Reid Dossinger

I’d always liked the idea of Google’s Chrome’s ability to sync (and, essentially, back up) bookmarks, preferences and applications across multiple installations of Chrome…but I could never get it to work. The preferences said that everything was backed up, but man…it was so not.

I thought I’d give it another try again, and this time it worked. I don’t know if it was just this fix or this combined with a fix in the browser by Google, but here’s what I did:

1. Turned off sync in the Google dashboard
2. Turned off sync on both installations of Chrome that I wanted to sync (one Mac and one Windows)
3. On my netbook (Windows), I deleted all the bookmarks I had there and closed Chrome
4. On my main computer (Mac), I turned sync back on and let it finish.
5. On my netbook, I turned sync back on and let it finish.

….and that did it. About time, too.

The personal blog that I’ve kept since 2003 has always had a serious personality split. It took on tech posts (especially beginner how-tos) and the music I’d been listening to, both of which could find a larger audience…if it wasn’t for the fact that it was jumbled up with each other AND with the personal blog type stuff that had a, uh, extremely limited audience. I would constantly want to promote the music and tech posts, but would stop short because it conflicted with wanting to keep the personal posts for just me and my friends.

The easy answer, of course, was to split things off. My music blog (which I still kick myself for not starting years earlier) has been going for almost three years now and I write tech in various different places. But since I split things off, the personal part has barely been updated, and I missed it.  

I considered just retiring the Wordpress site and just letting Tumblr be my dumping ground, but being a sentimental guy, I couldn’t just let my blog and its years of posts go. What I needed was the pros of Tumblr:

• Easy posting from Instagram
• The style of template that says “this is off-the-cuff content”
• The iPhone app (instead of the Wordpress app, which is unusable)

…with the pros of Wordpress:

• The richness of the plugins
• The long history of my posts and comments
• The knowledge that I can always turn it into whatever I want

What I did:

• Installed (and slightly customized) the Salju Tumblr-type template (which I found from this helpful page)
• Installed the FeedWordPress plugin to pull in the RSS from Tumblr
• Installed and customized the Reaction Buttons plugin to try to replicate the Like button on Tumblr

And so far…it’s not working too badly. Now, right off the bat, there are a few drawbacks. One is that, because posts from Instagram don’t come through the RSS with the category of “Photo”, I have to give all posts coming through FeedWordPress the default category of Photo, and then manually change the ones that aren’t photos (though most of them will be). There also seems to be a significant delay between the time the RSS is published to the time it ends up in Wordpress. Plus, you lose the rich community and easy functionality of Tumblr. But I’m pretty happy with it otherwise.

If anyone else has had luck creating a Tumblr-like blog, let me know in the comments what you did. I’m curious to find out ways to optimize this.

I just spent the last few days in “New” York, in my second straight year (a personal record!) at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference, which combines the worlds of publishing and tech. I also had a couple of great meals and my first pickleback (and, unfortunately, my second), but that’s another story.

This year felt pretty long on theory and short on practical examples and takeaways, but much of the theory did end up being pretty inspiring. Here’s a few quickshot thoughts on the conference:

The future of ebooks is…totally uncertain

It seemed that at least once every hour, someone pondered the future of the ebook. Yet no one really has a good answer for it. It’s obvious that we’re still in the early days (which I also felt last year), that standards are still being debated and grasped at, but that we’re still a ways away from organized steps forward. This is my opinion, and it seemed something that no one else wanted to say, but it seems clear to me.

And related, tablets are not catching on as much as expected. There were a number of survey results revealed at the conference, and they all showed that people reading on tablets were still a little uncertain and not entirely happy with the devices, whereas more serious readers gravitated to dedicated devices like the Kindle and Nook…and were happy with them.

HTML5 seems to be a very likely part of ebooks future

No one actually came out and said “HTML5 is what ebooks are moving to”, but considering that HTML5 was given just as much mention as EPUB, it seems obvious that this is the technology that people are looking to as at least the engine behind ebooks, if not just taking the place of dedicated ebook file formats.

The flow of information is replacing the page

Kevin Kelly’s presentation was one of my favorite of the conference. He presented a group of concepts of how he thinks information delivery is changing, and one of those was the concept of “flow”: that information simply flows by us, Twitter style, and is only relevant for a short time.

Readers share things THEY are passionate about, not you
One of the great, most inspiring talks was by Kathy Sierra, who spoke about passionate followers. This is a favorite topic of mine and one I could go on at length about, but she put it absolutely perfectly. Boiled down, it’s the point that getting people passionate is not about their interest in you or your product (book)…it’s about what getting them interested in what their product can do for themselves. The main example was the reviews of a popular exercise book: the reviews didn’t gush about how great the book was, but rather how that exercise changed their lives. They recommend books to their friends because they like their friends, not because they like the product. Amazing talk that I wish more people could have heard.

Future is in curation/filtering

There was a talk by Steve Rosenbaum that I wasn’t really crazy about, except for the fact that it hit on a concept that I think is extremely important and one that was mentioned often at the conference: discoverability and curation, the idea that it’s trusted people recommending things to us that lets us find things. As we find fewer books from browsing libraries and bookstores, we need more places that sift through the avalanche and recommend things to us.

Also…
I would highly recommend going to the Slides And Video page on the TOC site and watching the hilarious and charming presentation by Margaret Atwood. I guarantee there was not a person in the audience who wasn’t looking at the stage like a crushed-out teenager by the end of her presentation. Absolutely lovely. And if they put up James Bridle’s presentation at some point (it’s not up yet), watch that one, too.

Until next year…

And so begins a new feature that I call Ask A Reid, where I answer questions from people I know about the dorky-but-useful stuff on the interwebs, and put it here for other people who may want to know the question/are bored and will read anything.

Question: i know you operate different Twitter accounts - are they all linked to the same email address?  can you link more than one twitter account to the same email address?

Answer: Well, you can’t do multiple Twitter accounts with a single email address, but there’s an easy way around it: Gmail lets you filter emails just by adding a plus sign to your gmail username. So you could sign up for one Twitter account with fakeaddress@gmail.com and another with fakeaddress+twitter2@gmail.com. You can put whatever you want between the + and the @. That works well for filtering newsletters, too.

But I use a different email with each account anyway. I have multiple emails and when you buy a domain, you can do absolutely anything as the username in an email address and it’ll go to one email address. But that’s another discussion for another time.