sysmango.com

I looked at a link created to the last post, and I couldn't help but notice that this post SHOULD be node 1000. For those of you who are not following the technical disasters here, I use the Drupal CMS to run the site. Drupal uses node ID internally (and externally if you didn't do anything to change it) to keep track of content created.

This is post 1000. An odometer moment has been reached for SysMango.com. A little analysis seems to be in order. There are exactly 2 people reading the site. And I think I'm one of them.

(Hi, Yvonne. Love you, and thanks for all the support).

The rest of you are looking for information on a traffic accident that happened about 2 hours north of here, or aren't actually people, but code running inside some search engine, screenscaper, some kind of blog plagiarism engine or just something that's following any of the number of links I spew due to twitter, utterli, Pownce or whatever else I'm casting links to. (Welcome to my site, please make yourself comfortable.)

And honestly, I'm not really surprised. I'm not really that interesting.

SysMango.com was first registered on 2003 March 31. It was mostly a reaction to Natalie's sister (Hey, Miriam) having registered http://churnbutterdesign.com/. I had been thinking about having a site of my own for a couple of years (who didn't when they first got on the Internet in the mid-90's). Miriam getting a site, well, that made me just do it.

So, the site has been up for 2050 days. And this is node 1000. That's an average of 0.49 nodes a day for the last 5.62 years.

That doesn't mean that I've posted 1000 meaningful things. Some of those nodes are administrative items needed to maintain the site. Some of them where created and then unpublished in my 2 year experimentation with the contributed modules for Drupal that used nodes to hold things. A few were actually written by someone else in the almost never used SysMango.com forum. Yes, I created forum about the time my brother, Brian, got rid of the forum on his site. At the time, I was starting to have a change of heart about the validity of forums and their potential use. Since then, I have realized that I really don't like them after all. I have little to no interest in maintaining them. I find the software less than useful and the whole idea of a forum to be ill advised.

That, and the fact that there really isn't a community of people here to put anything meaningful into them. There is still a forum here, but no one is using it. Least of all me.

So here I am; one thousand packages of meaningless, uninteresting information later. And honestly, I'm not sure why I keep doing it. Other than I like screaming meaningless uninteresting gibberish into the void every couple of days or weeks or even months at a time.

This site has never really gained anything of an identity of its own. I don't really want to be a single topic blog. While the idea to have multiple sites going, each about a single topic, is the way some people do things, I never really understood that. I barely have enough content generation going to justify this one site.

I guess the big problem really is that I can't stand the feeling of just reposting links to other content that has been talked about elsewhere to death. This is especially true when I don't think I have anything meaningful or interesting to add beyond the posting of "here's an interesting link." And while BoingBoing handles that really well and in an interesting way, I don't have the energy to do the concept justice. And as no one is reading this here, not really what I want to spend my time doing.

Looking at the clock, it just became SysMango.com day 2051.

I don't have anything more interesting to say other than I'm sorry it hasn't been more interesting.

There really isn't anything particularly interesting about having created 1000 nodes here on the site. But as people seem to attach special significance to these moments when a digit is added, I figured "why not?" and just posted all this.

So, please, everyone enjoy SysMango.com day 2051 (and any subsequent days till I post anything again). Comments appreciated.

I just finished an update of the site to the latest version of Drupal 5 to close a potential security issue reported by the Drupal team. And looking at the site, I couldn't help but notice that it has been over a month since I last posted anything. Not exactly living up to my own expectations for the site. And yet, I'm still more active than a few people I know.

A big part of the issue has been that I'm in one of those phases where the computer just represents work. Sometimes a lot of work. And not all of it enjoyable. Not that anything is wrong with work. It's just that sometimes I am looking for something more than just using the computer.

Yes, you read that right. Sometimes Butch doesn't like computers any more than you do. They're not a toy. They're a tool I use to make a living. Well, maybe they're not always just a toy. Maybe just most of the time I use computers as toys. But it's not like I'm playing games with them. Not video games, at least.

I'm pretty much at the place where video games are just for my kids. But that's another story.

The update was done to protect against a security hole. I am going to be going back through the modules for Drupal 6. I will be looking to see if enough of the modules I use have been updated or have replacements for Drupal 6. I may just decide to unpublish some of the content (like the polls) that rely on some of the modules that have not or will not make the jump from D5 to D6.

I am also considering what I am going to do about the Gallery install I have. I haven't been using Gallery all that much recently, having used Flickr more for the daily photos (I do try to do it everyday, just not always successful).

 

I will be trying to post more about what I am doing. I guess my biggest fear is that I'm boring. I know that a lot of things I think about are not exactly unique. I really try hard to not talk about politics, work or the war. I think I should leave politics and war to those that actually have a clue about those topics. And what is what I am sometimes trying to escape.

I don't want the to be unused, but I also do not want to just repost things that have been posted elsewhere. And I don't want the site to become a single topic, one dimensional affair (which I'm afraid I did with the Uru-related content).

As part of upgrading the site, I will be going through and reviewing all of the content again. I am thinking about tweaking the taxonomy and organizing things differently. I have a to-do list with about 40 items that need something added back, edited or changed in someway. There are almost 1000 nodes on this site between this blog, the almost never used forums and a couple of other pages. (This post being node 993).

Maybe I'll try to do something special for node 1000. And then maybe not. I'll more than likely just put some kind of meaningless placeholder in node 1000. It's not like anyone even sees the numbers anymore.

