vanderwal.net

Personal InfoCloud Site Minor Tweaks to Resolve Issues

I don’t post about site updates for the Personal InfoCloud Site on that site, as it is just content there. But, I do post about them here. This is one of those occasions. The updates today were minor, but after about a year I finally repaired some of the remaining oddities from the move from SquareSpace to hosted WordPress on the same host as vanderwal.net. One of the rough spots was comments usernames turned into email addresses and they are now back to usernames.

There were also some odd errant non-content posts that came out of SquareSpace that were picked up as posts. Those have now been removed.

Google Search Console has now been connected so hopefully Google search will finally work properly, which has been off a bit since the move out of TypePad to SquareSpace (around 2011 or so). The move to WordPress added more friction from detritus that compounds it all.

There are some things in the layout, information design, and page structure that I really want to clean up, as it is bugging more than it was months back. But, writing and filling in some gaps in ideas that I swore were there is taking the priority.

A Blog Move and Thin Catch-up

Yah, I know. It has been a while. Some things have changed, as I’m searching for what is next on the work front. Where I was it was a bit restrictive on sharing outward, so things got a little quiet. I’m still working on the Social Lenses / Complexity Lenses and have 80 to 90 stubs of ideas in my backlog of blogfodder, for here or the Personal InfoCloud.

A Move of Personal InfoCloud

I hadn’t posted to my blog, Personal InfoCloud in a long while. I was in the midst of a 16 part “Shift Happened” series, which was hitting embracing complexity as the next part of the series. I’m not sure if or when I will return to that. But, my work agreement frowned on sharing things out and I had a long negotiation about my prior work and corpus of IP around the Complexity Lenses. But, now that I’m back and able to freely write and share again I realized my blog where that happened much of the time needed to move off SquareSpace. Why? Poor customer support and small things breaking and them blaming me, when I hadn’t touched it in years.

The last two plus months I focussed on the move out and into another platform. I had looked at a few options for a month or so prior, but SquareSpace had one easy export path out, which is to WordPress, which I could self host (I have a few small blogs and sites that I have on self-hosted WP and they are fine). While there is a lot of turmoil in the WordPress sphere, going with the self-hosted option seems viable as a transition, if not longer option. I did an export of my SquareSpace site and in 20 minutes of export I had all my posts in WP and all comments, tags / categories, most media in blog posts, and the structure was there.

While the first step was 20 minutes to get to about 80 percent of a move done, the next portion took about two months between many meetings around advisory to start-ups, discussions about next steps (everybody was holding out until after the election, then to sort out what level of chaos may ensue, now…, and finding a lot of interest it is just getting things to a reality), mentoring professionally to director and up leadership in product management and cross-functional design and development engineering (with a lot of data focus and AI), data analytics and analysis of my own 20+ years of what I know so it can be better organized for others to pick-up. But, I had a deadline of the first week of February for the move out of SquareSpace to take place, as it was the next billing cycle.

The last two months of the move of the blog focussed on getting the design transitioned over or finding a viable design theme to use and bend to something I could work with. I found something, but it came with a lot of options and capabilities, which I initially embraced, then started printing out screens to single screen PDFs and taking the red pen to them (even after the move I think there are some things that may go, but also things that need work to come back). The next big haul was touching every post fixing some media links broken and fixing the URLs, which included the pre-post name date slug as part of the post name. I got those finally sorted out at the end of last week and Thursday I started moving the domains (from where I was developing it in a sandbox), shift to the production site, adding certificates, fixing odd typography issues, fixing routing issues, and other oddities. I hit the deadline.

Move Done and Next Steps for PIC

With the move done, I didn’t realize how much stress and mental clutter I had tied up in that move. I was managing todo lists in Obsidian, GitHub, and some quick reminders with times and dates on them. I felt free to start thinking about what I was focussing on two months prior and a ton of pressure released.

With the Personal InfoCloud blog I still need to fix links that go to Slideshare as most are broken, but I need to sort out what I want to do with those presentations. Jon and Rashmi have started a new replacement for Slideshare as a modern attempt, which I need to try a bit more and assess the fit for needs.

