Welcome to The Very Daily Weblog of Joshua Blankenship

I gave .com/notestoself a bit of spring cleaning lovin’ this past weekend, which mainly consisted of porting the entire thing over to Wordpress. It was a bit of a fool’s errand in the grand scheme of things, but an interesting experience nonetheless.

Notes to Self never had a content management system or database backend; it was just an html file I would handcode. This was great, because it had a small footprint and was quick and easy. The problem was I would forget about it. Even though it was easy, it was a multi-step process that would get lost in the shuffle with so many other work-related and personal projects and life responsibilities.

So, yes, Wordpress is crazy-robust for such a simple application. In fact, it will most likely prove to be too slow to continue using in the future, especially if Notes ever got a ton of traffic. But for now, at least everything is sitting tidy in a database (that I could ostensibly export/import into another CMS down the road), there are permalinks, and there is (finally) an RSS feed for your usage. Enjoy.

Todd Dominey waves farewell to blogging, favoring Twitter for “what I’m enjoying” kinds of posted content and stating, “writhing pithy thoughts on a personal blog is a luxury I can no longer afford.” Fair enough.

Jeffrey Zeldman talks about content outsourcing and the disappearing personal site, saying “Not every person who designs websites needs to run a personal magazine on top of all their other responsibilities.” He then points out the way more and more folks are using Flickr, Twitter, etc. to post content instead of previous homebrewed solutions on singular domains. Most so-called “web professionals” have online personas spread out over a number of outlets.

I’d wager this will be a more frequent occurrence over time, whether it’s Twitter or some other content outlet. So again, there will be a sort of pruning of the blog world and the only people who keep blogging will be the ones who really want to keep blogging.

I love that the web keeps changing. I think I still love blogging.

Universe man, Universe man

Size of the entire universe man
Usually kind to smaller man
Universe Man

He’s got a watch with a minute hand,
Millenium hand and an eon hand
When they meet it’s a happy land
Powerful man, Universe Man
— They Might Be Giants, Particle Man

Universe Man is on Prom Night Fist Fight now.

Viewzi bills itself as “a new and highly visual way
to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place.” It essentially gives users multiple visual and contextual ways to search the web and hopefully cuts down on the clutter and boringness so often associated with search engines. They have a 101 video to learn more.

When I was still in Dallas, I signed my first (and thus far only) NDA in the early days of Viewzi (only to choose another v-named opportunity at the time), so it’s awesome to see it come to fruition because it’s a great idea and it’s well-implemented. Huge props to Aaron Martin for a lot of the design details throughout, and to the rest of the team that’s pulled it all together.

1. Shower curtains
2. Text messages written in the all-caps, shorthand style of a 12 year old girl
3. Uncomfortable chairs
4. Ben Stiller movies
5. The rampant usage of ridiculous puns in article titles (I’m looking at you, Dwell)