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Jan
18
But…Facebook streams my FriendFeed
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I read this while I was suffering form the side effects of the medicines prescribed to make me feel better.
2. Lifestreaming is bigger, but not via FriendFeed.
FriendFeed made a huge impact over the past year among the early adopter crowd, but lifestreaming is still yet to make its way into the mainstream. People are just now beginning to regularly use enough social services at once — YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, blogging — for aggregation to start to make sense. In 2009, it will be commonplace to publish your online life in a single stream, but it will be done via Facebook.Source: Sitepoint Tech Times Newsletter- 6 Jan 2009
When I first set up my Facebook account, I’d already been using FriendFeed for a while. And since Flickr and goodreads both fed to FriendFeed correctly while only posting once in a great while to Facebook, it just made more sense to me to feed FriendFeed to Facebook and save myself the headache.
That recently changed. goodreads has become far better about posting items to Facebook since they redesigned. Hopefully, Flickr will pleasantly surprise me once I finally upload my photos from the last month. I’m now trying to convince myself to remove FriendFeed from Facebook in favor of trusting the applications to do their jobs.
But I’m not giving up FriendFeed because I still have people who subscribe to it who aren’t on Facebook.
Jan
9
Change is in progress
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I’m finally starting to make use of my Twitter account, so you’re going to see more daily posts from there. Feel free to reply to me on Twitter or here.
In the next week or so, you should also be seeing daily posts from my delicious account (which is a mess, so you aren’t allowed to see it just yet).
But, don’t think that this means this blog is about to become nothing but tweets and links. I’m currently fighting off both a cold and the nasty stomach bug that’s been roaming around, so I’m not quite up to doing much more than reading and sleeping.
As yesterday’s tweet says, though, I have finished combing through all of my resources (and the digital libraries of two of the three local libraries) and read everything I’ve ever saved about information architecture. (I’m trying to be methodical about breathing life back into this site.) I have my IA plan of attack, and feeding my daily tweets over here is just the first part of it.
As changes show up, please feel free to tell me what works for you and what doesn’t, because while I am writing this to get ideas out of my head and into a space where I can review it, this is also for the reader (because people seem to think I have good ideas).
Oct
17
This place is under construction
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If you’re still subscribed or periodically checking out this site, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been absent.
It’s the age-old tale. First, I stopped being abl to think of things to write. Then, I had an identity crisis, and in the middle of the identity crisis, a lot of things happened.
But this might turn out to be a good thing, because I’ve given a lot of thought to what I want this site to be and who I am, and I think this place is ready for the long overdue overhaul it’s (hopefully) about to go through.
As part of trying to resolve the identity crisis, I started a secret blog to experiment with sharing more of the content I felt I should be sharing. I don’t know that I truly found my voice (or my posting consistency), but I thought I would move those posts over here and see what you guys think (those of you who may or may not still be around).
If these posts become your introduction to Rebecca Thomas Designs, then welcome! Leave comments. Email me. Say hi.
Anyway, things you’ve never seen before are going to start appearing. Don’t freak out. This is part of the flux this site will be undergoing for a while. Advice and behind-the-scenes help is appreciated!
Dec
23
Taking a break
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With it being the ever-fun, ever-crazy holiday season, I’ve decided to reduce a small bit of the demands on my time by putting this little cluster of websites on hiatus through the holidays.
Please go forth and have a wonderful holiday, regardless of what you celebrate. Take time to be with the people you care about and to reach out to those you can’t be with.
Happy holidays! See you in January!
Sep
30
What to do when you see rats
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The short version of this story is if you need a freelance teacher, trainer, writer, or editor, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
The long version of this story is that with so much pressure on our kids to succeed, working in a extracurricular teaching center (and paying the bills off that paycheck) is becoming more challenging.
My blogs have actually all been suffering for the past couple of weeks while I’ve tried to figure out how to resolve this situation.
If we can get the pages working on this blog, then I’ll put up a page to help everyone understand what I can do for them (Basically, if you need something taught, either by a teacher or a written document, there’s a very good chance I can help you.) Otherwise, like I said, contact me with potential projects.
Jul
8
Blogging challenge: What’s behind my blog
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(This topic will end up cross-posted because of how I started blogging.)
The newest blogging challenge from Lorelle on Wordpress asks for our blog’s story. Well, my blogs had a unified start, so it makes sense to start both stories the same, and then follow their development apart individually.
I was gifted with an online journal in January 2002, not long after moving to San Antonio after grad school. She had just met me, and was adamant that I should have this journal (She was doing this to her friends, and she decided the moment she met me that we were going to be friends. In an interesting twist of events, we no longer speak to each other.) At first, I had no idea what I was going to do with the space. I stumbled through a couple of random posts before discovering quizzes. Before long, I started writing random reflections and thoughts about what was going on around me. After a while, it became more a place to tell friends what I was up to. I actually started meeting new people through the community, some of whom I’m still good friends with.
A few months after being given this online journal, I was introduced to Curt Rosengren’s blog. It sparked something in me. I decided I wanted to write more than just silly little “Hello, world” posts. I set up a Blogger blog and started writing in it about personal observations about informal learning (one of my passions). Eventually, I started writing more about education, and then started writing posts about personal development, changing careers, and writing resumes (I was starting to realize I had to consider how I was going to reshape my career path. Still am, come to think of it. I was also spending a lot of time helping friends and family navigate their own career changes.)