I also need to sort out the homepage of the site, as I’ve long wanted to have a homepage that sits in front of the blogs. I have that now, but I’m not happy with it. With the deadline out of the way I can have it as one of my projects I’m working through.

The categories, post listing, and search is also something I need to re-think and get into a better state. When I moved from TypePad to SquareSpace in 2011 to 2012 there wasn’t a good way to manage this, and what I cobbled together I hated. But, for PIC the platform is something I don’t want to think about I just want to use to post things I write. WordPress has a lot more options and I played with a couple before I put a hard focus on making the deadline about 5 to 6 weeks ago.

I have quite a few blog posts ready to be written. An introduction to the Complexity Lenses (there are over 90 of them now and in my master outline of them with sub-nodes there are over 1,500 nodes all together, which each node capable of being a page to at least 5 pages of explanation). This introduction post may iterate over time, which I’m fine with and not true blog with a line in time tied to it that other posts have. I also need to write up my “20 Social Roles”, which I do a lot of work around helping organizations sort through the roles and dynamics of their work, collaborating, cooperative, and collective environments, but also tool and platform builders creating tools that close the gaps of missing support for any and all of these Social Roles.

What Happens Here?

Here at vanderwal.net I need to get back to building a habit of blogging again. The weeknote is something I may do to help my rhythm. I still write a ton, but it is all in my notes. My daily notes, or “Daily Dump”, looks an awful lot like my first 4 to 7 years of blogging here (so 2000 to 2007 / 2008), before short snippets and observations started ending up in Twitter.

I still need to spend a week of heads down work to update the underlying code that the site runs on. I started that about 2 years back, but a day or two here and there weren’t cutting it and not a good way to make progress, particularly since it requires rewriting the code on my many templates to get data out and filling the pages in. Once that is done I have a few things I really want to address, like pagination on tag pages, and fixing the flow of the blog across time.

Whew!

If you have interest in chatting and catching up, or if you have a project, product, or work you would like help with please reach out.

Take care.

The 8 Questions Answered in the Blog Questions Challenge

It has been a while since I’ve regularly blogged. I’m still writing a lot, but it is going into notes, and I need to get those back shared out. It used to be things I now put in notes, I just posted online (this sort of gets to the first question). I saw Joe Crawford answer these eight questions on his blog - ArtLung: Blog Questions Challenge ~ 16 Jan 2025. This seems like it would be a great thing to get the writing and workflow to post muscles functioning again.

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?

I had some odd notes in HTML markup, mostly to myself, that I had posted before I started blogging. They were just HTML files roughly linked in a web directory. On this site I’ve had my links running as an HTML page since 1995, which is a couple years before I had my own domain.

In the web development community in the 1999 and 2000 I was reading sites that had become blogs. It was late 2000 when I was playing around with Blogger, mostly as a means to share links between home and work (this is what my FTP HTML files to my web directory was doing). In very late 2000 I made my first post in Blogger tied to this website. It worked on an FTP model as well at that point, but when I travelled hotels would block FTP from their hotel networks. I wrote a travel note system in PHP that allowed me to capture ideas, links, and notes. When I would get home I would introduce them back into Blogger. The travel notes turned into a CMS at work (I had been regularly rolling CMSes for work life for a few years).

2. Why did you choose to write your own blogging software?

I started with Blogger, but quickly was writing my own CMS for when I travelled. But, what I really wanted was the multiple categories added to blog posts that Grey Matter blogging software (Greymatter (software) - Wikipedia) had that Noah Gray created. I didn’t have an interest in going back to Perl as I had moved to PHP for easier development and having it be more readable code. So, I turned my Travel Notes I wrote in PHP into a more full fledged blogging tool. In Spring or Summer of 2001 I moved fully to my own hand written blogging software and It had stayed there. I still has functionality missing that I’ve long wanted to add.

I’ve updated the underlying code when I move hosts and I need to update the PHP to a newer version (I’m currently in the midst of doing that and hope by May to have that done, if not much sooner).

