glemak » blogging

all in the family

glemak — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 03:12:07 +0000

i’ve been active online since the earliest days of the web & blogging since january, 2002 – so it shouldn’t be very surprising that my family would be really involved online as well…

my wife karyn has a blog dedicated to her family, faith and her hobbies such as needlepoint – you can find it at the teakettle corner…

my oldest son sean is also very involved online and has had numerous blogs – he recently started a podcast on the state of the video game industry, something he’s studying in college hoping one day to be a video game developer…

finally my youngest son ian has recently started a videoblog, capturing and posting to his youtube channel most days hoping to do this for an entire year – or basically for his senior year of high school and as he prepares to enter college next fall…

upgrading to lastest version of wordpress

glemak — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:22:16 +0000

i’m always terrible at keeping up w/ upgrades, but finally blocked a few hours to upgrade this blog since there was a thunderstorm rolling through our town and i knew i wouldn’t be able to go for a mtb ride until it passed…

i love the way wordpress tells you it’ll take no time at all to upgrade – the actual upgrade of the database is very quick but all the other steps take time and focus – this one took about 2 hours to get everything back to normal – but glad i did it and now i’m on the latest version 2.8.4 which should last a few weeks i hope

testing zemanta

glemak — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:21:49 +0000

from their about page:

“Zemanta is a revolutionary new platform for accelerating on-line content production for any web user. Any user-created text (a blog post, article or web page) is directly “read” by Zemanta, which recognizes all contextual content. Zemanta then combs the web for the most relevant images, smart links, keywords and text, instantly serving these results to the user to enrich and inform their content. What’s more, Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers through a simple plug-in.”

ok, this is actually pretty cool and straightforward to understand and use – everything below this line was added via the zemanta plug-in that i added-on to firefox which was available as soon as i enter my wordpress dashboard and started to create this blog post – sweet…

i’m meeting with their ceo later today so i wanted to test out the functionality myself prior to – very nice app, impressed

Image via CrunchBase

6th page 6th photo tag

glemak — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 03:11:12 +0000

my friend brian tagged me, rules are simple: go to the sixth page of your flickr stream, and post the sixth picture that’s listed, then tag six more people.

i was a little concerned that i would end up w/ a not-so-interesting photo but was glad when i saw which one was the lucky tagged shot…

this is from the spring of 2005 and was taken by me in our frontyard in stamford, ct while i was playing fetch w/ our two dogs: teagan (2 y/o jack russell) and kirra (13 y/o lab mix) – a month after this shot kirra would pass suddenly from what amounted to organ failure due to old age, she was a great dog having come to us as a rescue @ 9 months old when we lived in socal, moved w/ us to texas and then on to connecticut – when we decided to bring teagan into our family as a puppy fresh off the boat from ireland, kirra welcomed her wholeheartedly and loved playing in the yard w/ her – that’s the story behind this photo…

as for my tags, picking folks who i think might enjoy this flickr fun & are bloggers

my wife, drew, pete, chad, susan & jill…

personal soa – where you post is irrelevant

glemak — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:19:51 +0000

service oriented architecture is considered a loose coupling of services that allow for diversified backends to be joined via a web service integration into a unified frontend – this in the past was primarily considered the domain of business practitioners – i am over simplifying it of course so apologies to all my fellow techies out there – with the advent of presence aggregation environments such as friendfeed and swurl, that allow any individual or group to integrate a large number of sites and services into a unifying frontend, the advent of a robust personal soa capability has arrived – yes, this sort of frontend aggregation via rss has been around via rss readers and other sites for awhile (igoogle & my yahoo for example) but the simplicity, mass integration of diverse services and then the additional enhancement of community engagement functionality in the current environments is why i think they are so much more compelling than their predecessors – this is why i’ve started to think of this paradigm shift as a personal soa movement and why i stated in the title that i believe we are (as early adopters) at a point when where we post is irrelevant (i am ignoring those who monitize their blogs since this movement does seem to somewhat fracture their promotional traffic driving efforts – i don’t try to monitize anything i do online) and that we now have the luxury of choosing the best backend service for the task and then having it integrated upstream into our presence aggregation frontend (both for our utilization and for those that wish to subscribe to us once and get everything) – for me i like del.icio.us for bookmarking, flickr for photo sharing, typepad for my tech related blogging and wordpress for my personal blogging, etc… (you can see what services i’ve integrated via my friendfeed profile) – btw, i normally would do a tech focused post like this one on my other blog, but hey – its now irrelevant

