A short note this one.
I’ve now upgraded all of my WordPress sites to WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”.
Everything upgraded without a hitch, which was a pleasure and a relief.
I did all of the usual safety things and took backups of the files and the database, but didn’t need any of them.
Once the preparation was done, all I had to do was to click “upgrade”, so easy anyone could do it.
A big thank you WordPress.org and a similar sized thank you to all of the plug-in writers who’ve updated their code.
For those of you who are reading this through a some kind of Reader you might be interested to know that I’ve been tweaking the design on this site. 
For the rest of you, you’ve probably already noticed.
There was a bit of thought behind it:
- 3 Columns – I like 3 column designs, most people have a wide enough screen these days to make the most of it.
- Simplicity – I like designs that are very simple, but still functional. I’m not a huge fan of designs with loads of bling. I know that this slightly contradicts the previous point but it’s a balancing act.
- Photographs – I wanted something that would showcase some of my favourite photographs. Pictures are also a great way of engaging with people, but the skill is creating a design that allows this without it being gaudy.
- Fonts – I don’t like serif fonts. Don’t know why particularly, I just don’t.
I’ve still got some tweaking to do.
Let me know what you think.
I have quite a complicated set of criteria for writing what I write on this blog.
My first criteria is value. Is what I am writing of some value to someone. It might just be of value to me – helping me to construct a set of thoughts. If I’m trying to construct these thoughts then perhaps others are too. It might be something I’ve found that I think others would like to know about and it might be a set of opinions that I want to express.
That’s the positive side, but I also have a set of criteria for things that I avoid writing about:
- I won’t write about something that I am currently being directly paid to work on. I’m never going to write about a customer’s project. That’s not the purpose of this blog and would potentially ruin my relationship with my client.
- I won’t write about something that is “mainstream” and by that I mean that I am not going to write about something in blogs like lifehacker of ReadWriteWeb. They are paid to do a good job of covering their information, anything I say is just adding to the noise. If I have an opinion to relay I may say something, but I’m more likely to do that as a comment.
- I won’t write about individuals. The internet is far to severe a place for me to write about someone.
- I won’t write about my employer, I’m not paid to blog and I don’t have a mandate from them to blog. It’s a personal activity, so I’m making personal comment.
All of these criteria leave me with a lot of grey areas; where it’s grey I’ll always err on the side of caution and not write.
I also won’t aggregate into my blog all of the other stuff that I contribute to on the web – del.icio.us it visible as is twitter, but I’m not going to copy them in as posts. The same with flickr, and facebook. If people want to connect with those streams then they can do so by the appropriate mechanism. The other reason why I don’t do this that I’m just duplicating the number of times many people see the same piece of information. I’m considering turning off notifications of my blog updates in twitter for this very reason; I regularly read the same piece of information twice which annoys me, and probably annoys others too.
I write lots of stuff and only some of it appears here. This probably makes my online persona difficult to pin down, but it’s only ever going to a part of who I am. I think that I need to do a better job of showing people where I’m contributing, but I don’t think that aggregating it all together into a single stream is the way to do it.
A spend a good deal of time pondering whether I have the balance right; I’m still not sure.
The IT landscape is composed of millions of moving components that we plumb together to create thousands of applications. We then take the thousands of applications and plumb them together to make systems.
But how do you know what works with what, how do you find out what the problems are. You’d think that this was a simple question, but it’s not. There are many reasons that it’s not simple, one of the main ones is the relationship between organisations. It’s very difficult for one organisation to validate the work of another organisation without a lot of work. Lots of the larger vendors run verification programmes but they can be expensive especially for the smaller application vendors.
Citrix has recently taken a different approach – community verification.
The IT community is integrating applications and components all of the time and Citrix is hoping to tap into all of this knowledge, but also to make it available to everyone else.
“The Community Verified site is a platform in which third party products are added and verified by community members. Community members are helping each other by posting and voting on third party products known to work in their environment. These products do not get any Citrix Ready program benefits.”
There’s no warranty involved here just the knowledge that someone else has gone ahead of you and managed to succeed, a very valuable asset. The voting system also enables you to put some weighting behind your confidence.
In my experience it’s not integration of applications from the large well known vendors that cause the problems, it’s integration of products from smaller companies. These companies have less extensive experience and who would be struggling to undertake a formal verification activity anyway. A community based approach gives a very valuable middle ground.
On day 2 of my quest to have a meaningful conversation every day, today I had breakfast with a friend.
The conversations were all personal so I’m not going to detail them here.
It feels like a different conversation to business ones but they still require the same set of communication skills. So I’m not sure that I want to consider them as different conversations, just different subjects. I need to think about how Powell’s five levels of communication apply.
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