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?

My Personal InfoCloud blog started on TypePad in 2005 (I had it on MovableType for a short bit, but Perl was rusty for me and I shifted to TypePad). Around 2012 that moved to SquareSpace and I’m in the midst of moving that to self-hosted WordPress. The PIC blog I just wanted to write and post, where as vanderwal.net I was fine messing with the underpinnings. I’ve setup and run a few WordPress sites. I helped get Home - Boxes and Arrows on MovableType, before MT was publicly available (Jay Allen ended up doing a lot of the heavy lifting as my worklife got very busy). Today I use Micro.blog very lightly and I need to sort out what I’m going to do with that.

4. Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?

When I started blogging on this site I write in Bare Bones Software | BBEdit 15 in text, then would hand code the HTML and copy and paste that into the form, add in the title, location, type of post, and click categories to add. Around 2010 I shifted to Markdown in various Markdown editors. When the app Marked came out I started dragging the Markdown file to Marked and it would convert to clean HTML and I would check it, copy and past in to my system.

The since around 2010 or 2011 I’ve used iA Writer: The Benchmark of Markdown Writing Apps to write my blog content in Markdown. I have used Marked 2 to convert to HTML for this blog since it came out. The remainder of the workflow is to post into the CMS, it returns a blog post link, which I check through. If edits are needed I edit in Markdown, drag to Marked 2, drop in the test again for the post, and submit. If it is good, I go back to the CMS management screen and click to update the RSS feed. Then go to a push the notification something is posted to a ping service (it used to have 20+ options and now it is 2 or 3 I think).

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?

Most days I write thoughts I’ve been mulling as I wake. I capture links of interest I’ve read and write about those through out the day. In the evening I try to clear out open tabs and capture links then.

Sadly, in the last 4.5 years, since I’ve had Obsidian I just write in Markdown in there in a Daily Dump structure note template I have. Those all sit in the same directory as the Markdown for blog posts, as they are all notes.

I really need to get back in the habit of posting, at least a weeknote, if not more regularly. I have a long stack of writing to hone and post into Personal InfoCloud (more than 80 “blogfodder” items in a list for there - my past job didn’t take kindly to blogging, so I’ve held on to a lot of writing that just needs to get out).

6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Here on vanderwal.net in the Off the Top blog, it is pretty much what it says on the tin. As it is written it is posted. I’ve been trying to edit a bit more to fix missing letters, missing words, and making shorter sentences (that last bit becomes a rabbit hole), but mostly it goes out as I hit the last period. Marked 2 does some grammar checking and other lightweight edit helping, but not much more than that goes in to it.

7. Your favorite post on your blog?

Most posts I forget I’ve written once posted. The act of writing and posting clears them from my head, which is part of why I blog - so to clear my mind for other things. But, I think my favorite isn’t in the actual blog but adjacent to it, Model of Attraction - First Draft :: vanderwal.net, which is a brain dump while on a flight after the inkling of the idea for it was seeded. It was going to go into the Off the Top blog, but I set it apart as a draft. There are many posts I’ve written about attraction since that time -Attraction :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net. The Model of Attraction is the underlying foundation for a lot of approaches to thinking through and assessing things technical, social (along with grad degree with deep social sciences and analytic / quant).

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

I am in the midst of updating the PHP on the back end to bring the site’s code current. Once that is done I really need to add pagination to categories, a better previous and next navigation, calendar / chronology focus display of posts, and site search. I’ve also long wanted to have concurrent category views, say “folksonomy” and “data visualization” for better .

The other thing I really am wanting to do is to have a Digital Garden section shared out, like Maggie Appleton lays out here A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden and does on her site, or as Tom Critchlow has been tending to on his site - Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create..

Weeknote - 10 January 2021

The first week back at work after a 10 day break was going well, other than a continual battle with my work computer that had a battery bulge that started six months ago and slowly turned into throttling, slow cursor and slow recognition of keystrokes at times, and regular crashes. The long replacement / fix cycle is pure Covid impact. After on Friday 5pm my refresh the laptop arrived, it felt like I got half my brain back spending time getting it setup (that process is still underway).

