azazil.net

I am still alive! Thanks for sticking around through the quiet period.

Even though my posts here have been, ahem a little thin on the ground since our Tennessee road trips a few months ago, I’ve been active on twitter and I’m now blogging professionally for the Haxor Network since the beginning of this month. Please, do have a look at Mac Haxor and Linux Haxor and vote for my Mac and Linux tips! Ogle at the sexy lady screenshot. Sign up for the rss feeds etc etc.

If you’re interested in being paid to post, or guest blogging for the Haxor Network, Pavs is still searching for contributors, so head on over and express an interest in the comments. The site gets over 15,000 page views per day, so posting there is a great way to raise your profile!

Although I’ll be posting shorter Mac and Linux tips and news articles at least twice a week for the Haxor Network, I’ll continue with travelogues, martial arts commentary, opinion pieces, personal productivity items, and the occasional more in depth article on computing here at Azazil.

The funny thing about Twitter is that as much as I kept reading how you either get it, or you don’t — I never really believed it. I joined up about a year ago when the craze first swept across the intertubes, and made a couple of experimental tweets; I found a few interesting looking people and began following them; I installed twitterriffic (still free, despite appearances) and watched with feigned interest as those same interesting-seeming people droned on about the boring minutiae of their day. And that’s how it stayed until just a few weeks ago.

Twitter for those who don’t get it

Much as I had vainly cast aside the notion that I just didn’t get it the whole while, everything finally clicked for me when I started following people who were referred to by others I was following. @bynkii posted a tweet for the benefit of @flargh, so I followed @flargh and so on. Before long I was watching a little network of people commenting about their day, and about each others’ days. People weren’t casting their 140 characters into the void without reason after all, there was interaction!

With hindsight, my problem was that I had been thinking of Twitter as blogging in the small. But with no followers, there was no-one to read what I was writing, and thus nothing to engage me to take part in it actively. Twitter isn’t like blogging at all it’s more like instant messaging… if I had set the @Replies setting in my twitter profile to “show me all @replies” sooner, I would have certainly noticed these little pockets of conversation and started following the people being addressed. And some of them would have reciprocated. And I would have being taking part instead of watching, bemused.

Twitter for those who do get it

And now that I have some followers to read my tweets, and occasionally tweet back at me about them, I not only mention the minutiae of my day to the annoyance of everyone else who doesn’t get it yet, but I take part in conversations with other people who are following me. It’s kinda neat!

Now that’s all very well, but I want to incorporate my part of the twitterverse into my online life. I want to build my blog readership by tweeting when I put up a new blog post. I want to build my twitter followers by engaging my blog readers enough to be interested in what I’m comment about with other like-minded people at twitter.

I thought I’d found a great way to do all of that (and more!) with [Alex King]‘s WordPress [Twitter Tools]. I have it set up to automatically tweet new blog posts on my behalf, and to collect summaries of my tweets into daily posts. Except that having my blog posts drowned out incessant trivia and my half of various out of context conversations is more likely to drive you, gentle reader, away from my blog that to turn you from a twitter don’t get it into get it over a few days.

The problem is that twitter conversations are essentially throw away, and don’t generally have enough substance to generate further blog comments. Essentially they don’t belong in a post. I think what I really need is a way to show my last handful of tweets in the sidebar. Any pointers much appreciated!

Over the next few days, I’ll delete the Twitter daily summaries, and search for a wordpress rss widget to integrate into azazil, so as to try to pique your interest in Twitter. I might even write a post to try and persuade you to sign up for a free account and follow me at twitter. I’m one of the many people who will reciprocate the follow bit on anyone that follows me, especially as I’m now painfully aware that twitter just doesn’t click until you reach a critical mass of followers to pull you into the never-ending twitterverse conversation…

After holding out for more than 2 months for a new release of 3ColumnK2 (the WordPress theme that controls the look and feel of this blog) before upgrading to the latest WordPress release, and seeing very little indication that anything will be forthcoming in the near future, I decided to bite the bullet, upgrade WordPress and deal with the fallout…

Round 1

WordPress 2.2 now bundles it’s own implementation of sidebar widgets, which clash with the sidebar widgets implementation in K2 based themes. After upgrading WordPress, I went to the admin pages to upgrade the SQL tables only to be met by a fatal error before the upgrade button even appeared on screen.

3ColumnK2 takes a severe beating, barely able to stay on its feet when the bell rings… Round 1 to WordPress.

Round 2

I found and installed Disable WordPress Widgets plugin, designed to work around this very problem. Of course I would need to get to the plugin management admin page of my installation to activate the plugin, but since everything is displaying fatal errors right now, it’s hard to make any headway.

3ColumnK2 finds a new lease of energy and rocks WordPress2.2 with a plucky rally, soon paying for its overconfidence and forced back against the ropes to take another brutal assault. Round 2 to WordPress.

