Things You’ll Find Interesting May 3, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Working on the web site…

Chuqui com next gen

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog recently, partly because work’s kept me pretty busy (in very good, but you-can’t-see-it-yet ways) and partly because I’ve been digging more into the guts of a few things, and while that’s fun, it’s not necessarily interesting blog fodder.

Back around the start of the year, I did my annual plan to try to focus my time and energy on the things I thought were most important. What I found, much to my amusement, was that when I started digging in, my “streamlined and focussed action plan” was still rather big and complicated. I ended up thinking through how to streamline it further, and decided on simply looking at two things: my photography, and that it was finally time to stop playing the “some day I’ll have time to do this right” game with chuqui.com.

The fact is, most of the other stuff I want to do is going to depend on a professional looking, quality site as a foundation to build on. I talked a bit about that when I started working on the new photo gallery, and the more I looked at it, the more I realized I just needed to tear it completely apart and deal with all of the things I’ve patched around or played the “someday I’ll get around to…” game about.

So I am. The above is a structure diagram of what is going to become the new chuqui.com — unless I change it some more, which I probably will. The pieces in red are done; I’ve added two specialty sub-domains (photos.chuqui.com and files.chuqui.com), and loaded my new photo gallery in one, and a whole bunch of “stuff” in the other — my OtherRealms archive and the mailing list archives from the years Laurie and I ran all of those mailing lists about all of those various things.

The mailing list archives are a fascinating blob of data waiting to be analyzed — about 100,000 files and about 2 gigabytes of email spanning something like 40 mailing lists and about 12 years. I have it back in a usable form, which took some massaging (and trust me, Dropbox does NOT like having 100,000 files dumped on it, and in fact, I have TWO copies of it, one with the email addresses purged, and a private one unaltered).

I’m also using the files subdomain for other stuff, like storing full sized panoramas, and when i get my updated wallpaper download area going, it’ll go in there. So it’s just a big static web site for stuff that will have low usage and doesn’t need much but a big pipe behind it. Both live on Amazon S3, FWIW.

The two orange boxes are the things I’m currently working on. It was time to rethinking the wallpaper downloads, especially given the new iPad with Retina display (which I don’t have yet, I bought a printer instead…). One thing I’ve found in researching best practices for how to format and distribute wallpapers is this: there are none. Because of this, I’m trying to decide what makes sense, and how to explain the decisions I make (when I make them), in hopes of maybe helping along creating some.

The other orange box has turned into one of those proverbial “big hairy beasts”. For a while I’ve been posting my “shared links” every night; originally using Google Reader as the host, and when Google did away with that functionality (grrrr. grump), I experimented with some options, and finally decided to implement it through Instapaper — for now — because I could get equivalent functionality.

Quick digression. Early on, I called them “Shared links”, and enough people read it that I kept doing it. While I was figuring out the “post Google” version of this, for a while I fed all of the links to Twitter, and then did a nightly link of my Twitter activity. My analytics show that my readership of those postings fairly quickly went to ZERO. None. NADA. It was an easy decision to nuke that idea. Those of you who feel strongly that every word you utter needs to be permanently archived and who capture and archive all of that stuff to your blog? check your analytics. Just sayin’. What the universe was sayin’ to me was “dude, that’s a waste of electrons”, and their right. (but the whole “we must archive every word we say forever and ever” thing is its whole own essay, which I need to get to some day).

So I finally went back to the old model, using a new database and capture setup around Instapaper. It’s simply, it works, and it’s reliable. But I decided to try framing it differently, so instead of calling it “shared links”, I now call it “Things you’ll find interesting”. Daily readership of those items is consistently about 30% higher than the old “shared links” postings. Those geeks out there that pooh-pooh marketing and branding of things, well, check your analytics. A little quiet positioning can do interesting things.

But simply posting links isn’t what I want to do in the long term. Some links only warrant a link. Some I want to comment on to some degree or another. Others end up becoming jumping off points for entire blog posts. the problem is managing all of that without huge amounts of manual work, because, frankly, the more hassle it is to do, the less I’m likely to actually do it. So it has to be easy.

And this has turned into what I’m now calling the “collect, curate and comment” project. The current setup handles the first two well, and the third not at all. I’ve got an idea where this is going, but it’s not fleshed out yet. When it is, I’ll talk about it further. I will put a couple of sticks in the sand and say that both Duncan Davidson’s blog, and John Gruber at Daring Fireball have a better handle on this than most, but it’s still not what I think it could be. Ultimately I think having too many “link posts” clutter up the blog stream, which is why I like the one-post-a-day setup I’m using. The question is how to integrate commentary into it, and the answer is “I’m not sure yet”.

I am considering doing a separate link blog that I suck in as a daily post. I think using WordPress and make each one its own post, and use the excerpts for the commentary, I can come close (maybe); use Marsedit as the front end, and perhaps a link posting bookmarklet or something. Lots of moving parts, and integration might be painful.