But, the insurrection actions to take over the U.S. Capitol took the focus of the week. Work Thursday and Friday was a welcome distraction, but lack of sleep and a computer doing its best to die made them not overly productive. I never thought I would see the U.S. foundations attacked in such a brutal way. Large mobs fed by outright lies trying to keep Congress from doing what the Constitution requires them to do is years and decades in the making. Chants to execute the Vice President because he said he couldn’t do what there is no legal path for him to do is beyond excuse. Attacking the the monuments to the democracy, but also attacking the Constitution and what it has laid out to protect the U.S. democracy is pure insurrection. This is a true wicked problem that is a tightly wound gordian knot of complexity. Having leader still sitting in office that supported the insurrection and the lies that created its actions is beyond me. They are sitting in seats and elected bodies they don’t believe in and want to destroy and want to run a country with a Constitution they want to destroy.

Read

Friends shared the Rijksmuseum’s now offering high resolution images of their collection, which are stunning.

I restumbled upon SPACE10, which I used to follow but the RSS feed seem to have broken, but some of their long pieces (which is many of them) are not structured well for a long read and they have the scroll bar in the browser turned off to know roughly how far along you are in a long piece, and there are no anchors in the long pieces to link to sections of relevance. It is a really not well conceived site for people thinking about architecture and a structured world.

That said, their piece on The Digital in Architecture: Then, Now and in the Future is rather good, it reminds me of a collection of presentations on information architecture from some of the top information architects from around 2003 to 2015 or so. The piece also has a good bibliography, but nothing is linked (I’m really not sure they understand what they are doing with the web, but they content is interesting and that is likely why I pushed it off my radar in the past).

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais finally arrived. This looks much better than what I had thought it was and may dig into it over the weekend. I picked it up to gut around the topic of teams and optimizing them, particularly around adaptive teams. I a lot of experience with building and running teams and team ecosystems in large organization and bringing helping them be modern and breaking out of the command and control as well as chain of command model non-digital companies lean on (which destroy capabilities and efficiencies and mostly died out in the early 2000s except for the dinosaur companies - for more than 20 years I’ve flipped that models and been able to vastly improve every important metric). I haven’t found good books on teams that echo not only the experiences I’ve had and have consulted others on, but ones I see as prevalent in most of the high performing companies that work the same way. I know Team Topologies is more focussed on DevOps / developer / engineering models, but some underlying foundations for improving my framing of things is what I’m looking to get out of it. There are some things I don’t fully agree with and I regularly see as problematic that are listed in headings, but I don’t know their take. What I do know is a lot of the reference materials they point to are ones I’ve long used and have in my foundations as they echo experiences and things I’ve seen in practice that are really good (I love well documented books, particularly ones that use solid references that hold up with time).

Also arrived is a used version of Paul Madonna’s Everything is its own reward, which is a book of his monochrome watercolor and sketches of San Francisco. It is wonderful and takes me back to a San Francisco I deeply miss and loved. Even though it was used, but still had the poster piece tucked into its back cover sleeve. This poster is a wonderful edition.

Watched

News…

Listened

New to me band, Her, fit the mood early in the week and I’ve added them to easy access in some playlists.

Exponent - Episode 191: Facebook, Twitter, and Trump was a good conversation that was a bit out of sync, but good from a thinking and considering the situation piece.

Postlight Podcast - WordPress and Beyond: With Matt Mullenweg was really good, as expected. Some of the side discussion that started Paul Ford thinking, really have me intrigued. I’m needing to go back and track these down.

I had A.J. Croce’s A.J. Croce album on and had forgotten how good it really is. It is so well recorded and produced as on decent headphones or sound system it sounds like you are in the room with them. This was the in the soundtrack of the cross country drive with my dad in 1993. But, even with those wonderful memories I’ve always loved this album as there is so much good music in it and the lyrics are really good with nice turns of phrase.

