Goodbye old friend

This is it, my final post.

I've been using this weblog, and Blogger, for the past nine years, but some recent changes to Blogger got me thinking, maybe it's time for me to make a change.

New site, new weblog, new publishing system.

If you follow this weblog in an RSS reader it's time to point it at my new home. That new home is being published using WordPress, and I'm loving it.

So, point your browser to iam.fahrni.ws if you're looking for my new home. This site will remain unchanged, an archive of my weblogging life.

Web Home - fahrni.ws
Weblog - iam.fahrni.ws
Twitter - @fahrni

See you on the internets.

Labels: Blogger, Life, Social, Weblogging

Facebook, you naughty doggie!

TechCrunch: "This looks really, really bad. An avid Facebook user named Harman Bajwa says that his Facebook vanity Url - Facebook.com/Harman - was unceremoniously revoked yesterday for violating Facebook's policies. His new Facebook URL is the much less memorable facebook.com/profile.php?id=538612932." - Well, money talks, and bull$%!* walks.

Labels: Life, Social, Web

Weekend mode

Brent Simmons: "What I'd love to have is a "weekend mode" in my client. (Or it could even be a separate client.) The weekend mode would show me only mentions, direct messages, and items with links. However, the items-with-links would not include yfrog and similar links: if it's just a picture of someone's sushi or their wacky goldfish, I can skip it." - That's a good idea, just another type of filter for your Twitter stream.

Labels: Development, Idea, Social

New comic strip

George by John Norton - John dropped me a line last night. He discovered this weblog via a friend that was looking for fellow developers from Fresno. I'm amazed more and more each day how small this world really is.

Anywho, now I have a nice new comic strip to visit!

Thanks John!

Labels: Fun, Graphics, Indie, Social

MySpace, then and now

Financial Times - Reportage: "Since then, MySpace has shed 40 per cent of its staff, closed many of its international offices and publicly given up trying to match Facebook in the race to become the world's biggest social network. (MySpace has more than 100 million regular users, Facebook more than 300 million.) A move by MySpace and other News Corp digital businesses into the biggest new office development in Los Angeles was scrapped - after the $350m, 12-year lease had been signed - leaving the company paying more than $1m a month for an empty building. The number of people using the site has also dropped precipitously this year: MySpace's share of the social networking market has tumbled from 66 per cent a year ago to 30 per cent, according to the online research company Hitwise." - I would have called this article "How to build and empire, sell it to an old school media baron, make a ton of money, watch him run it in the ground, and get out." Maybe that's too long?

It's funny the article says MySpace was at the forefront of Web 2.0. I find that laughable. It looked to me like a complete nightmare, hey, ever heard of the blink tag? Yeah, it was that bad. While Facebook isn't the most aesthetically pleasing site ever created it makes MySpace look like an ugly step child.

Remember boys and girls, most of the web has the attention span of an A.D.D. child.

So, who's going to be the next darling and take down Facebook? If the woes of MySpace are any indicator we have three to five years before we'll find out.

Labels: Business, Social, Web

My Own Universe

Like many I use Twitter and Facebook, and I have my weblog, which I consider the center point of the Rob Fahrni Network.

Dave Winer has been working to de-centralize micro blogging, that's not a bad thing, it's a very good thing. I like the idea of being in charge of my very own nightmare. I need a center point, a launch pad, that works with all these services, including my weblog, and pushes updates to Twitter, Facebook, my weblog, and the other services that are a part of the Rob Fahrni Network.

Why?

Well, I see my weblog as a personal history of my adventures in life. Apparently it's next to impossible to get your full Twitter history, Dave has done so by constantly backing it up. I'd like to do so moving forward. To do that I'll need a tool I can use for weblogging as well as one for microblogging that will push to Twitter and Facebook, as well as keeping a copy of everything for myself.

How?

That is the question. I have server space and I'd like for it to live there. I have a desktop tool I love, MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software, but it's just a way to push data to the server. So, are there existing web services I could use to tie it all together? There's Ping.fm which offers a gateway to many different services, including Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, and Flickr, just to name a few. There's FriendFeed which will aggregate posts from your weblog, or Twitter, or Facebook, and publish to other services.

I'd like to find a CMS, or weblogging tool like WordPress, that I can use as the center of the Rob Fahrni Network. Here's what I'm after.

1) It must install on my server.
2) It needs a UI to publish directly to social networks, ala Ping.fm.
3) It needs a weblogging UI, that in turn pushes the title and shortened link to social networks.
4) It needs to publish to my weblog and publish to a microblog, ala Twitter, that's lives in my network.
5) It must have API's. One for blogging, one for microblogging, so I can point my favorite desktop at it. Basically MarsEdit would become my frontend to tweeting.
5) Everything points back to a center point, my weblog.

Instead of going to Twitter, or Facebook, or Blogger, I go to my network, where everything begins life, and it pushes to other services. For your average person this is Facebook, I want more, I want to control it. It is, after all, my content.

Hopefully I'll be able to do this with a combination of WordPress and Ping.fm. If not, maybe someone has already explored this and has a nice solution.

