new laptop time….

 

So a few weeks ago my laptop started giving me hints it was thinking about retirement. It’s given me yeoman service — it was given to me when I left Apple, so it’s had a nice, long, fruitful life. It was clear, however, that I was heading towards a badly timed breakdown and I wanted to avoid that. It started with rendering glitches that indicated problems in the video RAM when I ran the thing hot for a while (lots of video, or playing Civ IV for instance). No data issues, but it was obvious that as the box heated up, a video ram chip was getting flakey.

This has been slowly progressing. I had my first random reboot while in SoCal, and I’ve had two in the last four days while working in Lightroom. No data problems, but terribly inconvenient, and I don’t want to be importing photos if the box resets. So I decided it was time to upgrade the laptop.

My current laptop is a 2.16 Core Duo laptop, 2 gigs of RAM (max possible). The upgrades to the Mac lines since this came out (late 2006 model) mean just about anything is going to be a nice improvement. So what to get?

After chewing on the options for a while and considering my options, I ordered the new laptop today, and it’ll arrive in time for me to spend the weekend migrating. I thought it might be interesting to discuss why I made the choices I made and how I think they’ll compare to what I have.

When I worked at Apple, my traditional decision for buying a new computer was to get whatever the top end was (like that’s a surprise), although I had a tended to buy the N-1 generation on closeout unless there was some key technological shift that I wanted (like the switch from ADB to USB. For you youngsters out there, Apple used to have a non-standard connection setup for keyboards before they used USB, which was before we all started using Bluetooth…) — it was a way to leverage pricing but get powerful boxes.

In all honesty, though, these days, I rarely see people using most of the capabilities of their computers — and I don’t see the logic in paying extra so my idle loop can finish sooner. I also don’t see logic in spending money on extra computing hardware that can be spent on other things, like camera gear or an iPad, and a set of smart decisions on buying the laptop could save enough money to almost pay for an iPad (or a lens, or…) — so I didn’t want to overbuy.

In analyzing my existing setup, with a few exceptions, I was pretty happy with performance. The exceptions were becoming significant, though, and the big one was image processing in Lightroom. Upgrading from Lightroom 2 to Lightroom 3 helped in a lot of ways (but not all), and most especially, importing a day’s photo shoot was getting seriously painful. My central coast run I recently did generated 1,000 images in a single 14 hour shooting day, and then took over 6 hours just to import into Lightroom. The large size of the Canon 7D RAW file really slowed down processing on the old CPU and made some operations difficult. I did some investigation, and from all indications, the primary limitation was the CPU, not memory and definitely not I/O. The upgrade from 802.11g to 802.11n is going to be a nice plus.

In the past, I’ve always bought the 15″ Macbook pros. My current work setup, however, tethers the mac to a large (27″) monitor at my desk at home so I was tempted by the smaller 13″ screen for weight and portability (and price). I simply don’t need the larger 17″ screen much and I prefer portability over screen size here. Besides, if I’m road tripping and I want the screen horsepower, I don’t mind stuffing a display in the back of the car for the hotel room…

So the choices were 13″ Macbook, 13″ Macbook Pro, and 15″ Macbook pro. I decided against the Macbook; it’s cheaper, but not by that much and the lack of Firewire and the lower performance video wasn’t worth the saving. I ended up deciding against the 15″ Macbook Pro — while the shift from Core Duo processors and the upgraded video would definitely have been nice, it would have added $500-600 to the final price, and I finally decided that the performance boost from my old box to ANY current laptop would be significant enough that the added boost to the faster CPUs wasn’t as important, and I really was finding the idea of the smaller form factor of the 13″ units. It oversimplifies the decision, but it wasn’t lost on me that the price of the 15″ Macbook Pro was close to the cost of the 13″ Macbook pro AND a low-end iPad, and was the speed boost of the more expensive unit worth that price?

