think this use of Twitter has offered examples of my work online to a further reach than just amongst my existing "real life" friends.

Different Sets of Friends

Interesting enough, but by no means surprising, I've ended up with different sets of friends at each of these online destinations. I already mentioned that my group of Facebook friends are essentially people in my life everyday, co-workers (past and present) and folks I've become friends with over the different parts of my life.  My Twitter circle, on the other hand, largely consists of people in Hawaii, of all places.

The Hawaii part makes sense, though, because many of my waking hours for the last few years have been spent dreaming of Maui (at least when we're not actually there). My wife and I have talked about, and I have somewhat planned for, what life would be like in the next few years actually relocating to the Aloha State, and what types of changes that would need to bring about.

So in some sense of the meaning, the networking I do on Twitter with folks in Hawaii is all about learning what life is like there, making contacts, getting advice, and building a group of future "real life" (aka Facebook) friends should we bite the bullet and make the move 4,000 miles West. There is also a more immediate benefit to the networking I do on Twitter, and that is promoting my own Maui website. While there is no current (or likely ever) monetary focus put on traffic to my Maui site, I really enjoy the community and the interactions with our site's readers as well as participating in the communities found on their own Hawaii/Maui blogs.

No Crossovers

Since I work in a technology field, and many of my Facebook friends are co-workers, you think I'd have more tweeps spanning both of my networks.  But the fact is, at the moment, I don't.  You might also be of the opinion that Twitter is still techie-only (aside from the spammers) and that normal, everyday people haven't adopted it yet. But again, the fact is that quite a few of my tweeps have never written a line of HTML or JavaScript in their lives.

For now at least, it doesn't seem that any of my Facebook friends will be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon anytime soon. I'm kind of okay with that, although having a few IRL friends as tweeps might make it feel a little less lonely sometimes when I read about tweetups and local events in Hawaii that, for the time being, I can only bear witness to from afar. Someday...

What about "Social Networking"

I guess one subtle point in this post (somewhere) is that I haven't really found a happy medium between both the Social and the Networking aspects of my time spent online. I guess if I was more political at work and had the desire to keep in touch with the vast number of past co-workers I've had over the years (something along the lines of LinkedIn), maybe there would be more usefulness of combining both. At least at this point in my life (and career), I haven't had the need to play those social games just to get something back in return. Maybe others might think I do that already, but honestly it's not something I have doing consciously.

So I get back to it, is there really a place (in my life at least) to blend both aspects into a true concept of Social Networking? The closet thing I can think of right now would be in a few years if/when we take the plunge and move to Maui. By doing so, many of my current tweeps become my friends in real life, and a la Facebook. And then what?  Who would I tweet with, then?

Hmmmmmm..........

Trying to Avoid Burnout

Well, maybe I'm already there.

Took my first day off from blogging yesterday,  mainly because I had lost most of the momentum I had going for the past few months.  Even though the holidays are behind us now, I still have a lot of non-web stuff to do and I'm finding myself spending less and less time at the keyboard for personal stuff. 

That might sound like a good thing for most people, but it's kind of a mixed blessing for me right now.  There are numerous activities and functions that I serve online these days, from my blogs, to site upgrades, discussions on Twitter, posts in Google Reader, self-learning Ubuntu and Rails, and even my photography that I've been spreading my free time across lately.  There are days when I can prioritize the small things and feel like I'm making progress, and others when I don't have the energy.  

I'm afraid I might be in that latter category right now, but hoping to recoupe a little bit and bounce back shortly.  As I mentioned, there are so many neat things I'm pushing myself towards, so I can't really say I'm "bored."  It's really about managing my time, priorities and rolling with the punches when I hit a few snags.

Hopefully I'll be back here shortly with some more cool updates to my sites and great blog posts soon.  Stay tuned.

What Gets Measured...

Part of my little blog calendar widget consists for creating a merged archive file in XML format with limited post information, like blog, title, date, etc. I've meaning to hit it with some XSL/T for a while now, just to see how some of the numbers are coming out month-by-month.

