Entries Tagged 'Web and tech' ↓

I’ve heard nothing but good things about the Flip camcorders. They’re only $150, so you can’t expect eight hours of recording or movie-quality resolution.

But you can pop ‘em into your shirt pocket, record an hour of video on them with the push of a button and then easily upload the video to the Web and share it with the world.

So now that the I Never Grew Up blog is offering one in a contest, I had to make a pitch to enter the contest and try to win one.

You can bet that if I win one, I will grab one of these sweet tripods and start posting short videos here.

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Hey. Yes, you. Notice the little short posts underneath this one? They’re called asides, and they’ll let me post smaller thoughts without the pressure of having to create entire posts. Hopefully, this blog will be a bit fresher in the future.

So, I’ve been packing a lot of information into the column on the right. I thought I should take a minute to tell you what’s going on over there item by item:

Search

OK, this one is obvious. You can search this site easily with this box.

Get automatic updates

You can receive emails every time a new post goes up on this site, or subscribe with a text reader, such as Google Reader.

Upcoming shows

As I slowly gather some more gigs, they’ll go in this spot, after announcing them in a post.

Tweets

These are little notes automatically fed from my Twitter account. Twitter is a kind of micro-blogging site which allows you to post a sentence or two at a time, and no more.

Flickr photos

Here, you’ll see the six most recent photos posted into my Flickr account.

Recent comments

The five most recent comments anywhere on the Web site are displayed here.

Categories

I’ve done my best to divide the topics of this blog into nine different categories. You can click to see posts in any one of the categories.

Jon on social media

These are links to everything I’ve stuck my thumb into, online. If you’re on LinkedIn, for example, and you know me, you can link to me easily by clicking the link listed here.

Blogroll

This will eventually once again have links to other Web sites of interest.

Also …

And below every individual post, you’ll find Related Posts, three links to other posts on this site that a computer thinks are related.

It’ll take me a little time to get the site backup to standards, but almost everything is back where it belongs!

You may not have noticed, but I’ve been spending a lot working adding cool technical features to this Web site:

Get updates automatically!

If you’d like to receive an email every day I post to this blog, then click the link for “Get updates by email” link at the top of the sidebar to the right and follow the instructions.

If you prefer using an RSS feed reader, you can find a link for “Get updates by RSS” right under the email link.

If you don’t know what a feed reader is but you’re interested in knowing more, watch this great little video from Common Craft:

Upcoming shows widget

Also in the sidebar, I’ve included a little widget that lists my upcoming music gigs. If you click on the link, you’ll find more details on every show.

Plus, you can subscribe to the new shows widget as a separate RSS feed, but I’ll likely post about new shows in the main blog, too.

Email this, print this links

When you click on a headline, you go to a page with just one individual post and its comments. At the top of those pages, you’ll now find links for emailing and printing posts.

Potentially related posts

Under each post on its individual page, you’ll find five or so other links that may or may not be related to the post above, depending on if the posting robot had its coffee or not.

I hope these features are useful to you.

For those so inclined and nerdy enough.

I’ve installed the new blog software and a great, sturdy, customizable new theme. I’m very happy with the bones of this new theme, but you know I’m going to have to tweak the colors, layout and side pages.

I especially love the theme developer’s commitment to beautiful typography on the Web. That counts double for me when I choose a theme.

Let me know what you think and what should be added.

BTW, this marks the end of my experiments with Twitter and Tumblr. I can’t do everything!

Now with the release of WordPress 2.6, I am convicted. I must upgrade this Web site!

But while I’m at it, I might as well get a lot of site maintenance stuff out of the way.

And I’m pretty sure this will *not* be seamless. Your old links may not work anymore. If you get the RSS feed, you may have to resubscribe.

But I will keep everyone up-to-date on what’s up.

I’m considering switching to a Tumblr-style blog for here on my personal web site.

Right now, there are no comments over there, but you can check it out here:

http://jonswerens.tumblr.com/

Screen grab, originally uploaded by Jon B. Swerens.

I think my dear wife spilled some PDFs all over our desktop.

It’s … Dramatic Chipmunk!

Hat tip: Zach Klein

Ah, that’s getting better.

I decided to mimic my original web site pages in the redesign of my blog.

I still don’t like the header just yet, but I’m diggin’ the rest of it. For my next trick: bringing my Flickr photos back to this front page. That’s fun. And then maybe I’ll bring in my last.fm radio selections.

Technology is fun!