Are Seven

Homer: You can’t enjoy money when you’re dead, so why not have fun now?
Marge: Don’t you think you’ve had enough fun? Last year you spent five thousand dollars on donuts, two thousand on scalp massages, five hundred on body glitter.
Homer: Hey, I earned that money! While you lounge around here doing laundry and putting up drywall, I’m at work busting my hump.
Marge: Oh, please! From what I hear, you waltz in there at ten thirty, take a nap on the toilet, then sit around “Googling” your own name until lunch!
Homer: Who told you that?!
Marge: You shouted it while we were making love!

While I can’t recommend spending the whole afternoon Googling your own name, Homer’s on to something. I was reminded by this great article in Lifehacker that you really should meet your online persona, because you may not really know your online persona like you think you do.

At the very least, Google your own name in quotes (so that you get your name exactly) and just go through the first 4-5 pages of search results. Are you satisfied with what you’re finding? Does it represent you? This is what people see about you. “People” could be as benign as an old friend who wants to see what you’re up to, but it could be a future employer or coworker, or–worst of all–an ex.

Just a friendly reminder and/or tip that there are steps that you can and should take to control what’s ending up in the world, and to make sure that what’s out there is what you want out there.

Update: Welcome to folks coming from DC blogs! I try to write about tech stuff (”Tech for the Technophobic” as it’s unofficially titled) a few times a week, giving tips from what I learn. If you’re interested, there’s piping hot RSS feeds, one specifically for tech. There’s also music and everything else. Don’t be a stranger, stranger.

Nutshell: Using the rating function in iTunes may seem excessive and pointless, but it can be extremely helpful in organizing your music and optimizing your listening.

When I first got iTunes once upon a time, I turned up my nose at the ability to rate things one-to-five stars. I’m only putting my music in there, I figured. I like it all, so why rank them?

I first started rating songs when I figured that I could make mixes that were immediate decade best-ofs, and it grew from there. I started finding that rating songs in iTunes was a fantastic way to:

• Mark songs that I liked as I stumbled across them while shuffling. When I’m shuffling my “Never Played” playlist (play count=0) or my 2007 Radio playlist, there’s songs that I come across that I like, so I mark it with three stars, and then when I return to that album or artist later, wondering “what was that one song I liked?”, I’m immediately reminded.
• Easily keep my iPod healthy. When I ran out of room on my iPod, I knew that I wanted to keep music on there that was recently added or never played, but what else? Simple: everything rated three stars and higher.
• Have a constant go-to playlist. I always had my five-star and four-star playlists, but when I made one that had everything three-and-up, I found that ultimate decider. When I can’t decide what I’m in the mood for, I just put that on shuffle and let it go, and I’m treated not only to my favorites, but songs that I don’t know very well but had tagged with three songs.

I can understand why someone might object to rating. But I highly recommend it. In my rating system, much of my library remains unrated, but the stars start for these songs:

• Three stars for songs to mark songs that I like on first listen as well as songs that I want on my iPod, but don’t necessarily love. This last part is especially for those songs that bring out nostalgia in me, but aren’t exactly good. Lots of early ’80’s stuff there.
• Four stars for, “Oh, this is such a great song.”
• Five stars for, “I will not be able to do anything at all until this song has finished playing.”

Do you rate your library? What system do you use? If you don’t, is it a contentious objection or just nothing you’ve ever really considered?

Just a few unsorted broadcasts on the tech tip…

First off is that, now that the areseven.com feeds are working, those of you who are subscribed to both the Are Seven feed and the Tech feed are going to be getting tech posts twice: one in each feed. If you’re an Are Seven glutton and like it this way, you’re welcome to keep it that way. Just sayin’ you don’t need to, so you can unsub from the Tech feed and still get all of the tech posts with no problem. Those of you who want only the tech posts don’t need to do nothin’.

Second is a thought: while this site remains ad free, I thought I’d point something out to you. You know those “sponsored ads” on Google searches? They’re actually worth clicking on. They show up based on your search terms and Google does a great job at making sure that they’re going to the sites and services they say they are. It’s natural to brush them off as just advertising, but you can really find some good stuff that way. Let your eyes wander right on your search results and you just might find some good stuff.