Labels: Life, Social, Technology, Tools, Weblogging

Feed Reader vs. Twitter

Jerry Fahrni: "I love reading stuff like this because you can see the passion that everyone has for their little corner of the technology world. It's even more interesting when you consider that it's a completely personal choice. Boxers or briefs, who gives a crap as long as you're comfortable." - I use both. With Twitter lists, and a bit more tweaking, you'd end up with an RSS feed reader of sorts. I have my feeds sorted by categories, using the ever popular NetNewsWire. I can easily read the river of news, a.k.a. fire hose, or read just a particular category. I'd like to be able to do that with Twitter. Have my following list be a list of lists. This way I could still follow people's tweets, and dial into a particular list when I want to cut out the noise.

Labels: Social, Weblogging

Facebook Scaling

Dare Obasanjo [via James Robertson]: "Haystack runs on commodity hardware (i.e. Dell Linux boxes with a terabyte SATA drives) and is a custom file system which keeps all file indexes in RAM to speed up lookups. Today Haystack is so optimal that it only takes one I/O operation to load a photo compared to 3 I/O operations for the previous optimized implementation and 10 I/O operations for the initial NFS based system. Haystack is so scalable that they once accidentally disabled their CDNs and Haystack served all photos on the site without breaking a sweat. The service was built by 3 developers in a couple of months. It will be Open Sourced in the near future." - Very darned cool post. The Facebook guys are really tearing it up. I know I've been critical of them in the past, believing them to be the next MySpace, but they've gone so far beyond anything before them.

A side note. I love Dare's soft sell at the end of the article, "If you're interested in working on or building systems similar to the ones described above for the 500 million users who utilize Windows Live services. Send me a resume, we're always looking for good developers."

Microsoft has lost its luster, I'm afraid. I don't know many, if any, people that have Microsoft on their places to work list. There are too many exciting startups, especially in the social space, to work for the "New version of the 80's IBM."

Labels: Design, Development, Social, Technology

Ev hasn't a clue?

James Robertson: "Comedy Gold ensues as Ev bobs and weaves - it's pretty clear that he has no clue whatsoever. It amazes me that people keep throwing money at this guy." - Go check the link in James' post. I think their revenue model are the deals they just signed with Google and Microsoft. That's it!

Labels: Insanity, Social, Technology

Revisiting 09/11, Scripting News

I followed a link via Dave Winer's FriendFeed this afternoon to an piece on Gigaom titled "Remembering 9/11 - A Time Before Social Networks."

I left a comment of course because I was a part of a social network at the time, called weblogging. The only thing Twitter has brought us is a much quicker flow, along with more noise to sort through. Still useful, yes, just noisy.

On that day I found it next to impossible to get through to CNN, MSNBC, and the NY Times websites. They were just overwhelmed. I turned to Dave Winer's Scripting News for up to the minute information. Dave, if you read this, you did a great job that day.

This brings me to the title of this post. Go read Dave's account of the day, and click on the links. It's surprising how fragile our lovely World Wide Web is. A lot of the links just don't work. Sad to lose that history, don't you think?

Labels: Indie, Life, Social, Web, Weblogging

Facebook Lite, the perfect UI

This is the perfect Facebook Lite UI, period. In fact, it's the best Facebook UI.

UPDATE: Yes, this is the FriendFeed UI with a Facebook lite header graphic pasted over the top. That's all the Facebook folks need to do, change the name, perfection.

Facebook has a horrible user interface. Cluttered and clunky. Why not go for simple?

Labels: Social

All a twitter about the death of RSS, NOT!

James Robertson: "Out here in the real world, the rest of us are using Twitter, and RSS, and search, and basic web pages based on what we're looking for at the time. Inside the echo chamber? It changes all the time, and everything old is worthless..." - Well said.

Labels: Social, Technology, Weblogging

Can I get an Amen!

Om Malik [via @davewiner]: "Chris Saad, who works for JS-Kit.com, a start-up that makes social media tools and has been involved in various technical groups such as DataPortablity.org, today outlines seven reasons why the blog-builders and users need to rise-up. 'It's time we start re-investing in our own, open social platforms... Blogs are our profile pages - social nodes - on the open, distributed social web,' he writes. Well said, Saad! For his seven reasons," - I've been writing this weblog since 2001, it is my own personal profile. It's me, it's how I feel, what I'm doing, who I'm doing it with. It's family and friends. It's work and play. It's a view into my life, it's my very own personal nightmare. It is me.

I love having this blog and always have. As long as I'm still around this weblog will serve as my very own, one man, social network. It cannot, and will not, be replaced by Facebook or Twitter, they don't, and won't every let me run things the way I want to run them.

This is my place on the web, and they can't touch it.

Labels: Life, Social, Web, Weblogging

Fresno Area Geeks Unite!

Robert Schultz: "I've been thinking about some ideas to help promote local developers and programmers here in Fresno and getting to know others. One idea I really liked and experienced once was Startup Drinks San Francisco, which was really fun. I was new to the city and I got to meet with lots of developers for some great startups based in the city. So why not here in Fresno?" - This sort of event is definitely needed. Since writing my Fresno, technology black hole post I've discovered a LOT of new Fresno based talent, especially in the web and design areas.

Now, all we need to do, is springboard that into a Visalia Geeks Dinner and Drinks!

Labels: Development, food, Friends, Fun, Indie, Job, Life, Social

About

Rob Fahrni has been a Software Developer for 20 years. He's developed DOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone, and Palm based applications in C, C++, Objective-C/Cocoa, C#/ASP.Net, and, yes, even BASIC...
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• Goodbye old friend
• Blogger FTP, The End Is Near
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I work at Pelco. The opinions expressed here are my own, and neither Pelco nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.