of wordpress, twitter & friendfeed…

glemak — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:11:38 +0000

i use this wordpress blog to post about personal stuff as opposed to my typepad blog which i use for my emerging media, technology & career related stuff – i also have been sending all my tweets in digest format via the great alex king’s twitter tools plug-in to this blog as a lightweight way of archiving my tweets since my confidence in the architecture of twitter is minimal but since i’m now doing most of my microblogging via friendfeed and i’m sending those to twitter via twitterfeed and this blog’s posts are sent into friendfeed its creating an echo effect loop which is annoying…

so i’m going to turn off the twitter tools plugin – if for some reason you were subscribed to this blog for my microblogging, pls just go subscribe to me on friendfeed (or swurl which seems to do a good job of presence aggregation as well)…

i’ve also been remiss in posting a few interviews (rww, bst) and a panel (siia) that i’ve done this past year, so when i was adding them to my about page i thought i should also post about the shift in focus and online presence that i’m experiencing right now via friendfeed…

another upgrade

glemak — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 23:42:13 +0000

i’m about to upgrade to v2.3 of wordpress, after recently upgrading to v2.2.3 and a new theme (myjournal – which i really like)…

turning off all plugins and then getting to it – see you on the other side

maybe this will fix the category sql errors that seem to be plaguing my current version (and many others)…

update: completed w/ a few issues i needed to address, most importantly had to mod the /wp-includes/canonical.php via commenting out the final line:
add_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
change to:
//add_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical')

found help here in support

mobilizing the blog

glemak — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 20:23:00 +0000

Mobilized at Awakened Voice Blog

saw this post from my friend rob, and agree w/ his perspective – making this blog available to mobile devices makes a lot of sense – the plugin was very straight forward and just appears to work…

update: oh yeah, bookmark this url on your mobile to take advantage of this capability for my site – thanks to alex king for creating the plugin…

blogs, blogs and more blogs

glemak — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 01:11:28 +0000

i love testing new tools and platforms, it sort of comes w/ the territory when you have the background and dna that i have – plus i’m usually curious when it comes to emerging media and technology trends – some i embrace after my initial exploration, some i write off as probably ok for others but not right for me and some i think should just go away because they are a complete waste of time no matter who you are (i won’t give examples – that would be rude after all)…

so i’ve tried lots of blogging & other social media platforms over the last ~5.7 yrs

my typepad blog is my most frequently updated and subscribed to – it is mostly focused on podcasting and emerging media, my blogger site has been mostly for testing video uploading services (such as hipcast, the site formerly known as audioblog) – i haven’t really used it much lately, instead have been toying around w/ social media video sharing sites such as vimeo and blip.tv, my spaces blog was short lived as an active site and definately not what i personally was looking for in a blog toolkit, but msft does seem to have continually added functionality over time…

as an aside, i really like the new service that helps to aggregate my various online identities – onxiam (on “x” i am…) neat stuff…

so now, what to do w/ this great and very extensible blogging platform – for now i think i’ll use it for my more personal type posts including providing details surrounding my flickr photos and online shareable video that i’ve posted elsewhere – i think most of this stuff will be related to my family, life-style, interests and hobbies – so posts will most likely be about or of my family, my boys, my dogs & cats, snowboarding, mountian biking, hiking, cool gadgets and toys, etc – and i’ll still leave the podcasting, media and cto-related posts to my nomadic audio blog…

my expectation is that my family and friends will be the primary subscribers to the site – but actually i’ll also be doing it for myself, as my kids get older and the pets age – it’ll be good to have a chronological view to look back at – that is after all one of the original concepts behind blogging…

so the official necessary step to making this “real” in my mind is by claiming this blog on technorati – my profile

testing flickr to wordpress

glemak — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 02:42:03 +0000

marist student unionOriginally uploaded by glemak.

setup this blog w/in flickr so that i could post to this as well as my typepad blog, still experimenting…

haven’t had time to tweak w/ wp since the weekend, but definately have been bookmarking lots of good posts and wp recommendation blogs…

really like the extensibility of the platform as well as the extended community which seems huge and very, very engaged…

this photo is from the college visit to marist that we did w/ sean today – last one of the summer and all of us went up to take the tour and sit through the info session which went really well – this is a neat school and definately one of his desired schools…

karyn and ian went w/ us for the first time – which was good because they both got to see what a college campus that sean might actually be living at is like – eye opening especially for a mom…

we’ll go to a few more schools this fall while students are in session so we get that exposure too – and then its application time, fun stuff…

update: i really like the way my flickr photos work w/in this blog – maybe that’s what i’ll end up using this blog platform for – time will tell