I went back and forth — and ultimately went for the less expensive 13″ macbook. Tough call. Your mileage may vary, but realizing how much faster even the low end box was from what I currently had made the decision easier. If you look at Macworld’s historical benchmark numbers, They show the photoshop benchmark as taking about 1:45 on my current laptop, and 0:48 on the 13″ Macbook Pro, and 0:43 on the 15″ (there are more significant differences between these two current models in other benchmarks, but the speed difference between what I have and where Im’ headed is even more significant)

Final decision: which speed of the 13″? I finally decided on the low end (2.4Ghz) — I decided again the cost different wasn’t worth it for my situation, and I decided I’d rather upgrade the disk than go with a smaller, slower disk and faster processor. I’ve also ordered (from Other World Computing, where I buy most of my disks and RAM upgrades) a Seagate 500Gig 7200 RPM drive which I’ll install and clone the data to, replacing the stock 250Gig 5400 in the new unit.

I’m currently running with a 360Gig 5400 + a bus powered 500Gig 5400, (plus a desk-bound terabyte drive) and moving to a 500Gig internal will let me shift my data around and put all of it back on the 500Gig internal, use the 500Gig bus powered as a cloned backup (via SuperDuper!) and keep my secondary data on the external firewire, simplifying my life a bit and adding another redundant copy of my portable data, making my backups more robust. Never a bad idea. I never take backups for granted, in case you haven’t noticed.

I considered the new internal 1Gig drives, decided that I didn’t need the space that badly (I’m starting to like the 500gig bus powers more and more as flexible and stable and convenient), and they’re new enough I’lll let someone else field-proof their MTBF stats. I also considered SSD for the internal, but again, price won out over maximizing performance; and I can make that upgrade later if I want to.

Given I’ve been living in 2Gig forever and this box comes with 4Gig, I saw no reason to spend money to bump it to 8. I’ll leave that upgrade to later if/when I decide it’ll be worth upgrading, so there are options here down the road to boost the computer a bit along the way if I find I need it.

So my bottom line — I’m spending about $1300 (including the upgraded disk) and also a new bluetooth keyboard and a monitor dongle, and I think I have a good overall compromise among the various factors. It’ll handle my Lightroom processing and importing much better, and honestly, I don’t need an ego computer (“look! it goes to TWELVE! and belches steam!”) and other than my imaging, my processing needs are fairly modest. This should fit my needs well for a few years and then we’ll see.

Oh, one other thing. I did not buy AppleCare. I have some time before I have to make a final decision on that, but I haven’t bought AppleCare on my last three computers and I’m not leaning towards doing it here. If you do the research on extended warranties and what the margins are on them for all products, you can see why manufacturers really want you do buy them, and that’s a good reason why I don’t. So far, I haven’t regretted it; and I’ve saved enough cash on NOT buying them to probably pay for whatever goes spung when it finally does happen to me. If your computer survives the warranty period, the most likely problems you’ll have with it (he says, IMHO! IMHO!) are things that may be challenged under your extended warranty anyway, like dumping a glass of wine on the motherboard or damage to the LCD screen, so I’m just not convinced I need it. Your mileage may well vary, and if you prefer the comfort of having it, be my guest.  And to my friends in the AppleCare group back at Mama Apple, well, sorry…

So tonight I’m migrating data around to make the transition easier, and everything should arrive tomorrow. Sometime over the weekend, I’ll hopefully be on the new system, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Lightroom works on it. And when I know, I’ll let you know.

Hope this helps if you’re trying to think through the options on a systems upgrade; there are many options, and the price points are set up to make sliding up the pricing scale easy to convince youself (“hmm. For $200, I get the faster CPU, and it comes with that bigger disk. Oh, and for $200 I can go to the 15″ screen. And for $200, I can go to the faster CPU AND get 500 gigs of disk. And… And… And suddenly your $1200 computer is a $2300 computer, one upgrade at a time. So you can look at it and as yourself how much to spend to get what you want, or how little you need to spend to get what you need. And don’t forget, if you end up spending $2500 on a laptop, it’ll be a lot harder to upgrade to the NEXT one than if you can convince yourself you ONLY spent $1200 last time..Are you better off with a less expensive computer you are comfortable upgrading in two or three years or a more expensive one you think you have to hold onto for five to get the investment back on?)

