Viva Batista

Typepad Hate

Have I mentioned how much I hate Typepad's new posting UI?  No?  Well, perhaps I should get around to that one of these days.

I'm Back

Well, sort of.  I stayed away for over a year, but I've decided that trying to fold everything into a single site just isn't working, and I'd much rather have 1) a strictly personal site where I can post on anything under the sun (i.e. here) and 2) a more "professional" site focused on topics related to my vocational interests (i.e. there).

As I predicted a year ago, the tangle of topics has gotten a little too messy.  The essential dividing line is between posts I simply feel like writing in a public space, regardless of whether they're actually read by anyone but me (i.e. here), and posts that are intended to be read by the wider world--or some miniscule portion thereof (i.e. there).

I doubt I'll be posting often--given my schedule these days, it's hard enough keeping up with my day blog--but it's good to know I'll have the option again.

The Blog is Dead. Long Live the Blog!

The Bottom Line: I won't be posting here for a while, perhaps indefinitely.  But I'll be writing up a storm at EdBatista.com, so I hope to see you there.

UPDATE: I've successfully exported all the posts from this site to EdBatista--amazingly, it was even easier than TypePad promised; having taken a lot of heat lately, they deserve the kudos.  This makes it even less likely that I'll be writing here again in the future, so I hope to see you at the old/new/other site.

OK. Why?  I've been blogging for just over a year now, and it seems like an appropriate moment to make a few changes.  Shortly after I began writing on a range of professional topics at my main site, I set up this site as a space to talk about everything from cocktails to tech tips to music reviews.

It was helpful to have two separate forums while I got my feet wet, but I think that structure has outlived its purpose, for several reasons.  First, although as recently as last June I felt that it made sense to maintain separate professional and personal sites, at the same time I also wrote that "...it's essential to let people know who you are as an individual and to speak in your own voice when you're working online.  That means exposing yourself, speaking authentically, and being unafraid to share your silly passions."  Having found my online voice over the past year, merging the two sites now will make it easier to speak more naturally and to cover the full range of topics I'm passionate about, from the silly to the serious.

Second, you might notice that the old tagline on my main site--"Thoughts on design, technology, advocacy and marketing"--is gone.  Even though it initially gave me plenty of room to explore my professional interests, it was starting to feel a little cramped, like a shirt that shrank in the wash.  I could sense myself backing away from topics that interested me but didn't quite fit the old schema, and that's just ridiculous.  Using Doc Searl's metaphor, these sites aren't "channels" or "pipes," they're places. My primary purpose on these sites isn't "delivering content"--I'm stretching my mind, thinking out loud, and occasionally meeting others doing the same.  And I don't want to be bound by a predefined set of topics, however broad.  (Just as a heads-up, these days I'm particularly interested in issues related to organizational culture and executive coaching.  I don't know where those explorations will lead, but I'm looking forward to covering some new ground.)

And finally, thanks to my association with AttentionTrust, I have every expectation that more sophisticated attention services will be coming online soon that will allow readers who are interested in my professional musings but not my music reviews (and vice versa) to sift through my feed and find the posts that are most relevant to them.  Those services aren't here yet, so there's certainly the risk that merging these streams will just muddy the waters, making it more difficult for people to find what interests them--in fact, I expect that to happen in the short term.  But hopefully the advantages described above will be worth it, and the geeks won't keep us waiting too long.

It's an experiment, and who knows?  Perhaps the tangle of topics will get too messy, and I'll have to switch back.  I'll keep this site in suspended animation, just in case, but I'll be bunking over at EdBatista for the time being.

The Bottom Line: I won't be posting here for a while, perhaps indefinitely.  But I'll be writing up a storm at EdBatista.com, so I hope to see you there.

UPDATE: I've successfully exported all the posts from this site to EdBatista--amazingly, it was even easier than TypePad promised; having taken a lot of heat lately, they deserve the kudos.  This makes it even less likely that I'll be writing here again in the future, so I hope to see you at the old/new/other site.

OK. Why?  I've been blogging for just over a year now, and it seems like an appropriate moment to make a few changes.  Shortly after I began writing on a range of professional topics at my main site, I set up this site as a space to talk about everything from cocktails to tech tips to music reviews.

