Tristan Friedrich Schmid’s take on the brave new world: news, music, technology, film, culture, activism, politics, reviews, the environment, etc…
Sitting here at the Blog Indiana conference on IUPUI’s campus, in their new student center (nice!)
Also set up a Twitter account. Like I was with blogging, I’m very skeptical of Twitter and its uses. There’s no way I’ll be fanatical like many Twitter users who update about everything they do (”I’m in the restroom right now!”), but it might be a fun, free tool to work with.
This post isn’t as focused as those previous, but read on, kind sirs and madams:
A big week for me at Angie’s List and for Adopt An Animal. At Angie’s List, I set up our magazine department’s blog and released List-en up!’s first true video podcast. I say “true” video because previous episodes were in what was technically a video format, but were basically a still-image slideshow with pictures to accompanying the audio. This time, though, I actually followed a home energy auditor and videotaped the house-inspection process. After watching the video, I hope you have an audit performed on your home to find out how much money you can save through some simple energy-efficient upgrades.
As for the blog, you’ll notice that its design is basically the same as the Angie’s List podcast site. For the “Blue House Blog,” as we’re calling it (thanks to Brandon Smith, Angie’s List magazine artist and Goldfish Don’t Bounce bandmember, for the awesome logo!), I used the same Wordpress content management system, and the same theme, K2, simply because it works well. It looks good on its own, but is easily customizable and functions quite well for the most part. And though I have little PHP-programming experience, going into the code and fiddling with certain things isn’t too difficult. And there’s a tremendous network of free plugins, forums, and bloggers that serve as terrific resources for any Wordpress-related problem.
On a Wordpress-related note, I’ve posted some more dogs for adoption in Indianapolis at my Wordpress-based Adopt An Animal site. Please check them out (an adult female German Shepherd and adult male Pit-bull mix) and let me know if you or someone you know is interested.
Finally, I hope to install Ableton Live this weekend and create my first digital mix of some songs I’ve been really into lately. If you have any experience with Live and have tips to offer, please let me know. Thanks!
I switched this website to a different server today, following these instructions from WordPress. I followed them to a T, or so I thought, but as soon as I signed in to my newly transferred site, I realized I had a lot more work ahead of me than I’d bargained for (almost 4 hours’ worth, to be exact.) WordPress’s simple instructions failed to mention the fact that nearly all of my settings for this site (descriptions and preferences for plug-ins, widgets, thingamajigs and doo-dads) would be erased. Continue reading ‘Grrr!!! WordPress settings: now you see ‘em, now you don’t.’
Thanks goes out to Gregory Boop at business blog Bizinformer, who just wrote this post about educational opportunities via podcast, and what does and doesn’t work. Apparently he thinks the “stories about consumer scams and customer service” in List-en up! The Angie’s List podcast are good sources of information. If I’m lucky, he’ll think AdoptAnAnimal.org’s podcast (link opens in iTunes) is a good source, too.
I’m thrilled to see Boop’s post, and especially thrilled that the podcast is mentioned right alongside an NPR podcast. Not bad company to be recognized with, in my humble opinion. 
I figured I should follow up to the wave of responses I got about yesterday’s post, in which I dared suggest that blogs are a waste of time (I actually didn’t get any responses… Surprise!)
I do realize that blogs serve some terrific purposes: they’re great for podcasting, marketing, and SEO (search engine optimization) (that last link actually has some great reasons to blog). But when every other link in a typical Google Search results in a blog post (seemingly half of which are useless), the very idea of blogs can become quite frustrating.
It also seems that with so many blogs (175,000 created a day, or 2 per second!), the internet will one day implode under the sheer weight of them all, like a black hole. But until that technological armageddon, I’ll gladly keep adding my two cents and hope someone decides to pick ‘em up.
I’ve written a few times about this season’s whale hunt by the Japanese, but have realized that the BBC’s Jonah Fisher is a much better source for it. He’s aboard Greenpeace ship Esperanza and is also keeping a journal of the events, so I’ll just link to his diary. Rather than me regurgitating what I’ve read elsewhere, you can go straight to the source.
That’s my problem with blogs: most of them are used simply for regurgitation of info that can almost always be found more easily and with better information elsewhere. This whole “news aggregator” phenomenon of Digg, Newsvine, Reddit, etc., etc., etc. often leads viewers/readers to blogs with summaries of other stories, so what’s the point? I guess blogs are good for diary-like entries; they’re good for friends and family to check out and stay updated; they’re good for illegally posting copyrighted content. But what else are they good for? My guess is absolutely nothing (UNHH - say it again!) Oh wait, they are good for one more thing: wasting time.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has taught me that patience is a virtue I’m severely in need of. I spent much of my Thanksgiving break (probably almost a full workday) trying to figure out why the heck Internet Explorer was making the sidebar menu navigation on this site and List-en up! look like crap. I had no idea how horrific and unprofessional it all looked until I test-drove the sites on my mother-in-law’s computer, running IE 6.0. The sites looked wonderful (in my humble opinion) in the Firefox and Safari browsers that I’d been testing on, but for some still-unknown reason, IE piled every single part of the sidebar on top of itself like so many layers of two-week old digital lasagna, as if the navigation didn’t matter at all. (I guess it didn’t matter if no one was visiting the sites.) If you’re reading this, though, and hadn’t visited the sites until now, you won’t have a clue how bad it all looked, thankfully.
Anyway, after tweaking and testing nearly everything I could think of on the sites, I decided to reinstall the display theme (K2), and voila! Everything was in its right place. So now I can sit down for some leftover pie, without worrying that millions of strangers (or none) are laughing what used to be my pile of worthless sidebar doo-doo.
(Thanks to my wife and in-laws for tolerating both my absence from cooking duties and my obsession with fixing this wonderful CSS problem.)
Mission accomplished!