And to think I once spent $2800 on a Mac IIfx. How things change..

(p.s: nope. no magic trackpad in today’s order. But it’ll be coming, don’t worry…)

 

 

How Much Information is Too Much?

Disclosing Photo Locations: How Much Information is Too Much? | G Dan Mitchell Photography:

Earlier this week I had the good fortune to join a several fine photographers (Charlie Cramer, Mike Osborne, and Karl Kroeber) for a few days shooting in the Tuolumne/Tioga Pass area of Yosemite National Park. Getting to spend time with photographers who have so much experience and knowledge of Yosemite was inspiring, and I’m grateful for the chance to join them. While sitting around during the “boring light” hours one afternoon – while waiting for early dinner and travel to a shooting location before the good light – Mike mentioned that they were going to a place that was best not publicized, and he joked that he “might have to blindfold” me if I were to accompany them. Mike was a Yosemite ranger for decades before he retired and it is clear that he loves and cares for the place deeply. He mentioned a few of my posts on this blog in which I had named photo locations and given, in his opinion, a bit too much information about where they are located. This concerns him because he has seen the damage caused by publicity of certain special locations first hand. He also feels that it is often better to gain information about these places the old fashioned way – by word of mouth from an acquaintance or by sleuthing them out yourself. In addition, he also points out – correctly, I think – that many of the photographs I post here are not so much about the location as they are about some thing I saw there, and that it might make sense to title photographs with that in mind. Mikes’ comments have caused me to think quite a bit over the past few days about this issue. First, a few words of self-defense, but then some changes that I intend to make.

 

It’s not just a photography issue. These situations come up in birding a well; once or twice a year here on the west coast I here of a situation where a notable bird is run off by a birder who gets too enthusiastic and encroaches on its territory enough to scare it away (ruining it for everyone else); it’s fairly common to see both birders and photographers go out of bounds — over fences, into restricted areas, blazing “new trails” in fields of wildflowers, etc — in an effort to get the shot or see the bird. Nests of notable species like owls get popular, and sometimes they get too popular and problems happen; sometimes the nest is abandoned.

What to do? Whenever these situations occur, the debate springs up. In reality, in birding, the debate was over long ago; the senior birders have learned over the years to be careful about being too disclosing about sensitive birds and habitat. They self-edit public disclosure to protect senstive birds and locations from being pounded to pieces by popularity — which occasionally creates debates about whether they have the “right” to not disclose these things by the folks not “in the loop” (short answer: of course they do. it’s their information. they’re under no obligation to share; get over it, and earn their respect and get involved enough in the community to be part of those private discussions. hint: I’m not yet; and I’m in no hurry).

What I wonder abut here is how technology is affecting this. Do sites like Flickr and ebird make it harder to be careful about these areas? Well, more and more of us carry phones with GPS in it; more and more cameras are coming with GPS chips in them, automatically encoding location in great detail, and sites like flickr will automatically disclose that data for you. Location-based sites like Gowalla and Foresquare are building businesses around this data, and I admit I’ve been exploring and experimenting with Foresquare and mobile GPS data as a way to help networking among birders — but this issue is one that’s made me go slow and try to think through not just how to use these new techie toys, but when, and why.

We haven’t yet STARTED the discussion of the ethics of these capabilities, or created some kind of standards to help people know when to publish that data and when to hide it. Who makes those decisions? Right now, it’s the elders in the group making judgement calls informally, but that model is going to fail over time as technology automates disclosure of this info. Is part of your instruction at a photo workshop going to be telling students to disable the camera GPS?

I think we need a dialog on this, and an understanding of disclosure vs. protection and how precise. Right now, since I geoencode my photos manually, I can choose just how precise my location is going to be; I have consciously chosen at times not to be TOO specific about the location of something, especially if I’m shooting a nest or working in sensitive terrain.