It was helpful to have two separate forums while I got my feet wet, but I think that structure has outlived its purpose, for several reasons.  First, although as recently as last June I felt that it made sense to maintain separate professional and personal sites, at the same time I also wrote that "...it's essential to let people know who you are as an individual and to speak in your own voice when you're working online.  That means exposing yourself, speaking authentically, and being unafraid to share your silly passions."  Having found my online voice over the past year, merging the two sites now will make it easier to speak more naturally and to cover the full range of topics I'm passionate about, from the silly to the serious.

Second, you might notice that the old tagline on my main site--"Thoughts on design, technology, advocacy and marketing"--is gone.  Even though it initially gave me plenty of room to explore my professional interests, it was starting to feel a little cramped, like a shirt that shrank in the wash.  I could sense myself backing away from topics that interested me but didn't quite fit the old schema, and that's just ridiculous.  Using Doc Searl's metaphor, these sites aren't "channels" or "pipes," they're places. My primary purpose on these sites isn't "delivering content"--I'm stretching my mind, thinking out loud, and occasionally meeting others doing the same.  And I don't want to be bound by a predefined set of topics, however broad.  (Just as a heads-up, these days I'm particularly interested in issues related to organizational culture and executive coaching.  I don't know where those explorations will lead, but I'm looking forward to covering some new ground.)

And finally, thanks to my association with AttentionTrust, I have every expectation that more sophisticated attention services will be coming online soon that will allow readers who are interested in my professional musings but not my music reviews (and vice versa) to sift through my feed and find the posts that are most relevant to them.  Those services aren't here yet, so there's certainly the risk that merging these streams will just muddy the waters, making it more difficult for people to find what interests them--in fact, I expect that to happen in the short term.  But hopefully the advantages described above will be worth it, and the geeks won't keep us waiting too long.

It's an experiment, and who knows?  Perhaps the tangle of topics will get too messy, and I'll have to switch back.  I'll keep this site in suspended animation, just in case, but I'll be bunking over at EdBatista for the time being.

Technorati and the Tagged Web

Back in March Preetam Rai of betterdays posted a fantastic primer on the "tagged web" and how to use Technorati.  Great stuff, and I'm in his debt.

Technorati has a good page on TypePad ping configuration, but Rai's post puts the technical details in a much more useful context.

Blogtricks Link Feedback

Blogtricks offers a number of interesting little add-on services for bloggers.  The most useful one (and the only one I've actually tried) is their Link Feedback service, which allows you to create an automated list of websites referring visitors to your site.

It's easy to set up--in Typepad, just take the script from their "linkbuilder" and use it to create a new item in a "link" Typelist that has been configured to read notes as text.  And your Blogtricks account is free--if you want to pay $10/year, you can opt not to have their little ad displayed at the bottom of your list of referrers.

A nice feature is the ability to exclude certain referring domains--for example, you can exclude search engines, so that your list only displays traffic from actual links on other sites, rather than traffic from search results.  (Helpful when you get a lot of random traffic from people searching on, say, your uncommon last name.)

I used it for a few days and really liked the convenience of seeing referrers right on my home page, but I didn't pony up for a paid account, and loading the ad from their server was really slowing down my site.  It's worth $10/year for the ad-free service, but they currently only accept PayPal, and I don't have a PayPal account.

Here's the script that was generated for my account, including a number of blocked domains.  Note the hard break in that line between "google.fr" and "search.msn.com" to get it to display properly here:

<script language="javascript">
  document.write('\074scr' + 'ipt src="http://svc.blogtricks.com/referrer' +
    '?token=0d04699ac43ec0e657ff51afd58957a3' +
     '\046exclude=google.com%2Cyahoo.com%2Cgoogle.de%2Cgoogle.fr
%2Csearch.msn.com%2Cgoogle.co.nz%2Cgoogle.it%2Cgoogle.be%2Cgoogle.pl' +  '\046maxlen=40' +  '\046maxwordlen=40' +    
    '\046action=combo\046referrer=' + escape(document.referrer) +
    '">\074/sc' + 'ript>');
</script>

Search Me Redux

Why can't I find a (free) site search tool that works?  The Technorati searchlet that I installed recently on my day blog isn't working any more--it only searches the entire web and ignores instructions to search just my site.  Not helpful.  So I've put the Google search box back (TypePad makes it easy.)  But it's an imperfect solution at best.  It's not updated all that often (at least for a little ol' site like mine), so it excludes terms from recent posts.  And it includes terms from my sidebars, so you get a lot of false positives when searching for someone in my blogroll, for example.  PicoSearch had its own problems, so at this point I'm out of ideas.