Where you really should be clicking is on people’s blogs. Bloggers and site owners make money off of those ads, and the easiest way to financially tip the people who give the content that so entertains you is to take a look at these ads when you visit the site and click on the ones you see. As always, click sincerely. Don’t just click an ad that doesn’t interest you at all. But if something looks even mildly interesting, go ahead and click, knowing that it’s essentially a small donation to your favorite sites that costs you nothing.

Finally, there’s something you may not know about email newsletters you get.  You know how email programs will now ask you if you want to load images?  The reason that they do this is that the only way that the sender of an email can know that you opened an email is if the images are loaded.  Even “plain text” messages have a tiny image in them that sends open information.

The reason that the email programs have made it standard to not load images is obviously because of spammers.  But there are a lot of legitimate companies out there that gauge interest in the content of their newsletters by the open rate, and if you’re not loading the images, your opens aren’t being counted as a vote in favor of that newsletter.  So the next time you get a newsletter from an online magazine or nonprofit you support, load those images on up.

You’re done now.  Great job.  Go ahead and take the rest of the day off.

Nutshell: Get your own domain cheaply and easily with Google Apps, and use it for email, websites, or just good old fashioned hoarding.

I know. You’re giving me that “you’re crazy” look, thinking that only businesses and geeks own their own domains. In fact, owning your own domain has benefits that you may have overlooked. It’s never been cheaper to buy your own domain, and never been easier to turn it into your personal email and/or add it to your blog. In short: everyone should have one.  What do I have to do to put you in a domain today?

If you’re already convinced and have a domain in mind, go to Google Apps and plunk down ten dollars (ten dollars for a year! Bring your lunch instead of going out twice a year and you have the money!) and start now. If you still need convincing, here’s reasons why you should own your own domain:

• To hoard your brilliant idea for a domain name. Had a great domain name idea that isn’t taken? Go register it and then just let it sit until the day someone offers you $10,000 dollars for whippets4whippits.org.
• To provide email and services for you family. This was easier for me because I have an unusual last name, but I was able to register lastname.com and then make email addresses for everyone in my family that forward to their regular email address. Some of them use it, some don’t, but it’s a nice thing to be able to give to them, and it keeps me from having to remember their email addresses. Google Apps also offers you the ability to have shared documents
• To attach to your blog/site. Most free blogging softwares like Blogger and Wordpress.com and a number of services like Feedburner offer the ability to attach a domain or subdomain to your blog. You still do everything as you did before, except now it has the name on it. Plus, if you ever move, you can take your domain with you, and anyone linking to it will still get to your site.
• To give yourself a professional identity. Sure, we’re all used to seeing gmail and hotmail addresses on resumes. But it looks so much better if you can direct people to joe@yourchosendomain.com.
• To be immature. Because it’s fun to tell your friends to write to jerkface@yourchosendomain.com

If you still need convincing, the comments are open and standing by.

As you can see by the rash and sudden paint job of the blog, things are different. Squirreliness is still afoot, but slightly less manic. Hopefully.

I’ve now gone to Wordpress from Blogger, and I’m still pretty unsure about it. I’m now my own personal one-man IT department, which has the silver lining of teaching me some stuff I need to know about domain and server configuration, but the big dark cloud is that I now, when things go wrong, I have to figure what’s going on.  The Wordpress geeks are exactly the sorts of IT folks that drive me nuts.  Everything is sponsored by that sick, overused word of the tech word: “simply”.  You simply upgrade the software when a security patch comes out, and you simply backup your SQL database, and you simply figure out what’s going wrong when it goes wrong.  It all sounds so goddamn simple, but it adds up and eats into the time that I could spend actually writing.

So why did I do it?  Well, partly for the experience, but mostly because it seemed as though the Wordpress platform was more capable of doing exactly the sorts of things that I wanted to do with categories; that I could write in one place and let the software sort it out.  There’s still a number of challenges to be dealt with here, not in the least of which is the search engine gunk, but, to quote the Pixies, it’s educational.

