CBOND - Wiki

I added Wiki software to my professional site: www.colinbond.com/wiki.

Only authorized individuals can edit it.

This gives me the ability now to manage my own knowledge base online.

Wordle of Blog Categories

The image below is a visual representation of the number of blog posts I have for each category.  The larger the word, the more blog posts I have for that particular category.

I created this using the advanced tools over at Wordle.

Fantastic Creative Blog

I came across a fantastic website and blog today via Mindjet's blog.

The site, www.austinkleon.com, is chock full of informative and creative content.  He has mind maps of events (like SXSW), maps of books, one he's read about Charles Schulz), and poems. 

One of the many creative aspects of Austin's site is his "blackout poems".  He creates poems using newspaper articles as his source of words.   The process begins by outlining the words he wants to use for the poem, then blacking out the surrounding content. 

He's been commissioned to publish a book of poetry in this manner, due out in 2010.

Another great aspect of his site are his analysis of events, books, festivals and other happenings which he mindmaps.  He keeps a gallery of these on his Flickr account and they're also linked from his site.

The Air Force Blog Assessment Flow Chart

Apparently the Air Force Public Affairs Agency (Emerging Technology Division) has come up with a flow chart to deal with bloggers: how to evaluate posts and decide whether or not to respond to them. 

 

Google Reader & Me

I was looking at my Google Reader trends this afternoon.  I do the most reading of news around 9 in the morning and it trails off by 11. 

From your 96 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 9,422 items, starred 38 items, shared 67 items, and emailed 36 items.

I also have a tendency to check RSS feeds more on Mondays, followed by Friday.

Last 30 days

 

Items posted = blue

Items read = orange

 

Time of day

 

Items posted = blue

Items read = orange

Day of the week

Items posted = blue

Items read = orange

I star the most from these three sites:

• NRA-ILA News
• Lifehacker
• Fox International

These are the most emailed sites:

• Engadget
• Lifehacker
• Cato Recent Op-eds

I shared the most from these sites:

• Lifehacker
• The Register
• NRA-ILA News

If you want to check out my shared items go to the link in the sidebar of my blog and select Google Reader Shared Items. 

Google Reader

Do you use RSS?

Of all the things that I find efficient with computing and the internet, RSS is absolutely up there as a simple implementation that greatly increases efficient data gathering.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  What does that mean?  It means that rather than surfing to a thousand news and blog sites everyday to find out what's going on, you subscribe to a URL from that site that let's you know when new information is available. 

The best explanation is a video available from Common Craft.  Take a moment to watch it, it's really good.

Over the past five or six years I've used several different RSS feed aggregators: News Gator, Google Reader, MS Outlook 2007's built in reader, and a reader I built in MS Access.  The one that I like the most, though, is the RSS feed reader built into IE 7. 

It doesn't matter so much which reader you prefer, just as long as you RSS a try. 

For example, here's what my blog looks like through a RSS feed reader (IE 7):

 

On the left you see all the categories that I have set up (as folders).  The each feed I subscribe to is displayed.  If it's bold that means that I have unread feeds.  Most news feeds only display a summary under the title, so you can skim through the articles.  When you find something you want to read, you click on the title and it opens in the browser so you can read the entire article. 

My blog is set up to give the read the entire entry, so there's no need to go to my site to read the articles. 

My new favorite blog is Lifehacker.

Enjoy the RSS video.

New Blog Format

I've updated the template for the blog site and it looks a lot different. I
decided to use a much simpler format as I use various methods to post. Some
of the methods would format rather ugly on the previous blog design, so I
decided to use something much more basic.

Enjoy.

Test Post

I'm testing a blog post using MS Office 2007.

Interestingly enough the New Hampshire Primaries are taking place today.

It doesn't look well for Hillary.

Formatting Issue

There appears to be a formatting issue right now for the right hand side pane of the blog. I'll look into it later when I have time.

Mobile Blogging --> Ready

I have set up mobile blogging through Blogger. This should give me fewer excuses not to blog. It's been several months since the last update.

Note that if you want to find a post from before August 2007, there's an archive link on the right hand side of the page.

mobile blogging

Mobile blogging through Blogger.

Migration Successful

The migration back to Blogger's software was successful. The blog's URL must still be migrated.

The reason for the transfer back is to take advantage of Google's suite of tools.

Test - First Post --> Blogger

I'm testing the move back to blogger, but hosted on my site.