Search Me

I just dropped PicoSearch from my day site and substituted the Technorati Searchlet.  Much better.  Far superior search results, and no need to manually index the pages (so presumably no maximum page number.)  I wasn't able to get it to work for this site--perhaps because it branches off from my primary TypePad account, perhaps because it's not a public blog--but I'm happy for now.

When I initially set up the PicoSearch box, I had to tweak it considerably to get a fit I was happy with.  Just in case I ever want to restore it, here's the code that worked well (at least visually) for the sidebar:

<!-- Begin PicoSearch Query Box -->
<P><FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://www.picosearch.com/cgi-bin/ts.pl">
<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="index" VALUE="232131">
<TABLE BGCOLOR="WHITE" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 BORDER=0><TR><TD>
<TABLE BGCOLOR="WHITE" CELLSPACING=2 CELLPADDING=0 BORDER=0>
<TR><TD colspan=2><INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="query" VALUE="" SIZE="20"></TD></TR>
<TR><TD><A HREF="http://www.picosearch.com/cgi-bin/index.pl?wherefrom=picobox
&type=all" TARGET="_blank"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="http://www.picosearch.com/picosmall.gif" ALT="PicoSearch"></A></TD>
<TD><nobr><INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE="Go >>>" name="SEARCH"></nobr></TD></TR>
<TR><TD colspan=2 ALIGN=LEFT><FONT SIZE=-2><A HREF="http://www.picosearch.com/cgi-bin/ts.pl?index=232131&help=help">
Search Help</A></FONT></TD></TR>
</TABLE></TD></TR></TABLE></FORM>
<!-- End PicoSearch Query Box -->

More Offline Blogging

In addition to ecto (which does come in a Windows version, TypePad's outdated advice notwithstanding), TypePad recommends Zempt and w.bloggar.  And I need something--I love TypePad, but the editing interface is not the best (and it's actually worse in Firefox, but I just can't see going back to IE.)

Dr. Frank

Dr. Frank is the main force behind the Mr. T Experience, an old Berkeley based pop-punk band that still seems to be semi-alive and kicking, and he's one of my favorite pop-and-politics bloggers.  To be honest, I've never been a huge fan of the MTX, but the blog kicks ass.  Two recent highlights:

1) From the latest salvo in Frank's running commentary on why the Bay Area is the most Wonderful/Horrible Place on Earth:

I love living here. The weather's great. I like the tolerance for eccentricity (though I often wish people would just get on with being all tolerant and everything without having to make such a big deal about how great it is that they're so tolerant, and how you don't find such top-notch tolerance just anywhere, and how you haven't really experienced true, cream-of-the-crop tolerance till you've seen it in action amongst the best people in the Greatest Place on Earth.) I probably couldn't survive anywhere else. But there is a drawback, and that is that everyone is so self-impressed. The narcissism in the air is so thick and plentiful that it's sometimes hard to breathe normally.

2) Frank skewers the humorless dolts at Alternative Tentacles whose knickers are in a twist over the possibility that a former member of the Dead Kennedys may have sold the rights to the band's cover version of "Viva Las Vegas" to American Idol.  (Got all that?)  Tongue firmly in cheek, Frank writes:

Needless to say, it is absolutely vital to protect the legacy of the Dead Kennedys' joke version of a novelty song owned by Warner Brothers. This is particularly true when the co-opting is being done by Amerikkkan Idle, a popular show that the better sort of person rightly holds in contempt, and on a network like Fox, which will, of course, be the first network up against the wall when the Revolution comes.

The man is fighting the good fight and entertaining in the process.