Let me know if anything isn’t working right.  If you’re RSS reader or blog link is still pointing to a blogspot address, you’ll need to update it, because that’s not going to be updated anymore.  I’ll take you on a tour of the new digs once the boxes are unpacked. It’ll be a housewarming party.  BYO moonshine.

As my friend Alphonse would always say: onwards and upwards.

Alright, I give. I’m not going to write on the tech blog anymore. The reasons for that are numbered below, like terms of surrender:

1. My life was too fragmented. I was tired of thinking what to write where, instead of just plugging it all into the same place.
2. It wasn’t fun to write. I like the voice I write with here; the snarky, obnoxious, vaguely-insulting voice. I was basically writing documentation over there, and I do enough of that at work.
3. It wasn’t reaching its intended audience. I wanted to make it a place where I could convince people who were a’feared of computer to pet their computers and finally be friendly with them. For the kid’s sake.

Then there’s the bad news, much like the news of surrender is followed by the listing of the dead. The first bit of bad news is that whatever tech I want to write about is going to be written about here, and there’s going to be a lot of it. It’s a force-feeding. Sorry.

The second bit is that this site might go a little squirrely at some point if I switch blogging platforms. You won’t need to change your feeds or bookmarks unless they include the word “blogspot” in the URL, but there may be moments where the site won’t come up. It’ll be back up eventually, so don’t run out into the street in a blind panic, throwing bricks through the first windows you see. Again.

Just before I started this blog, I had a dilemma: I didn’t really want to start an entirely new blog, per se. I just wanted to split off the tech part of my current blog. Though I partly wanted to keep it separate from the rest of the stuff that I was writing about, I mostly wanted a place with it’s own subdomain so that I could practice promotion and search engine optimization. I didn’t want to heavily promote my “buncha crap” blog, because I don’t think there’s an audience for it beyond my friends, but this one…there’s an audience for.

But I’ve gotten a little frustrated already with having to keep two separate blogs through blogger. I want to write as inspiration strikes and let the system sort out what goes on what blog without having to think about it myself. On the other end, I want one basic template for any blog that I choose to write, but that will allow me to customize the sidebars for each one.

The simple answer is to go through Wordpress. There’s apparently a plugin that will allow me to assign subdomains (tech.areseven.com, blog.areseven.com) to categories. But this raises the main issue that I have with Wordpress (besides the cost, I mean): I don’t want to be a one-person IT staff. And plugins and open source software is great, but what happens when Wordpress upgrades and that plugin doesn’t work anymore and the person who made the plugin is too busy/bored to upgrade it? I’m S.O.L.

At this point, this is just a rambling. But it may mean a dramatic reworking of the pages, maybe meaning that the site will go down for a while.

If anyone knows about Wordpress and configuring subdomains so that they point to category pages without using a plugin, please let me know. Thanks.

Sitting at work today struggling with bouncing emails from our weekly newsletter, I’m reminded why RSS is THE way to get content:

If you subscribe to an RSS feed, you know that the content will get to you. If you subscribe to an email newsletter, it has a pretty decent chance of never getting to you, even if you add the sender to your “safe” list.

There’s plenty of reasons why email newsletters are on their way out. And right now, as I struggle trying to figure out why over 1/5 of the people who consensually opted in to our email list just aren’t getting it at all, I can say with a lot of confidence that the practice of using email to reach large audiences is one that is on its way out.

The new news about Yahoo today is that they got an acquisition offer from Microsoft. The old news about Yahoo today is that their mail has the worst spam filter imaginable.

For the second time I’ve seen at as many organizations, all of our email newsletters, sent out by the Convio platform, are getting filtered as spam by Yahoo mail. As a result, the line graph of the our emails that get successfully sent is looking a lot like Yahoo’s stock prices. Maybe Yahoo’s profits are being filtered as spam. They should look into that.