Productivity

I’ve gone back to a practice of daily notes (the daily dump) in Obsidian / markdown that helps keep track of thoughts. It is similar to the sections I have for the weeknote template, but include: Thoughts, read, talked to, health, watched, listened to, worked on (personal items - I haven’t kept a daily work journal in a long while, but have daily meeting notes I keep in my work environment), learned, ate, bought, added to wishlist. These last two are to keep track of why.

One of the things I’m trying to sort through in my notes, research, and writing process workflow that I’m doing between just the daily notes and weeknotes is a microcosm of my regular workflows for writing (which I’m getting back to). My notes sit in directories in markdown files that are now in Dropbox for mobile device access and Obsidian sits on top of them linking things together and all is searchable in spotlight and DevonThink Indexes it. My writing is now in iA Writer, which works best with iCloud directories, which can be searched by Spotlight, but is outside Obsidian and outside DevonThink.

I sometimes start writing in iA Writer, but they may be: Just a stub, more fleshed out but still a draft, mostly finished but not posted / published, or posted / published. I have many pieces from mid-summer around the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd was murdered, which really moved me, but they weren’t finished or posted. Weeknotes ran into multi-week notes, then into just idle and start from scratch. There are things I know I have written I want to point to, but they aren’t shared out (this is a common issue). I finally created a quick template for marking the state at the bottom of a piece in progress. But, this isn’t helping sort through my central repository in Obsidian where searching across that collection and interlinking to pull things closer.

I’ve swapped through a bunch of writing apps and at the moment I have no interest in moving off iA Writer as I really like it. There are some things I need to investigate for some writing coming (footnotes, tables, and possibly integration with Grammarly as I need to get back into good writing patterns and practices). In the past my long or focussed writing was in Scrivener, which I still love, but its treatment of markdown as second class citizen, which made it difficult to have a smooth workflow with for publishing to the web. I used Ulysses for a short while, but its own structures and not freely available markdown files made it not work well at all in my workflows. There is a lot I really like with Ulysses and Scrivener with notes and note management, but easy working across devices isn’t as smooth as iA Writer nor as smooth as the workflow that is easy with freely available markdown files.

Good Night Sweet Six Apart

Odd how news of business transactions hits. Today I saw Six Apart was bought by VideoEgg (yes, Six Apart that makes TypePad and MovableType). This news made me a bit sad and nostalgic.

Movable Type is Old Skool

As the young people used to say (they were still young back then) Movable Type (MT) is OG. MT was far from the first blogging platform, as Blogger and others like Grey Matter (this influenced the blogging platform under this blog a lot). MT was started by the couple Ben and Mena Trott out of their house in the dust of the test boom bursting. It was started as a blogging platform and build to be a well thought through platform for others to use. By 2002 it had been launched user tested and was the first underpinnings of Boxes and Arrows Magazine (as deployed by Jay Allen).

Those were good days and MT was a solid product. MT turned in to Six Apart and offered a hosted platform, TypePad, which my Personal InfoCloud blog is hosted on. The became the first real blogging platform company and it grew into a solid company.

The Show Goes On

The announcements around the purchase state MT and TypePad will continue to be supported. The big change is a new owner, a new company name (SAY Media), and possibly a new direction. I've had a lot of friends work at Six Apart or work with them.

The days of sitting up late talking blogging platforms in the early days at SXSWi and how all of this was more than just something the "broken one's" did. We have seen WordPress surface out of another platform and thrive as have many other personal sharing social platforms that have not only changed the web, but have also largely changed the world for the better. MT and other blogging platforms gave nearly everybody a printing press with a wider reach around the globe than any personal printing press ever had. As well the readers or people with affinity to the ideas shared, or even trying to get a new or different view.

I look forward to my new TypePad overlords and hope they are as inspiring and gracious as the kind, smart, gentle, and caring folks at Six Apart always have been. I also have my own hand rolled blogging platform that sits under vanderwal.net, as well as my vanderwal on Tumblr blog, and all those other social platforms I share things within and on. Be well Six Apart as you move from a blogging platform company with a name on the door, to our collective blogged memories.