Round 3

Noting that the fatal error is just a symbol clash in wp-include/widgets.php, I logged into the host server and systematically renamed the symbols causing the errors, returning to the admin dashboard page to be greeted with a fresh symbol to rename and a new fatal error each time. Several symbol iterations later, the WordPress Dashboard finally rendered in my browser.

Not to be downtrodden, 3ColumnK2 fights back gaining a little ground with each volley. It looks like WordPress2.2 hasn’t got any tricks left, and is starting to look a little shaken when the bell rings. Round 3 to 3ColumnK2 by a nose.

Round 4

Having carefully saved a copy of the unedited wp-include/widgets.php, I enabled the Disable WordPress Widgets plugin, and restored the copy. Returning to the upgrade page, I was able to successfully complete the SQL table upgrades and have a fully functioning WordPress2.2 running my hacked 3CK2 theme.

WorPress2.2′s legs are looking a bit shaky by now, when 3ColumnK2 sneaks a lucky left-hook through WordPress’s defences dropping him to the canvas. Winner by TKO: 3ColumnK2.

Conclusion

Azazil is now running properly (or at least, no worse than before) on the latest security patched release of WordPress, and feels a little snappier for it on my client. The speed of the site is really bothering me now though, so I’m going to start ruthlessly cutting back on the modules I use, in an attempt to squeeze some responsiveness out of the server. If there’s anything you’re especially attached to, let me know in the comments and I’ll move it to the back of the line for summary execution. ;-)

Not including mailing lists or spam, I typically receive a couple of hundred emails every day, and I try to respond to the relevant ones as soon as they move into my attention — marking them unread to remind myself to get back to them later is generally doomed to failure as incoming mails push that message ever further from the front page of my email reader. Consequently, I tend to be a little shy about advertising my email address, and made a conscious decision not to include a contact page. I’ve even gone so far as to obfuscate the Message Me link on my myspace page.

A good proportion of you, gentle readers, don’t use RSS or email subscriptions to read my articles, and since I’m currently ruminating on how to improve your experience when visiting this site, I do want to supply some means of getting in touch without leaving an off-topic comment. Enter Plugoo, an IM flash application newly embedded into my sidebar. Not only will it queue messages for me when I’m offline, but I can answer you in real-time if I’m online :-)

I plan to leave it in place for a few weeks to see how it works for me (and you!) before I decide whether to make it a permanent addition to the site. So, why not try it out and say “hi!”…

Now that I’m no longer Escaping from Gloucestershire (mission accomplished!), and the glory days of traveling Chicago to San Diego with Gaz and Tave are over, I think it’s time to figure out where I want to go with blog.azazil.net… As Ian pointed out, I need to change the no-longer appropriate subtitle among other things…

First of all, I’m struggling to capture what azazil.net is actually about. Curiously, my most popular posts by far have been my aging Pocket Diary Moleskine Hack post, which gets around 25% of all the traffic to my site (!!), and Getting Things Done Digitally. I could certainly post some interesting updates on how my system has evolved since I wrote up what I was using back then, and GTD is still at the core of how I manage my productivity. But, even though I’m sure I could write about GTD in particular, or personal productivity in general ’til the cows come home, I don’t care to be the little voice lost among the ravening hordes of already established blogs in the same niche.

On the whole my posts to Azazil have been totally eclectic over the last 6 months since I seriously picked up my posting rate, which I rather enjoy, but I think is now holding back further growth of the blog. I haven’t decided yet whether to start a new personal blog to run in parallel so that I can tighten the focus here on Azazil.net, or indeed where to make the cut between subjects suitable for posting to a refocussed Azazil.net and subjects more suitable for a new personal blog. If I keep posting here in the same eclectic style rather than start a second blog, I think that it is important to come up with a branding that captures all of the subject areas I like to write about… and I don’t yet know what that might be.

As a start, I thought I should list the subjects that I’ve either posted about frequently, or would like to write about more often, and then stare at the list for a few days to see if I have a flash of inspiration about the niche (or niches… no need to be too heavy handed here) that I’m already in, and try to build a brand around that. If the inspiration doesn’t arrive, I should at least have a better idea of which subjects I can keep here, and which I should move to a new home.

Here’s the list, in no particular order:

• Productivity
• Personal Growth
• Travel
• Living & Working on the Move
• Martial Arts
• Programming & Open Source
• Gadgets & Technology
• Apple Macs
• Music
• Movies I’ve seen, Books I’ve read, Beer I have drunk
• Life Commentary

Is there anything here that would leave a hole in your life if I stopped posting about it? Anything you’ve found interesting, but wish I’d get into more depth? Anything you wish I’d just shut up about already? All advice greatfully received… otherwise I’ll have to just sit here and wait for that inspiration to arrive. :-D