For that matter, the fact that I DO photograph nesting birds is controversial in some parts of photography, and I’m sensitive to that; I try to work under very specific rules when I work near nests, the first of which is simple: any time I get any hint I’m interfering with the nest, I leave. Immediately. I might try again at some later time and be more careful about distance and approach, but if I see any sign the birds are stressing, I get the hell out, now, and figure out next steps after they have the ability to settle down. I feel that way about any animal I’m photographing — if I flush a bird while trying to set up a shot, I slow down. If I flush it twice, I stop trying.

Unfortunately, not all photographers worry about their subjects enough, whether it be animal or a pristine location. And this is nothing new. I remember reading one of John Shaw’s photo books from the 80′s on macro photography in which he complained about witnessing another photographer take macro shots of a flower, and then destroying the flower to prevent any other photographer from shooting it.

Unfortunately, some people are jerks, some simply don’t care, and many are simply well meaning but naive. And I think we need to figure out how to teach those that are teachable to behave, and how to protect what we cherish from those that aren’t — especially since our tools are creating solutions that make it easier to show everyone where images were made and where birds were found, and in many cases, those tools are going to be doing so in an automated way that we may not remember to turn off (or strip), and that many others won’t even realize is happening…

 

My trip through Time Capsule Hell leads to a different backup approach

My trip through Time Capsule Hell leads to a different backup approach:

 

I bought a one terabyte Time Capsule shortly after it hit the market, along with an external 1.5TB drive. I use the Time Capsule’s internal drive to back up two smaller capacity Macs, while the external disk backs up my two larger capacity Macs.

 

Working with Time Machine in Leopard or Snow Leopard, the Time Capsule updates its backups every hour. This makes perfect sense if you’re just dealing with one Mac wired into the Time Capsule, since it really doesn’t slow anything down. But if you are using it to wirelessly back up multiple Macs, hourly backups slow everything down to a crawl.

 

When Time Machines first came out, I bought two, one for myself, one for my mom. I’m very happy (so far) with the Time Machine with my mom, and she seems to be the appropriate use case for this product: fairly light duty user that doesn’t generate a lot of data and has modest backup/recovery needs. It’s worked wonderfully, and the couple of times I’ve had to hook in remotely and recover files for her, it’s done the job well.

My personal experience wasn’t quite so successful. I don’t like the Time Capsule in a multi-mac environment because it doesn’t seem to do well as the different macs need access to disk space; if one mac allocates disk into its backup, there seems to be no way to recover that data for use by a different mac. That means one mac could find itself with a four month set of backups and another with two weeks (as happened with us), and no way to balance that out. That seems to be a really basic flaw, that there’s now way for the system to tell time capsule to garbage collect disk out of one time capsule dataset and shift it to another that needs it more.

A bigger flaw, however, came when Laurie lost a hard disk. First thing I did was clone the Time Capsule data onto anotehr disk, not only to give me a redundant copy (“just in case!”) but because I wanted to plus that disk into the computer directly to do the restore so I didn’t have to slog it all across the much slower network. Which I couldn’t make work.

I ended up dragging out a long ethernet and wiring up a temporary physical network and doing the restore across that — which took bloody forever. The backup worked flawlessly, and the restore came back fine, but the process of restoring all of that data over the network was painful and caused a long delay, even over physical ethernet to avoid the slower WIFI/wireless. Too painful for my tastes, and there were just too many compromises, so I retired the Time Capsule as a backup device and went to a new backup system that depends on directly connected disks and a combination of superduper as my primary backup and Time Machine as the backup I use in ccase I need to restore an individual file. I don’t like Time Machine as a primary backup  for systems with heavy data requirements (i.e. anyone doing photography, video, audio or any other large data files). I’ve written about backups a number of times, and you can see more details on what I do by looking here, here, here,  and here.  And yes, one of these days, I’l consolidate all of that into an ebook and publish it in a single document that’s easy to keep updated…