Just after putting together a quick prototype XSL stylesheet on my laptop, here are the numbers as they came out for November, listed per blog:

• Ka'anapali Dreamin' - 18 posts - Archive
• Kris and Cindy - 7 posts - Archive
• photonelly.com - 6 posts - Archive
• webnelly.com - 6 posts - Archive

That comes out to a combined total of ... 15, 27, carry the 1 ... 37 posts for the month of November. That's well above my goal of 1 post per day.

And the numbers for December are looking even better. With 10 days left in the month, I've already written 40 posts (41 if you include this one). That's setting a pace for almost 2 a day, which is very good considering I'm trying hard to find enough time to do all this.

Yearly Totals

2007 being my rookie season here in the blogosphere, I only posted 49 posts. It wasn't an entire year, and only included:

• Kris and Cindy for 9 months, starting in April,
  
• Ka'anapali Dreamin' for 4 months, starting in September, and
• webnelly.com for 3 months, starting in October.

This year being my first full year writing on what is now 4 blogs, I'm at 209 posts. That includes over 120+ at Ka'anapali Dreamin' alone!

At some point, I might think of posting these numbers somewhere, probably as part of kris.nelson. Maybe I'll even dress them up a little bit using the Google Chart API. I guess it's just another example of the old saying, "what gets measured, gets done." 

Oh, and in case you were wondering, this very post and the time spent working on the above numbers is a prime example of me chosing code over content, and procrastinating as usual. If I cared for making New Years resolutions, that might be one of them. :)

Code vs. Content

No one will argue the fact that Content is King, including myself. With my heavy coding background, however, it's not always easy to focus on writing content.

A Little Background On My Background

Professionally, my primary discipline has been building web applications. While sharing a few concepts with traditional website design, designing and developing web applications has many unique aspects to it. Without getting too specific, I spent many years designing application databases, learning new systems and frameworks, building out web services, coding integration with 3rd party applications, and very, very little time writing content.

It wasn't until about a year into my professional career did I start putting together websites on my own. The first, webnelly.com, was more of a playground than anything else. In fact, it looked down right awful.

Yikes! The next site I created was Nighthawks Hockey Online, which was heavy on application functionality rather than content. With a full community forum, extensive stats and schedule sections, and many other data driven features, large blocks of content were nowhere to be found.

Enter Content
It wasn't until I started Kris and Cindy a few years later did I really start writing content rather than code. It was a small start, since many of the pages only had 2-3 paragraphs at most. It was more of a website than a web application, however, since there wasn't much functionality. But the coder in me wasn't satisfied. No, instead of adding functionality to the site itself, I built an entire content management system to control every aspect of the site. In fact, the entire site can be administered from the web-based console, including adding new pages, javascript files, external RSS feeds, you name it.

About this time, I really started to focus on web standards and expanding my skillset with CSS based layouts, designing site comps and layouts with Photoshop, and ultimately signing up for a formal Web Design course. As a result, I created Ka'anapali Dreamin', which is by far the most content-rich site in my portfolio. With the launch of that site, I had successfully added Web Designer and Content Author to the list of roles I now play regularly.

Welcome to the Blogosphere
My entrance to the blogosphere was a little late than most people, giving me yet another place to write original content and contribute to the World Wide Web. Although it was a slow start, I now post on 4 different blogs and target at least 1-2 new posts a day. Anyone that writes on even a single blog will tell you that committing the necessary time and effort can sometimes be a challenge. While my situation is no different, I've always enjoyed writing throughout my life, and continuing with that has become very rewarding.

The Conflict
Where my personal conflict of code vs. content comes into play is that the Web is such an exciting place these days. There are so many cool things I still want to learn and incorporate into my sites. At my recent pace, I've probably been learning 1-2 new APIs a month from different sources like Blogger, Flickr, script.aculo.us, and others. While I enjoy writing, I thrive on learning, so that usually ranks higher when I have to choose what to work on.