Mis-Marketing

I have been needing to turn comments back on here in Off the Top. I get really good, er, make that great responses in e-mail to many of my posts here. There needs to be a conversation, which is what blogs are all about and it is in comments that much of this conversation takes place. But, as we all know having comments on is a large problem. Why is it a problem?

Problems Created by the Clueless

The problem with comments is the mis-marketers. No, not those mass marketing, but people with little clue about finding a good information space and bringing up products and ideas when they are coherent, which would be good marketing. Good marketing can be annoying, but it is not good marketing that has made an utter mess of blog comments. These people have not clue, they think they are on to a good idea that will make them wealthy, but like most get rich ideas they do not work. Not only do they not work in this case they create animosity toward the product and site. They are putting themselves on black-lists and lowering the value of what they are trying to inflate the value of. It is a clueless approach. They think they are marketing and creating value, but are actually doing the opposite. These mis-marketers not only have shot themself in the foot (or worse) they have ruined great tools.

I am curious if there is a convention or summit for mis-marketers? Can we get a little Cluetrain juice for them to sip?

Looking At My Options

The mis-marketers have made a mess of e-mail with SPAM, referrer logs, blog comments, and trackbacks (I know I am missing many other good communication methods). My blog is broken, I know this. I am still running my own blogging software from 2001. No, I do not have the time for upkeep. But, I keep looking at the time to convert my database to a format for MovableType or WordPress and keep the nearly 2000 entries still working for historical purposes. I do not see that time coming any time soon.

Off the Top Blog Turned Five

I forgot that 31 December 2005 was my 5 year anniversary blogging. A lot has changed on this blog and the whole blogging arena. Many of my short posts along the lines of, "I found this cool thing... " are now in my del.icio.us feed, which for those of you with JavaScript turned on is over on the right as the new incarnation of Quick Links. The same items and more I also post over on Yahoo! MyWeb, but because I can post to just myself or to a community of people I know with similar interests. (I really really hope their community functionality of MyWeb gets fixed soon in 2006 to better filter feeds from the community coming to me and allow something other than, "you can see all of my links and I will see all of your links". Life and real people's interests are not like that and Yahoo! is the people understanding people products on the web for people's lives. So, lets get to it shall we?)

Blogging seems to be more than the relative handful of people I followed in 1999 through 2001. It really exploded following that, partly because there were more options that were easy to use and options that became more stable. In 2000 I had been running this site (under a few different URLs) for five years and when I added Blogger as my tool to add content more easily it was a wonderful change for me. Not long after that Pyra (the company that started Blogger) imploded and we were left with just Ev and when Ev was away Blogger had separation anxiety. Not long after I turned to blogging by hand for a few months. I then put my own blogging tool in place that eased my workflow (Movable Type did not have the features that I wanted for my multiple categories and three entry types (essay, journal, and weblog). I had built my tool as a means to post information while traveling from any web browser when I was doing it by hand and needed FTP to regularly post. I have been running the same blogging tool with modifications since it launched 31 October 2001 (I had a post on my hand built page from October 2001 announcing it.

The look of the site has changed from the bright blue and bright green on black the blog launched with (this had been used for two years or so, and blogging with that use of the color palette was hard on the eyes). I moved to a less hard on the eyes color scheme not long after the blog launched. The current look was put in place 20 November 2002. Other than turning off comments (which I hope to bring back some day) and modifying the right-hand bar I have not made many changes since then. Life has been a bit busy since then.

I am still hoping that I will move this blog to a commercial blogging tool as my time is pulled elsewhere and I do not have the time or energy to tweak the underlying code that creates this blog. I have been quite happy with my use of TypePad since they launched and I keep my more professional blog, Personal InfoCloud over there. My happiness with TypePad and the full company of six apart there to support Movable Type will likely make it my choice. I have some other uses for the Movable Type software, other than this blog that is helping my choice. I am also a fan of WordPress and Drupal (Drupal has the capabilities under it to do what I want and need too and a large developer community). These changes come down to time available, so I could be a while.