What makes it even worse is that my Yahoo inbox is filled up with spam that is so glaringly obvious junk, so the problem is not an over-aggressive filter; just a BAD filter. Meanwhile,the spam filter in Gmail is still working like a charm; never sending any good mail to junk and only very, very rarely sending junk to my inbox.

I would say that maybe Microsoft could shape Yahoo up, but that concept just makes me laugh.

UPDATE: This stopped working for some reason.  If someone wants to give it a try and see if it works again, let me know in the comments. But mine quit working.

Nutshell: Turn an RSS feed into an iCal format file that you can read through Google Calendar. For my purposes, I needed this to make a content calendar, where I could see what content we’ve published and when.

My problem: well, I have plenty of problems, but one of them was that I needed to keep a content calendar at work. Keeping track of upcoming events was going to be a (mostly) manual process no matter what. But having an automatic calendar of everything we had published in the past should be easy, right? We had an RSS feed that spit out an entry for every blog post, event, publication and staff and job listing we put on our website. Surely I could use that instead of having to manually keep track of everything we’d tracked, right?

Not so fast, Chester. Most calendar applications can only subscribe to files formatted as iCalendar, so you can’t go throwing in RSS feeds into it and expect it to work. I searched high and low and couldn’t find anywhere that could tell me how I could convert an RSS feed to something that could be read by calendar applications that needed it formatted in iCal.

Dapper to the rescue again. God, I’m really beginning to love them. In a purely electronic way, of course.

To convert an RSS feed to iCal so that you can calendarize it and see everything that’s been published on your web site in the last __ days:

1. Go to Dapper.net
2. Select “Create a New Dapp”. You’ll need to create a user or login first so that you’ll be able to save it.
3. Select the “In An Existing Feed” tab and put in your RSS feed’s address. On the next page, you can choose to rename the overall feed and/or de-select the parts of the feed that you don’t want coming through. But that’s totally optional.
4. Save the Dapp.
5. On the final page, go to the Choose Format dropdown on the right side and choose “iCalendar”, and then click Go.
6. You’ll be prompted to select the content in the RSS and what it corresponds to in the calendar. This is because RSS and iCals need to have the information in different formats. I chose “Publication date” for both start and end date, since all I’ll want to see on the calendar is when the article was published. Title goes to Title, Description goes to Description, and Event Location I left blank.
7. Make a service of it, which you’ll find at the bottom right of the final page under (confusingly) “Get A Nice Short URL”. The long URL that Dapper supplies when you turn it into an iCal doesn’t work when you plug it into Google, so the only way I could figure out how to make it work is to turn it into a public service. If anyone knows a way around this, let me know.
8. Go to your Google Calendar
9. Click on Add > Add by URL in the dropdown of the calendars box on the right side
10. Paste in the Dapper service URL, hit “Add” and you’re all keyed in.

Here’s what it looks like in Google Calendar:

But all of these sorts of things have problems, just like me, and this one is no exception. The problems:

• It’s premature. I’ve gotten all excited about it, but I’ve only been using it for a few days, so I can’t say if there’s any problems with it. I have noticed that it doesn’t update very quickly, but since it’s a past calendar, that’s not such a big deal…at the moment.
• Google Calendar. You can see the past content, but you can’t print out in “Agenda” view for more than 10 days, so I can’t present my boss with a calendar of what’s been published where. This may not be a problem for you, but it’s kind of a big one for me.
• Lack of labels and links. As of now, everything just comes through with its title and time. What I would love to be able to do is label each one with text preceding the title that says what section of the site it comes from (ex: Publications, Press Releases, etc) and then have a link that could take me to page on the site. I may be able to do the labels with Yahoo Pipes, but so far…
• The descriptions are too long. It’s helpful to have the descriptions come through into my calendar feed, so I don’t want to remove it from the Dapp, but I also don’t need the entire article to come through in the “Details” section of my Google Calendar. I might be able to truncate the descriptions using Yahoo Pipes, but I haven’t done that just yet.

If anyone has any further info or has discovered other ways to make this useful, the comments are open and standing by.