I’ve got the new site on line. I’ve made the DNS changes and I know it’s starting to propagate.
Everything’s certainly in a state of flux right now. Hopefully nothing will be lost and all will shake itself out by the end of the week.
administrata
Site transition
I’m about to move my hsoi.com domain and hosting.
A few years ago my hosting company added new systems that were more feature rich and lower priced. It’s been my intent for over a year to transition from their old system to the new system, but inertia is a powerful force to have to overcome. 😐
I’m finally getting around to it.
Consequently, emails to hsoi.com or other access to it may be up or down depending on how well the transition goes and DNS propagates over the next few days.
I’m still debating if I want to move this blog from here (hosted at wordpress.com) to the new system. I probably will, once I see how the new setup looks.
Blarg
Busy.
Lost time because of a doctor’s appointment. I’ve been in some serious pain since Sunday. Thought it might have been a cracked rib, doctor doesn’t think so (so no x-rays). Prescribed me some muscle relaxers and some tests are being run. We’ll see.
Meantime, I hope to be back here later.
Quiet
Yeah… quiet today, at least so far. Been in meetings all morning and lots of scrambling to deal with this afternoon.
Now you see me
I’ve never been one to hide my identity. I’m John C. Daub, millionaire; I own a mansion and a yacht.
I admit in my early online days I was a bit more reluctant about sharing my identity because hey… there are crazies out there. But while I may not have been as forthright with my identity, I didn’t lie or hide or refuse. If someone wanted to know who was behind the moniker, it wasn’t hard to find out either by searching or just asking me.
The advantage of “Hsoi”? Well, plug it into Google and apart from some acronyms and foreign words, Hsoi equals me. It’s nice to have a globally unique identifier, because there are other John Daub’s out there.. There are disadvantages to being unique, a discussion for another time.
The one thing I have still been reluctant to do is post my picture online. Oh sure, there are some pictures of me online, but usually my face wasn’t directly visible. I’ve had some bad experiences in the past with posting pictures online, mostly because there are assholes in this world and I have better ways to spend my time and energy.
Nevertheless, a friend of mine who is really into social media made a good point. Your avatar is who you are online. It makes a big impact and impression. I recall meeting lots of people in real life that didn’t ring a bell until I was able to put their email address with their name and face. That was kinda weird to know them more by their email address than anything else, but yes it’s a unique identifier. I’d rather know people by their faces. Call me old school that way, but it’s far more personal to be able to associate a name/blog/email address/twitter account/username/etc. with a face.
So, I finally hooked into Gravatar and put my face back online. We’ll see how it goes.
Twitter Fiddle 2
OK… I’ve disabled twitterfeed and enabled the wordpress.com native publicize to Twitter support.
So… this is a post-fiddling post to see if it posts.
Time will tell.
Fiddle with twitter
I’m just not into Twitter, only because it doesn’t have a place for me. I mean, only 140 characters? You’re killing me! 😉
Nevertheless, I do have a Twitter account. I mainly snagged it to ensure I got “hsoi” and no one else squatted on it. A few weeks ago I set it up via twitterfeed.com to hook the blog to the twitter account to post when my blog updated.
Now it seems WordPress.com can do it automatically.
So I’m going to try switching to it.
1000
This is my 1000th post.
That’s all there is to say. It’s like those Monty Python sketches with “this is my only line” as the only line.
Endorsements
So the FTC says that bloggers must disclose.
When did the FTC start having jurisdiction over blogging? I obviously missed the memo. Actually they don’t, it’s still regulation over advertisers, but it’s acknowledging that blogging is one new avenue for marketing. Macworld has more.
Conceptually all of this bugs me and I could rant on for a while about it. However in the end, I have a degree of “OK” with all of this. The thing is that the Internet is a place ripe for transmission of information that’s less than truthful. When you couple in the ease of anonymity, it makes it hard to always believe your sources. Of course, one remedy to this is to trust your sources, do the work to vet them, and if you can’t be sure of the source then don’t be sure of the information. It’s one reason I make no bones about who I am on my blog: I’m willing to stand behind what I write and willing to let you know the source of the material. I am human, I will make mistakes, I will evolve my ideas and opinions and knowledge over time, but I do my best to be solid.
But of course, the reality is if someone wants to be unscrupulous, they will be and no law or guidelines or regulation will stop them. Thus in the end what the FTC did amounts to a whole lot of nothing useful and a whole lot of regulatory burden placed upon law-abiding citizens that are just trying to live their lives without hassle.
For the record, all of the “endorsements” and “reviews” and such that I’ve done on this blog are purely my own personal opinion. Anything I’ve reviewed or endorsed has been from my own personal experience, paying for the thing out of my own pocket, and either being a satisfied or unsatisfied customer. If I ever did receive something free, I’d say so regardless of the FTC ruling, because my own personal integrity depends upon it.
Updated: I like what Linoge did: made a “For Hire” category and any such actual paid/compensated endorsements/reviews/etc. and such get classified under that. Makes a nice way to corral things together and make context evident. So, I’ve created such a category and you’ll note that, at least as of this writing, this posting is the only thing under that category so some context to the category can be retained.
Testing
Let’s see if I can get WordPress for iPhone to post not just this text but also a picture.
Updated: It appears to work. 🙂
The image is hosted out of WordPress’s files area, which makes sense, but isn’t where I normally host my pictures. As well, it was resized smaller (which is an option in the app, which I can turn off, but I think is OK to do for network/transmission purposes). All this is OK, as they can be edited after I get back to home base.
I also don’t like that the WordPress for iPhone editing is severely limited (e.g. no style). You can do raw HTML but it’s cumbersome on the iPhone’s keyboard (e.g. the < and > are on the third keyboard screen). Of course, this is understandable as the iPhone interface is small and limited, so they had to keep things simple.
But at least the basics are there and that’s enough to make a basic posting from the field.
Stuff From Hsoi 