For awhile, many of the pages on Ka'anapali Dreamin' were in a permanent "coming soon" state, because I was too busy building out new features to the rest of the site. I've recently tried my best to catch up, but it isn't always easy. I often find myself procrastinating on simple page updates and putting off writing prose just to tinker with something new. Sometimes things completely irrelevant will peek my interest and delay other updates.

Content is King
But I still realize that Content is King. Of all the changes and phases that I have gone through in my web development over the years, Ka'anapali Dreamin' has really brought on the biggest shift in my priorities. The primary focus of my previous sites has really been for my own personal use, or for friends and family. With my Maui site, the purpose is different. The goal of Ka'anapali Dreamin' is to "Share the Magic of Maui". That change in focus puts the site's visitors as the priority, and not just me doing something soley to learn how it works.

While I've been getting better at putting my visitors first and working on pushing out fresh content as frequently as I can, old habits die hard. For example, I have a week off from work this week because of the holiday, and I listed out a few things that I'm considering working on during the break. As you can see, quite a few new coding projects.

Too Many Roles?
At times I wonder if I'm trying to do too many things at once. My background might be a little unique (or maybe not), but I still wonder how many folks out there are trying to juggle being a Web Designer, Web Developer, and a Content Author all at the same time. Maybe it's more manageable for someone that just has a single site or blog. I imagine that having 6+ sites and 4 blogs that are frequently begging for attention doesn't help matters, but with someone that has so many different interests and so much to share, I have a hard time picking just one.

For now, I just continue the struggle with it. Like everything else, there are good days and bad ones. When I get on a really good roll with content and posting on my blogs, it is one heck of a feeling. The other extreme is getting burned out on writing and not feeling like doing either coding or content. I guess that perfect balance is out there somewhere, and if I ever get it down to a science and prove it can be done in a way that scales to multiple sites, I'll try to write it down.

Wasted Web Weekend

I was really looking forward to this past weekend away from the day-to-day, for many reasons. It is always quiet up in Door County, so that was very welcome. I also wanted to get out on the ice again, but none of the outdoor rinks were open.

As far as all that free time to push out a bunch of new content and posts for my different sites and blogs, I was psyched. Getting up at 6am (considered sleeping in for me these days), I could have a good 4+ hours alone with my laptop cranking out nothing but new code and tons of content. Not to mentioned time in the evenings as well, when the temp drops outside and there's nothing better than sipping hot cocoa next to a warm fireplace.

But alas, my hopes were dashed by a long series of incompetence by my current (and soon to be former) web host. I'm not here to rant or vent or blast these poor souls who apparently don't know very much about anything. Although, having saved all the chat transcripts and ticket updates, it could make for some very entertaining web sattire in the near future.

All told, my sites were not available from about Thursday evening and most of the day on Friday. This was due to a scheduled IP migration (which I was not aware of), and even though their status update said there would be no downtime, all sites were down due to propagation of the new shared IP addresses across the Internet.  If that was it, just about 24 hours of downtime, I probably could have managed to salvage some quality time with my sites.

Yet, something sounding so simple was undoubtedly excruciating 4 day ordeal that only ended about 6 hours ago. It turns out, that after 12+ hours of tech support chats, numerous vague and, at times, conflicting accounts of what was being done, the root of my agnst was a silly firewall issue that the network admins forgot to configure.  The firewall configuration that was missing would not allow me to access my files via Passive FTP. Doesn't sound like a big deal (especially to tech support), but Passive FTP is the only mode that Blogger supports for FTP publishing.

So you can imagine my agony, wanting to spend all this time writing new content and code, and instead writing the same updates to a brand new tech support rep every 12 hours. Now that is behind me, and I can get back to writing all the updates that I had planned for this weekend, I have some catching up to do. On top of what I already have on my plate, I also get to search for a new webhost (I've narrowed it down to two) and plan out a migration and testing strategy. Always fun, as you can imagine.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to continue towards my personal goals of blogging and adding new features to my active sites.  In addition, I'll be migrating my sites one by one to a new host and going through a fair share of testing for each. As part of this migration, I will be looking to upgrade some of my PHP 4 code to PHP 5, which is long overdue. I've also been toying with learning Ruby on Rails and having at least one site running on Rails, which shoulds like a good 2009 goal.

