Servusamanu.com

This morning I was all about social networking. I threw a couple of status messages at facebook. Over the course of the day I probably assaulted twitter two or three dozen times with assorted minutae. This blog got a post. I was reading other people’s blogs, twitters, and facebook. Basically, I spent the day enjoying the sights and sounds of our mirror, digitized, society. I should probably be writing, but, hey, my story is set in the future. I have to have a healthy grasp of the current…

Anyway, via twitter, I was informed of Audioboo. (Specially via StephenFry. (Yep, of Jeeves and Wooster fame, among other things.))

AudioBoo is an application for the iphone that lets you record short messages and post them to audioboo. It’s a form of audioblogging, similar to twitter for recorded voice. It seems to be a happy medium between the lillipution delivery of twitter, increasingly commercialized facebook, and vain absurdly of videoblogging.

Already, audioblogging seems to be a positive direction for authors and people in general to communicate. StephenFry has his AudioBoo. Michael Stackpole has The Secrets Podcast and some other things.

Web 2.0 has been the catch all cliche for new technology, but…it’s exciting. I’m all about democratizing media. The days of New York Times and the Evening News have ended and a new world of open communication is taking place. The worst critics of social media deplore the overall quality of the writing. A valid criticism, one I fall under, but social media also solves its own problem. There are pieces of quality out there to be found. Compare: the number of tv channels with uninteresting content vs. the number of websites with uninteresting content. By percentage tv might win (5 channels out of 50, 10%, 100 websites: billions <1%), but by sheer number the internet wins handily. It’s not the medium, internet carries video just fine, but the openess. WordPress, twitter, myspace, facebook, xanga, now audioboo are all opening up the available mediums that can be utilized. The popularity of forums and newsgroups, even in the early days of the internet, show the general desire for open communication, regardless of ‘quality,’ and these new technologies are only giving greater means to an already present market.

Sadly, I don’t have an iphone, but Servusamanu might dabble with audioblogging in the future. I’ll be on the look out for other interesting programs that might pop up.

Today’s my grandmother’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Granna!

A certain reader of Servusamanu has, as of today, been tolerating the author for a full year. Happy Anniversary! Love you!

Turns out it’s my birthday. Also turns out lots of other people were born today. Cheers fellow Vernal Equinoxers!

Another technical update:

As you can see, I’ve removed the background. The other one was a bit cluttered and distracting. I also changed the front back to black, Sylfaen. I just think it looks better. I took the background away from the footer box and centered the copyright lines. The top header also got padding change.

I tested the wordpress+Ajax plugin. Interesting, maybe worth looking at in the future, but it had some issues, so I disabled it.

The forums are still a test-bed only, but permalinks are now working. I’ve been trying out a few different styles. The current one is inove, found here. http://ericlbarnes.com/projects/inove-for-bbpress/. I like the look of it.

I think that’s about it. Forum is still a work in progress, but I’m pleased with this latest round of updates.

~Robert

Tech Update for Servusamanu.

I recently added a BBPress forum located at http://www.servusamanu.com/servusamanu/forum/. It can also be accessed from a top header icon on the main page.

Right now it’s just a sandbox to test the forum’s security and admin features, but I may have some plans for it in the future. Further update posts forthcoming. I’ve also added a backup plugin, statpress analytics, and akismet comment validation.

Future plans:
Add some Ajax functionality to the site.
Reskin The Forum
Configure Akismet for Forum Posts
Tweak The Upper Header Bar

Cheers, Robert

As you can tell, I’ve made a couple of changes to Servusamanu.  Nothing too major, just some artistic modifications.  Tell me what you think!

New Years is Coming!

My resolutions

Writing:
Write 5 short stories
Apply and Win a Short Story Contest
Finish my Novel this Year

Servusamanu:
Publicize Servusamanu More (improve readership 10%)
Increase number of writing sample articles up to at least 1 a week.
Change Servusamanu Background to something a few shades darker

Other:
Take Dancing classes with the GF
Read 25 Books (at least!) this year.
Improve freelance work to 10% of income

The big one for me is finishing my novel. I’ve written novel length manuscripts before, but they are very poor both in idea and writing. I can’t vouch for the writing, but my idea and inspiration is far more mature than it was the last time around. I really look forward to getting everything down on paper, but it’s such an intimidating process. 100,000 words, maybe more. Even once it’s done it’ll need to be edited over and over and over. It’s a terribly disheartening project by the sheer amount of work, but it’s also so very exciting. It’s a fun process that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

Good luck to everyone else in their own resolutions!

Christmas! Or maybe Sithmas? Or perhaps a little Festivus cheer?

Don’t drink too much eggnog!

Captain Crunch…it’s great.

Also…it’s my girlfriend’s birthday. Love you!