But overall, I think if you fit the presumed use case for Time Capsule, it’s okay. But for many of us, our data needs stress it and I don’t want to depend on it as my primary backup in those cases. Time Machine on a directly-wired disk is better, but still, I think there are better options. It is a good way to create a set of backups to do individual file recovery, but I’d rather use a different backup setup for ercovering of a failed disk (and so I do…)

 

 

 

 

early stats on the new chuqui.com

 

it’s way too early to do any significant analysis on the new blog design but I did a quick comparison in google analytics against some prior weeks (all of them mon-thurs and designed to avoid the holiday) to see how comparable dates differ. The early numbers are encouraging:

Total visits up 102% on average. Pageviews up 136%. pages per visit up 17%. average time on site up 81%. All really good changes. If there was one metric I wanted to change with this new design, it was the low pages-per-visit number and I looked for ways to encourage people to sample other parts of the site while they were there. It looks like I succeeded, at least initially. Whether that’s because the site is new and the regular visitors are curious or whether it’ll continue, I don’t know. I’m also seeing nice traffic on the Smugmug portfolio, much higher than I was seeing on flickr. Flickr traffic seems to be about the same, but I didn’t make it nearly as prominent on site as Smugmug, so I’m not too surprised.but I expect over time to see it increase traffic there.

all very early, but encouraging.

 

 

Announcing the new!improved! chuqui.com

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just released a new design for my blog and the chuqui.com site. After 3+ years of living with the old design, I was long overdue for a refresh, and I’m quite happy with the result.

I’ve been researching this refresh for a couple of months as part of a larger look at whether I felt it was time to take the next step towards shifting my photography towards my goal of going pro — in fact the short answer for that is no, because I don’t want to take the time and energy away from the photography to work on the business, and there really isn’t any overriding reason why I should now (there’s a longer version of that answer, but it’ll have to wait for another time).

Goals for the redesign

Coming out of that research I came up with some goals for this new design. I felt my old site had a number of problems, it wasn’t a good design to show off photography, the design in general seemed dated, having the entry page also be the front page of the blog limited my flexibility, there really wasn’t a good way to integrate in other things I do or create ways to help people find the other places I’m active or connect with my via social media, and the old site had the remains of at least three previous blog designs and none of that content had ever been cleaned up or properly integrated into the site, leaving me with what can be described charitably as a chaotic mess with a horrifically bad taxonomy.

I decided if I was going to fix this, it was time to fix it right, and not just layer a new pretty theme on top of eleven years of blogging crap, so I did.

The new design

The new design uses the Clean Modern Simple theme, available from Themeforest. I spent a lot of time thinknig over what I wanted and ended up choosing a premium theme because it was well worth a few dollars to not spend tens of hours creating my own from scratch (although the geek in me wanted to). I chose it because it was light, open and modern looking, not heavily ornamented, and it seemed to present photographs pretty well but was still a good design for text-oriented material. That latter was a problem with many photoblog themes that seemed to presume only visual content and for more traditional blog themes that really didn’t handle large imagery well. This one does both without any significant compromises, which I like.

I expected to do some customization to the theme, but in fact I ended up making only two changes: I swapped out the front page image area with a gallery system from my smugmug account that will dynamically pull from my portfolio for images, and I wasn’t completely happy with how widgets laid out on the front page so I tweaked it so that the three columns all flowed separately so I could better control the look of the page. All in all, that was a very minor change.

I set up a custom front page that is designed to bring all of my activities together — not just the blog, but my photography, my various social media outposts and the other places where I create content like Google Buzz and Twitter. If you view the front page of the site as your “business card” — which makes sense if you think about that URL being the one most likely on your card that you hand out as a “drop me a line” contact — then I think this new front page does a good job of showing who I am and what I do while creating opportunities to connect and interact. It creates easy access for my two photographic activity points (flickr and smugmug) and provides easy ways to locate my blog and my social networking hotspots as well as aggregating some interesting content back from them so people get a sense of what’s there and why it might interest them.