The alternative is to go full monty, and build a custom web app with a database in the back that I feed stuff out to, with some automated way to suck it back out. Full customized interface, plus easy (for me) posting hookups. The questions I’m grappling with here are complicated: is this way overkill for what I want to do? Am i re-inventing Delicious or Magnolia (remember them?) and is that what I really want? And if I do this, is the blog post really the final result, or should this be a web-visible, query-able database that people can poke at, and if I do that, what the hell am I getting myself into? It seems like a fun hack, but.. is that really where I want to go?

So I’m down a rathole, and I’m trying to refine the idea so I can build it and move on. I’m enjoying the process, but… well, I can do it easy, or I can do it right. and I’m tired of easy-but-sloppy. I’m just trying to decide what right is. (and, well, there’s an entire philosophy of signal vs. noise and creating value in your content, and the philosophy of curation and how that all relates to blogs and this internet thingie, but that’s another essay, too). And then there are times when I think I’m in “thinking too hard” mode again…

What are the other colored blocks? The purple block is the “this is silicon valley” project I talked about back in January. It has, of course, blossomed and grown in scope since then, but I also put it on hold to focus. Assuming it doesn’t mutate further, it’ll eventually become it’s own site, and it’s now clearly a multi-year project, even if I don’t grow the damn thing to include other contributors, which I’m considering. For now, though, it’s a purple box that I’m ignoring until I get some other things done…

The green blocks are parts of the site redesign I can’t do until I upgrade to a new WordPress theme. I’ve chosen a theme — Photocrati is the core I’ll be designing around — but there’s a whole lot of work to do before it sees the light of day. The lavender is the rest of the site, various bits and pieces that need to be shampooed, walls painted, maybe some new trim, metadata and content refreshed (and the crap thrown out), etc. Lots of deferred maintenance and a re-thinking of the writing and content areas. I’m working on some of that now, and unless you’re looking closely, you won’t notice those changes because that’s all being worked in quietly and gradually.

One aspect of that is that I am going back through and editing out the crap from the site and postings. So far, I’ve deleted about 90 blog posts, and I’m probably going to find another 50 or so worthy of termination. For those of you who who think that words should never disappear into the ether, tough. There’s a lot of crap on the internet, and some of it is on my blog. I’d rather it not be there. This brings me down below 2000 blog postings again, and since I’ve gone through these purges in the past, I know I’ve nuked probably 1/3 of the entries I’ve written oner the last 12 years or so. Which is fine, I’m not trying to win the “he wrote more entries than anyone else longer than anyone else” award.

I do wish WordPress would implement a “termination date” option for blog postings. There are any number of things I post that I know that two or three months from now nobody will ever care about again, and I wish I could just pre-set the system to make them go away. But I seem to be the only person who worries about things like that, so instead, every so often I wander the site looking for crap, and when I find it, I haul out the shovel and start mucking…

Oh, and that last color on the diagram? the teal? That’s the next piece to come, when I figure out the curation and commenting. If you know my past and you’ve watched the blog over time, you can probably figure out what I’m thinking of here. I’m still noodling on the concept, though, so we’ll defer detailed discussion for now… But yeah, it’s about reviews and reviewing, just like OtherRealms was.

Well, right now it is. It may mutate further…

Photo of the Day: Calaveras Bald Eagle Nest

At May 3, 2012
By Chuq Von Rospach
In Photo of the Day, Photography - Birds
2

The other thing I did on Sunday was check up on the bald eagle’s nest on Calaveras Reservoir. Because of work and life, I haven’t gotten out there for about six weeks, and since my last visit, the eggs have hatched and the chicks are growing.

This is just a status shot, I didn’t stay long and they weren’t cooperating. I missed the male by about ten minutes, but both parents are busy rearing the kids again this year. I try to take photos of the nest when I visit so I can compare the nest over time — the photos of the nest over time are on my gallery, and this is the fourth out of the last five years I’ve taken images there (last year, they moved nests and work precluded me visiting more than once).

You can (mostly) see mom behind the struts, and the brown blob on the left side of the nest is one of the kids laying down. The other chick is down in the nest and I never got a shot of it flapping its wings, which was about all I saw of it. 2009 was the first year they successfully fledged, and they seem to be on the way to two fledges this year. My (unofficial) count for this nest is 0, 1, 2, N/A, and 2-in-progress, so this has been a very successful nest. There are a couple of first year nests we’ve found, one at Crystal Springs reservoir in San Mateo County (first confirmed bald eagle nesting in the county in a year), and one down at Pinto Lake in Santa Cruz County — both with younger females and it looks like both failed to hatch this year, but that’s not unusual from what I’ve been told. We’re hoping they’ll both try again next year.

From what I saw, the chicks seemed healthy, although they mostly slept when I was watching. One chick is getting close to the size of mom, and both are showing signs of feather growth including primaries. If the eggs were laid around the first week of February, they seem on track for fledging in around the start of June. Again this year, it looks like two chicks are growing to fledging. Mom is hiding behind the stanchion. The brown lump to the left is one (sleeping) chick. the other is down in the nest in front of mom, but was flapping its wings occasionally and did pop a head up once. Both look healthy to me, at least as far as I can tell from this distance.

