Tonight I created some sub-categories under the Media & Entertainment category here at smays.com. Still cleaning up and checking but the new categories are: Best Scenes; Short Films; Steve TV; Trailers and TV Clips. Click around on a few of these (pull-down in right sidebar) and you can see what I’ve tried to do.
Category Archives: Blogging
Why Dave Winer won’t point to Facebook posts
He has two other reasons with which I agree, but this is my favorite:
“It’s supporting their downgrading and killing the web. Your post sucks because it doesn’t contain links, styling, and you can’t enclose a podcast if you want. The more people post there, the more the web dies. I’m sorry no matter how good your idea is, fuck you I won’t help you and Facebook kill the open web.”
I’ll have a blog till the day I die or I’m too far gone to maintain it. God willing, I’ll have an AI to take over at that point.
WordPress Media Library
The screencast below is about one of the under-the-hood features of WordPress. So it’s going to be of zero interest to anyone who doesn’t have (or has had) a blog or website using WordPress as the content management system.
WP is great for searching. I have 5,000 posts going back 15 years but if I can remember a word or phrase, WP will find all references in a matter of seconds. If you include media (photo, video, audio) with your post, WP puts it in the Media Library. I had more than 1,600 pieces of media in my library but I couldn’t search because I hadn’t taken the time to give the media a useful name or any other metadata. This 6 minute screencast shows how I cleaned that up and why.
As I’ve experimented with various online tools for managing media (iCloud, Google Photos, Flickr), I’ve found myself drawn back to my WordPress blog. Let me hasten to point out almost nobody visits my blog. That’s been true since the beginning. It’s always been more journal/archive.
But when I put images online, I try do so in some context. If I have 50 photos of my mother as a young woman, I’d rather include those (as a slideshow or gallery) as part of blog post that might include links to other posts and images. You get the idea.
For me, the stories behind the images (if I know them) are as important as the images themselves. A blog works well for this. And because it is self-hosted, I don’t have to worry that Yahoo! or Google or Facebook might one day kill it.
Dave Winer’s Comment Guidelines
I forgot how often Dave Winer says things I think but can’t find the words for. Below are a few excerpts from his comment guidelines on Scripting News.
They should always take into account what is said in the post. If you haven’t read the post in full, reasonably carefully, don’t comment. If it is obvious that you have not read the post, your comment will be deleted.
It’s not a free speech zone. It’s not a place for you to be heard.
It’s not a place for you to promote your products, services, blog, initiatives, political causes. Don’t post spam.
I’m not interested in debates here on my blog. If you want a debate, host it somewhere else, and if I’m interested in participating I will.
Absolutely no personal comments about me or anyone else.
A blog is like a flower bed
A website — especially a blog — is like flower bed. Stop weeding for even a few days and you have ass high weeds everywhere. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been pulling weeds here. Since starting this blog in 2002 I’ve posted about 5,700 items. These fall into four basic type:
- Original
- Excerpts from articles
- Book quotes/excerpts
- Media: video, audio, images
So far I’ve deleted about 600 posts. Some got yanked because the off-site story to which they linked was gone; in some cases the embedded media (video, audio, images) stopped working; and some of the stuff I posted was just worthless (flushing sound). Of the remaining 5,000+ posts almost 700 include video and 90 have an embedded audio clip.
The most time consuming chore has been cleaning up meta data: categories and tags. I’m a bit anal on this topic and I’ll explain why.
The reason I started — and continue — blogging is so I’ll have a place I can put stuff and find it later. WordPress (the content management system this blog runs on) is great at search but with 5,000 items that doesn’t help if you don’t know what to search for. Putting each new post in one or more categories and assigning appropriate tags makes this easier.
For example, I have a category for Social Media and tags for posts about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Apple is a category… iPad, iPhone, iPod and MacBook are tags. You get the idea. If it sounds like a lot of tedious work, it is.
In some respects I’m like the guy that builds the scale model of the Taj Mahal out of Popsicle sticks in his basement. Nobody’s gonna see it but that’s not the point.