My assumption is someone arrives at the front page of my domain because they were given the URL and are looking for something — a way to contact me, one of my photos, something. The front page is designed to make it easy for them to find whatever they came to the site for if they didn’t have a deep link directly to it, while also maybe encouraging them to check out some of the other stuff I do.

In researching blog/site designs and deciding what worked on other blogs and digging through the analytics on my site to see what worked and what (most of it) didn’t, it became obvious that visitors to a site generally do not explore it. They hit a link, they browse whatever is on that link, and they leave. The implication of that is that if there are other things you want to get them interested in, they have to be there on the page when they arrive. I’ve tried to create sidebar designs for different types of pages that reflect that. By splitting the blog front page from the site front page I can target them diffferently. The blog has the pointers to the archives and category pages (useful mostly to make sure the detail pages exist to the search engines) — which means I do not need to give up page space on the front page for those items. I also made a decision not to ppush any photo links or galleries on the blog page to keep it from getting too cluttered; there’ll be images in the blog entries and if that interests someone it’ll be easy enough for them to switch off and explore.  Same rationale for the blog detail page and the supplementary pages (about, contact) and the photography page, although on the latter, I added in two small galleries to give visitors a jumping off point to my photo sites.

The RSS feed is a full feed. The politics of full vs. partial is it’s own extended discussion; suffice it to say I’m not trying to force people to generate revenue by forcing them to come to my site to be forced to see advertising, so I see zero advantage in partial feeds for my situation. And since I’m now explicitly using a Creative Commons license on the site that removes the other reason not to do full feeds; in reality, the pirates will do what they damn well want anyway, so gutting functionality to stop them is a stupid tactic, and given these choices this made sense.

Advertising and Revenue

My old design had Adsense advertising on it, which did very poorly, and I occasionally experimented with Amazon affiliate links that did surprisingly well given how rarely I used them and how little work I did to promote them. It’s my opinion that Adsense works better when your audience is a non-technical crowd (i.e. “my mom”) and since my audience is heavily skewed to high-tech and photography types, it’s not a good match. I won’t miss it, and I won’t waste screen space on something that performs badly for me.

One of the things I argued with myself a lot over was just what my proposed revenue model was. Was it trying to create content that I generate revenue with on advertising? Or is my site about me creating things that have value that I can sell? In my view, it’s very hard to do both at the same time: if the purpose of the site is to sell my images or to sell what I do, then advertising distracts from and dilutes that and confuses the message.

My long term plan is to create content and imagery that people want, and then sell them products based on that. Because of that, I’ve taken a very low profile on advertising. Doesn’t mean I won’t take on a sponsorship or sell advertising if the right situation happens, but I’m not pursuing it or encouraging it and I don’t expect it to be a focus down the road.

My long term revenue potential right now looks to have two aspects:

• Photography: The industry is still in the midst of a major transformation because of the online and digital revolutions. Some traditional revenue forms (like stock) have been devastated and aren’t coming back — or more correctly, will stabilize in some new form that will benefit some but many that depended on it will have to adapt. I’m waiting and seeing before trying to step in here. But I still think that there is a continuing market for quality images for both licensing and through prints, and so I continue to work to refine my craft to allow me to enter those markets.
• Writing: I think there’s a fascinating future shaping up here in ebooks and in writing. There’s a transformation just starting towards the electronic book (thanks in large part to the iPad, but also to people like Tim O’Reilly who has been fostering this form for years with things like his Safari Bookshelf); we’re just starting to see a revenue market and a mainstream audience being created for this form. I’m particularly taken by what David duChemin is doing with this in his Craft and Vision line of books, and I think there’s a lot of potential in the “short form” inexpensive ebook that he’s championing.

It takes a long time to write and produce and publish a 300 page traditional photography book that costs the consumer $40 and may be obsolete with the release of one key piece of software; that’s a main reason why I’ve never gotten into computer book writing, even though I’ve had opportunities.  I do think there is a definite market for these traditional books in electronic form, both instructional and visual, and I’ve spent a couple of evenings with some of the work of William Neill who’s published three of his classic imagery books electronically, and I think that form works well. How it’ll make the transition and be priced and whether it’ll transform, I don’t know (but I believe so, and again, I think you’ll see a move to the shorter, less expensive form that is more of an impulse buy and easier/faster to produce. We’ll see.