All said, I'm doing a lot better right now that I had been feeling about this disaster over the weekend. It's time to move on and head to a better host and new opportunities. I'm sure to be laughing about this 3 months from now.

Potential New Project - Auto Blog Utility

Driving to the office this morning, I happened to be brainstorming a few ideas for another project to work on (in addition to the other half dozen I haven't finished yet).  One of the items I kicked around over the weekend was to follow up my new Blog Calendar widget with a version for my Twitter feed.  I thought it would be neat to go back and see my tweets from a particular day to see what was going on and how much of it I actually remembered doing. :)

Going down that rabbit hole sort of reminded me of something I had did earlier in the year with creating my Maui Twitter page.  I created that page before our most recent trip to Maui in order to record different activities and locations we were visiting using Twitter as a log, and then displaying those entries on my Maui site for others to view.  After the trip, I used the same logs to create the Trip Itinerary pages, which included the time and message from each tweet, as well as comments I wrote up for each activity when I was putting the pages together.

...Back to the Point

So I started thinking about doing something similar when I'm not on vacation, where I could gather up all my tweets for a given day and put it into a blog post or something with comments if I wanted to elaborate on something in particular.  That itself doesn't seem that hard since I've already played around with the Twitter API for the page mentioned above and for work on kris.nelson.

From there, the idea just started to snowball.  Instead of just tweets from a given day, I starting thinking I could import a few photos that I might have uploaded to Flickr that day (probably tying them back to the date taken instead).  I've used the Flickr API quite a bit, too, so that seems easy.

But wait, there's more.  :)

I started thinking about what else I do online all day and where I can pull that into this new little idea.  I'm on Facebook, and even though I haven't looked at the API for that yet, that would be fun to pull in certain things from there.  I could bring in feeds and posts that I read from other RSS feeds using Google Reader (either through it's API or just through the individual feeds themselves).  I could probably use something like del.icio.us to pull in other pages that I might have read and wanted to include, too.  All that seems like a good start, don't you think?

The Plan

This could just be an old fashioned mash-up and not really have to be something that I publish everyday, but for now, I'm kind of feeling like it would be better off if it started as blog posts, at least to start.  Thinking through it initially, I will probably create a standalone WinForm app in C# that I use to go out and gather all the feeds and data for a given date.  Using a few things behind the scenes (thinking XML and XSL/T), I could create a boilerplate blog post with a merged set of all these various items listed out in chronological order and ready for me to fill in the gaps.

Heck, I'm even thinking of using the Blogger API to post a draft version of all of this mashed-up goodness so I can just run this little guy and go right to Blogger to review, add/edit and publish.

It's starting to look like this could keep me busy for awhile, what do you think?

Creating your own iGoogle Theme

I found this a few weeks back, but just started playing around with it a few days ago. For Google fans like myself, the Google API section was recently updated with an API for creating your own iGoogle Themes so you can customize, create, and share your own themes for iGoogle.

The concept is pretty simple, and one of the things that I always thought was neat was that iGoogle Themes could change their displayed based on the time of day. Although the concept is simple, it's been my experience thus far that putting together and testing out these themes can be a little tedious. However, these could just be minor annoyances that I'm only experiencing because I haven't gotten the full hang of it yet, and I don't want to influence anyone who hasn't tried it for themselves yet.

You can check out the growing collection of iGoogle Themes in their gallery here, if you need a little inspiration. The one I'm working on now is a Maui theme goes along with my Ka'anapali Dreamin' website. It's likely going to take some time, so I don't anticipate it being ready for a few weeks. Once it is, though, I'll be sure to share it here.