If anyone has any ideas or comments, please feel free to either comment or send me a message.

 

Since the last post, I have noticed that the Twitter feed has appeared to load a bit faster. Initally, I had turned off the "What am I doing?" block. I did not leave it off for long, just a couple of hours. I missed having it. I did turn it back on, but Twitter is leaving me something to think about. Actually, it is a couple of things. The performance of Twitter is an issue. I know they are making changes, and trying to setup rate limits and what not for their account. I have to assume they are getting slammed pretty much round the clock by people updating and people using things other than SMS messages to either update or receive the feed. I know it took me about 5 mintues to figure out how to post to Twitter using a command line. And then I saw Dave Taylor's script at Linux Journal for doing the same thing. So I used that. It was better. I made some changes to match how I normally do scripts, but the guts are his. How many other people are doing that? Writting scripts to abuse the Twitter (or any other services) api, and pushed the usage model in a completely different direction from where it was designed for. (I love doing stuff like that!) So, here I am, sending tweets from my phone using PIE or SMS (mostly PIE), sending tweets from about 3 different windows apps, sending tweets from a shell script. And then there are all the ways I'm receiving them. I'm not receiving a single SMS message. I found them to be too distracting. The phone sending me an alert means I either have a meeting, a phone call, or something really needs my attention. I prefer to get tweets via a desktop app, a Firefox extention, and my Chumby. I am also using Twitter to feed into at least two other sites that update themselves from the Twitter feeds of their users. Since the last post, I noticed that Twitter was doing something different. They used to limit clients to 60 or 70 calls an hour. With the number of clients I had going, I would hit that once or twice a day. This weekend I started to notice that I was hitting it way more often. They now have a maximum rate of 30 calls an hour. And honestly, I don't see my web site loading any faster. I do think I want to do something different with the Twitter feed. I think I would rather the nanoposts that I send to Twitter show up in the main feed, with the day's tweets grouped together as a single post. I think I saw something like that one someone elses site, but I can't remember which one. Probably a WordPress thing. But being I'm not a fan of WordPress, I'll have to figure something else out. Or just keep going how I'm going. Of course, this all assumes that I'm going to continue on with Twitter. That's another thing I've been thinking about, what the is going on with Twitter? First there is this collective idea that Twitter is having major performance issues. And then I see this in Tweek's feed: Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service. And then Ars Technica runs with it. One has to wonder about companies that don't feel the need to honor their posted terms of service. And I have to assume that these same companies would have no problem at all going after end users that annoy them one way or another. Where's the accountability? Too many times, I've sen these awful click-thru terms of service and licensing agreements that are impossible to read, and is many ways seem to prohibit the exact activity that the product, wesite or service was pitched to perform or provide. And I get that a company or service, in the interest of protecting itself, must occassionally make changes to their terms. But Twitter is on the record as saying they went with their original TOS intentionally, presumably because of Flickr's repuation, a part of which is their enforcement of their TOS. Twitter's now telling people that's not what they meant to do now? They just slammed a package together and, well, mea culpa, there will be changes to make it harder to pin things on them. I like the Ars article's analysis. What is Twitter, a service or a community? Maybe it is time to evaluate either doing something myself, just for me, or looking at services that target the same space as Twitter. I am not using Twitter as anything than a platform for message passing. Honestly, of the now 29 entities following me on Twitter, only 2 are people I actually know. I think even my skills as a programmer would be enough to put something together to accomplish most of how I'm doing with Twitter, even updating at least one of the other sites. And with only two other people who would really be affected (and I'm fairly certain that either of them would really care if I stopped using Twitter) it may be worth going my own way here.

There have been some changes made to how SysMango.com works. And there are more changes to come.
The major change is that I have stopped using the contributed Category module for Drupal and switched back to the native Taxonomy. This means that a lot of things were broken and some may still be broken. It is going to take days to find them all, and I have already been working for weeks on a copy of the site.
There may also be some visual changes in the look and feel, and some of the menus have changed.
Beyond that, let me know what you think.

Yesterday, at about two in the afternoon, I recieved an internal IM from Carol, the project manager who owns about 75% of my time. Now it is not abnormal to receive instance messages from Carol. We are in different states and working on the same project for the account. And she does own how I use 75% of my time. What makes this IM noteworthy is that it was about sysmango.com. For those of you that have noticed, I recently made some small changes to SysMango.com. I started using Twitter. The "updates" are showing up on the left. I have also been thinking about how I have been managing images for the site. And at the begining of October, I was poking around TED.com, and saw Mena Trott's talk about blogging at the 2006 conference. One of the items in the talk was the picture of herself that she had been taking every day and posting on a website. I started thinking to myself: "this sites a little dead, I need to do something. And I have this webcam here that I'm not really using . . . " So I started doing a daily-ish photo and posting it to the site. And then I thought about the Flickr account I opened when Yahoo Photos closed (because Yahoo bought Flickr). I had been using the Yahoo Photos account to facilitate showing pictures on the TiVo. ButterPhat and RA both started using Flickr for photos. So it kind of made sense, and I was given a Pro account at Flickr for 3 months free to keep me happy with Yahoo and picking Flickr. Carol is the first person to say something about my photos (well, ButterPhat did comment @flickr on a couple and I think Yvonne is watching, too) and say something about it to me in person.