The short form ebook at an accessible price looks like a great opportunity here. If you haven’t read any of duChemin’s books, they’re well worth the $5 just to see how he’s experimenting with the form. The iPad and the Kindle and other e-readers and the emerging market that is just starting to emerge for “consumption-oriented” devices like tablets or slates will accelerate this, and it’s definitely something I think has potential and I want to foster.

Needless to say, there are synergies possible between those two, and I also think that good imagery and well-written content on a nicely built site can help create opportunities to write for other venues down the road.

I am not a huge fan of online advertising as the core of a revenue model; the internet is littered with sites who are so desperate for every ad dollar that they abuse their readers in search of any revenue they can get. I am not a fan of sites that hold my eyeballs hostage and make me jump through 30 hoops to see their content — and in most cases, I leave without actually seeing it and rarely come back. I’m also not a fan of sites that load themselves up with every possible ad and every possible sponsorship and end up looking like cheap callgirls in a biker bar looking for some action, and I think ultimately people view the content on those sites that way, and I think my content and my audience deserves better. So I’m happy to not have to go down that path, and I hope that never changes.

Other stuff that finally got fixed

As I went over the old blog, I realized I really needed to fix some things. There was a lot of crap content in it, from the days I was convinced it was better to post content free messages than not post, so there was a lot of two-line postings, and a huge number of them had broken links to whatever I was originally pointing to. There was also a lot of — crap — that I just didn’t want to have published on my site any more, because it was simply irrelevant, uninteresting or no longer reflected a position I wanted to reflect. The old screwed up categorization and taxonomy needed fixing, too, badly. over 2/3 of the messages posted to the blog were sitting in an “uncategorized” category feeling bored and unloved.

So I did. I read every posting in the blog, all 2,600 of the 11 year history of my blogging past. And I deleted the crap and I restructured the categorization and I fixed the links and I polished the brass and I painted the trim, and now, honestly, I feel like the content might actually be interesting and useful. It can be tempting to edit history, of course, and I don’t promise that I did NONE of that, but my focus was on preserving the message that including significant material by me, and I was a lot less interested in keeping a post from four years ago that included a link to some random internet meme and a message from me that said “funny”. I think the universe is a better place for this editing.

And a fair amount of editing it was – about 40% of the messages in the blog went away, but maybe 25% of the content, and none of it will be missed. I’ve spent some time analyzing how people visit my old site, and to be honest, 95% of the visits went to the home page or to about 5% of the pages, and 75% of the pages got visited zero times in about 9 months of data.

Moving forward

It was interesting going back and reading what I was thinking along the way, especially given my view of those years and how I see things today. Most on that some other time. And it was interesting to dig into the details of the last design and see just how — unsure and chaotic — it was. Lots of stubs I never filled in, lots of mixed messaging, lots of confused thoughts and frankly, a pretty poor design. I intended at the time for it to be a relatively temporary placeholderr. I didn’t expect it to be three years to finally deal with it. In all honestly, it fairly represented what was going on in my head and life at the time, and no, that wasn’t a necessarily a fun and happy place to be.

But now I’m feeling healthy for the first time in a while, life is going pretty well, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what I want to do and where I want to go; when I left Apple it wasn’t on a real positive vibe and it showed. Now I understand things a lot better, and I think that’ll show, too. So since the 5th is my birthday (#52), I decided to give myself a present, and one I want to share with all of you. And so, a couple of hundred hours of sweat equity later, here it is.

Let me know what you think, and let me know what you think it could be. I’m all ears and open to your ideas as well as mine…

And thanks for reading this stuff. There are a lot of voices and a lot of sources out on the net. I’m thrilled to know some of you think mine is worth investing some time and energy in.