After a while, I felt like I had no idea what I was trying to accomplish anymore. The Blogger blog was split up among three TypePad blogs: CareerNiche, DesignNiche, and EducationNiche. They covered the main topics I’d been blogging about at that point. People would occasionally stop by and leave comments, or email me. But TypePad had a series of meltdowns, and I became frustrated at not being able to write when I wanted. This blog dabbled briefly as a Drupal blog (which is where JewelryNiche became a blog, but someone mentioned WordPress, and I checked it out.
I can’t remember when exactly I moved this group of blogs to WordPress. but I remember it was a bit painful. My web guru finally used Multiply to get everything here the way I wanted. (Funny thing, we’re actually finally looking into MU, but I don’t really want to move anything until I have a design and a good idea how everything is going to change around here.) At some point not long after that, I started WritingNiche.
My motivation is purely internal. I need to be able to get things out of my head, and this medium works well for organizing discarded thoughts. Others read and link these blogs, and I’m very appreciative of that fact, and a bit surprised anyone finds this useful. My inspiration comes from life, my own learning efforts, and the blogs I read. The biggest challenge, especially now that I’m trying to reorganize everything, has been figuring out where certain topics fit.
Would I give up any of my Niches? Except for JewelryNiche (which is on an indeterminate hiatus), I don’t think I could reasonably give up any of them. To some degree, they all represent some facet of who I am and what makes me happy. I guess that’s all one could really ask for.
Jun
26
An apology
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For those of you who are unaware (that would be the majority of you), my hard drive gave up the ghost Friday morning. It just came back to me this morning.
The good news is, I managed to back up the most important things that hadn’t been recently backed up as the drive was in its death throes. The bad news is that it never occurred to me to back up my application data. Fortunately, we had backed that up in December when the laptop popped a resistor, so reconstructing Firefox has not been nearly as painful as it could have been.
Reconstructing my music collection, on the other hand…well, let’s just say we discovered that the folder containing one of my favorite artists hasn’t existed in a while. I was planning to re-rip both CDs anyway. Now I have an excuse.
I’m also in a losing battle with an allergic reaction, so this whole experience has been quite fun. I’ve decided for now to take a couple of days to make sure everything is up and running, and to allow myself time to adjust to my new OS. I am happy to say I am braving the wilds of Ubuntu! (Thankfully, I have a very patient roommate who tolerates my silly questions.)
The blogs will return next week. I’ll try to blog a little extra to make up for losing this week.
Jun
3
Re-centering
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If you’ve been following this site for the past couple of months, you know that I’ve been trying to take a good, hard look at myself and then try to pull my life into alignment with who I am.
I don’t know if I’m any closer to figuring out who I am at my core and what I bring to any table, but I am learning that some of my interests and focal points have changed. As a result, you’re probably going to notice the Niches struggling through a bit of a shift as each one gets refocused to match what I’m finding out about my own interests. This may show up as intermittent blogging, or a change in topics, or both.
If you see a Niche being unusually quiet, it’s likely going through some sort of growing pain related to all of my work the past couple of months (except JewelryNiche, which is going to move away and resume at some point).
Thank you for your patience and your support as I work through this.
May
21
To stay here or go elsewhere?
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I’m doing a lot of housecleaning and laying out a plan of attack to condense and revamp my web presence. Too many people have told me that it’s difficult, even with most of my sites offering RSS, to keep track of me. One of the sites that’s going to end up really hit by this concern is Dead Bunny Educational, which is currently focused on math lessons, but I’d intended for it to eventually pick up my grammar and composition lessons, too.
I’m starting to think, though, that since I have this great, established, writing blog already, maybe I should just weave those into the fabric here at WritingNiche. I’m already debating moving the math lessons to EducaitonNIche, and everything would then be in one site.
What do you think? Would you be willing to go over to Dead Bunny, or would you prefer I weave those lessons in here next to my challenges and resources? (It really does seem like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?)
Apr
8
Presenting your compentencies in Web 2.0
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Sorry for the unexpected silence around the site last week. When an illness hits the area, it runs through work and my household at the same time, so I usually get an amplified dose of whatever it is. This past week was no exception as I made friends with a less-than-friendly stomach bug. I haven’t been that sick in years.
Right before I fell over (literally) sick, I stopped by the library to pick up a book I had on hold and found a book on competency-based resumes. I’m currently looking into various resume and portfolio styles in preparation for updating and revamping my resume and developing an accompanying portfolio. Naturally, I have my army of links from my days of helping others create their first resume (or whip an out-of-date resume into shape), but I’ve often felt my diverse combination of skills requires something a bit outside the box.
I started considering the competency-based approach about a year or so ago when I started trying to apply for freelance work. I wanted to be able to present myself as both a writer and a teacher. My current resume actually reflects this, and initially did its job very well. But it hasn’t been quite enough. A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across someone’s competency-based portfolio, and it inspired me to start exploring this approach again. Just a day or two later, I came across this series of tutorials on using Web 2.0 to help build your e-portfolio, and I was ready to start playing…only to be stopped by illness.
Now that I’m back on my feet, I’m hoping to be able to take some initial steps in playing with everything and trying to figure out how it applies to my unusual background.