I’ll try to get out there a couple more times before they fledge and move out for the year, if I can…

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 2, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Do you need a printer in the house?

At May 2, 2012
By Chuq Von Rospach
In Photography - The Digital Darkroom, Photography - Tools and Toys
1

Back in 2010, when I retired my HP9180, I wrote a blog piece asking the semi-rhetorical question Do do you really need a printer — and here it is 2012, and I have a definitive answer for that question.

For me, at least, the answer is a definite yes. I’d been considering buying one for a while, when Mark’s new Epson 3880 convinced me it was time to get serious about this. The 3880 was beyond what I wanted to spend, but I’d been arguing with myself about it’s slightly littler brother, the Epson 2880. Much to my surprise, Adorama had a few as manufacturer refurbished for about $90 off the new price, and that was enough to convince me to grab one (that deal is no longer available, however).

Personally, I wouldn’t buy a used printer (your mileage may vary), given the usage and wear printers go through, and if this was a revenue generating printer I wouldn’t buy refurb, either, but as a low-volume, primarily hobby device, I’m comfortable with this choice. It comes with a warranty, so if I run into issues, I have options.

Why the 2880? I wanted something from a good manufacturer (which, for photo printers, IMHO, means Epson, Canon or HP); I ruled out HP because I find their inks brutally expensive (I don’t work there any more, I can say that now) and their low and medium end devices don’t tickle my toes (and I’m unwilling to pay $3500 or more for a printer yet). I wanted a wide format printer, this one will do up to 13×19, which is great, as my favorite print sizes are 11×14 and 11×17. And it supports roll paper, which allows for panorama prints, something I really want to explore, and which can be cheaper than pre-cut paper. And the print costs seem reasonable. I really like the Epson UltraChrom Inks, too, and as I explore black and white printing, the Epson inks seemed to be a better choice.

Having said all of that, it was primarily lack of roll paper support at this price point that made the difference between Epson and Canon, FWIW. Canon has some nice models, too.

The printer is on a truck, trundling this way. I’ll probably be unpacking this weekend and starting to explore.

What do I plan on doing with this? Make prints. Put them up on my wall. Give them away. Expect to see some opportunities on this site for prints once I get settled in.

Why do this? Why not lab prints?

Well, it’s complicated. Maybe for some people lab prints are an option, but one thing I fell in love with using the 8190 were art papers. Big, thick, textured hunks of paper that bring a different look and life to an image. I miss that, and using a lab to print on Hahnemuele German Etching or Photo Rag Pearl is between impossible and unaffordable.

Besides, I enjoy geeking the printer and working to make my prints better.

And that’s the other, bigger aspect of this — I lost an aspect of the quality of my images when I stopped printing. I got comfortable with a “good enough for Flickr”. Over the last few months, I’ve bent taking a close look at what I’m doing and why, and why I haven’t been as happy with the results as I want to be — and I came to realize that when I stopped printing, I stopped getting better, and in fact, my photography regressed. When you only look at your images online — you can get satisfied with the quality a lot sooner in the production process. Putting it on paper, especially at larger sizes, means you can’t tolerate the flaws.

So I came to the decision that to drive my imagery forward again, I had to start putting it on paper again, and I needed to do it myself and not depend on a lab to do it.

Besides, I like giving prints away… (and maybe selling the occasional one).

And the first image I’m going to print on this puppy is this one:

Why?

Well, there’s a story to that…

Photo of the day: Lawrence’s Goldfinch

At May 2, 2012
By Chuq Von Rospach
In Photo of the Day, Photography - Birds
0

I’ve been doing a lot of photography work recently, but without a camera. Sunday, though, I was able to get out for a couple of hours, and visit an infrequent visitor to the coastal part of Santa Clara County. A few Lawrence’s Goldfinches wandered into the Ed Levin Park area near Milpitas from farther inland and have been hanging out — typically, I need to get out to the Mines road or Anderson Valley areas out beyond Mount Hamilton for a chance to see them.

They were easy to find — I just wandered over to where they’d been seen and looked for the flock of 500mm lenses. This one was sitting on a branch for a good ten minutes, watching us and evidently amused at all the bother. (you can find more images of this bird over on my gallery). Some days, its’ just easy to add a bird to the year list…

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 1, 2012

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

Photo of the Day: Marsh Wren

At May 1, 2012
By Chuq Von Rospach
In Photo of the Day, Photography - Birds
0

A small and precocious bird, this one was clearly checking out my camera gear…

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 3, 2012

Working on the web site…

Photo of the Day: Calaveras Bald Eagle Nest

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 2, 2012

Do you need a printer in the house?

Photo of the day: Lawrence’s Goldfinch

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 1, 2012

Photo of the Day: Marsh Wren

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