This Is My 3400th Post Here

Wow.

stoweboyd.com has been my blog for just a year, but I imported over (nearly) all my old posts from /Message in 2010, and a bunch but not all of the posts from Get Real back in 2006, and I had ported a bunch of the Timing posts back in 2004 into that. I even have posted my old columns from Darwin, but there’s only 6 or 8 of those. My original blog, in 1999, was Message From Edge City, which was shut down one day when my hosting service, convey.com, was closed down. I saved a few posts, but restarted on Blogger in 1999, with Timing.

Still, it’s a lot of wordage. And a lot of yearage. 3400 posts, 12 years, and counting.

Thank you, folks. It’s been an honor, and I ain’t done yet.

12 May 2011 5 Permalink

Blog 2.0 —- More Conversation Required

Apparently my planned revamp for /Message is part of a greater trend that I was unaware of:

[from Hugh MacLeod’s twits]

Thinking about gapingvoid 2.0. gapingvoid 1.0 HAS GOT to die…

And Dave Winer’s response:

[from Winer’s twits]

@gapingvoid, funny I’m thinking the same thing! (About Scripting News.)

Of course Winer has been threatening blogicide for some time, so who knows what he means by “die”…

I mean a drastic reworking of the site. I have a new logo, but nothing else yet. Here’s the logo in a sticker I put together for the new Moo sticker product:

19 July 2007 Permalink

Clarification: I Am Not A Blue Whale

Just to clarify my status, because so many people still are confused: I am not a partner in Blue Whale Labs. I parted amicably for the company in February, and my former partners, Greg Narain and Ranvir Gujral, continue to grow the company as a Ruby development shop.

I guess our tiny marketing campaign for the company must have been effective, since people continue to associate me with the firm, even six months after I have left.

Since February, I have returned to independent consulting. Check out www.stoweboyd.com/work, where I write from time to time about my consulting and clients.

I am doing business as /Message, where I tell people my title is /Messenger.

Whenever you have truth it must be given with love, or the message and the messenger will be rejected. — Gandhi

19 July 2007 Permalink

Moved to Wordpress

I am going to be dramatically revamping my Typepad set-up for /Message over the next week or so. Pardon my dust as I am futzing around.

The motivating cause is my desire to get Sphere working on the blog, which has proven to be a real headache. The nice people at Wordpress — solicited by Tony Conrad of Sphere — discussed moving me over to Workpress, but that soon started to look like a real major headache: partly because I have three blogs at Typepad, now, but just because I don’t want any breakage. Then the nice people at Six Apart offered to help me, but it rapidly became clear that I know just as much about Typepad’s vagaries as many of the Six Apart staff, if not more.

So, expect a template that looks something like this one, but with only one sidebar, on the right, new logo, no banner ad along the top, and a reduction in clutter of various sorts.

More to follow.

17 July 2007 Permalink

June 27: A Day That Shall Live In Infamy, Typepad!

I don’t know what happened at Typepad’s blogging service on the 27th, but the spam filters must have been all the way down. I have deleted nearly a thousand spam comments, all from that day.

I am sorry to say that Capcha is now up at /Message, at least until Typepad tells me I can drop it.

7 July 2007 Permalink

Whoops: Wake Up Call For A Blogger

I know my writing has been at a recent low, but when I visited /Message yesterday to search for an old post, I was astonished to see that I have no posts on the main page, meaning that I had not written a single post in seven days. Well, first I changed my settings (now I display the last 14 posts written), but I have also penned this short apologia, as a way of breaking the jinx.

Just too much travel and work, recently. But things are getting back to something like normal (or I am becoming used to an abnormal lifestyle), and starting today I plan to make room for writing, again.

6 July 2007 Permalink

Clothe Stowe: The Bidding Frenzy Heats Up

The auction for the Clothe Stowe project opens at 12:00pm PT, here. It’s a dutch auction at eBay which I described here.

I have made a few small modifications, based on various recommendations:

• I was thinking greedy, but I have dropped the starting bid to $1 per day. Who knows where it will end up.
  
  
• It’s a ten day auction.
  
  
• I pulled back a few days so I can were something else for weddings, thanksgiving, whatever. So there are only 222 days available, although the period is still May-Dec 2006. But I will only use those off days for weekends or personal stuff, not business or conferences. I tried to pull a few days out, and I changed the text to say so, but I forgot to actually decrease the quantity, so 240 days are still up for grabs!
  
  
• Since I can’t control the number of days people are going to bid for I decided to drop the limitation, altogether. Some company wants to bid on 40 days, or 100 days, or all 222 240, go for it.

20 April 2006 Permalink

Clothe Stowe: 240 Days Wearing Logo T Shirts

I have created the ebay auction for the Clothe Stowe project, which will go live at 12pm noon PT Wed Apr 19:

eBay: Clothe Stowe: 240 Days Wearing Logo T Shirts (item 6052184746 end time Apr-26-06 12:00:00 PDT)

[Update: Apparently, the link only works for me, since I own the account. But it’s there.]

Make a note, set an alarm, whatever. I have already heard back from over 10 companies planning to participate. The auction is for 240 units of one day’s worth of T shirt wearing, bu please don’t bid on more than 20 days!

This will be handled as a dutch auction in eBay:

[from eBay help]

Here are some examples of how Dutch Auctions work:

• A seller has 10 pens for auction at $1 each. 10 people bid $1 for one pen each. In this case, all 10 bidders will win a pen for $1.

OR

• Let’s say that 5 people bid $1.25 for one pen each and 10 others bid $1. The minimum bid for the pen will be raised to $1.25 because demand exceeds supply. Because the $1.25 bidders bid higher than the $1 bidders, they will be guaranteed a pen. The other 5 pens will go to the earliest $1 bidders. The final price for each pen will be $1 (even though someone placed a high bid of $1.25) since all winning bidders pay the same price — which is the lowest successful bid.

It might sound complicated, but the majority of Dutch Auctions are simple: Most users win the items they bid on at the minimum asking price. However, there are some special instances you might want to know about:

If you are the lowest bidder in a Dutch Auction and you specify a multiple quantity, you may not get to purchase all that you specify. Why? Because there may be little left over after the high bidders get their share.

In other words, if the lowest bidder requests a quantity of 3 pens, she may only get one since the first 9 pens have already been allotted to the higher bidders. The only way to avoid this problem is to make sure you are not the lowest bidder!

In Dutch Auctions (Multiple Item Auctions), successful high bids are displayed when you click on the ‘High bidders’ link. The complete bidding history (including any unsuccessful bids) is displayed when you click on the ‘Bid history’ link.

Clear? Any questions? Ping me at stowe DOT boyd AT gmail DOT com.

17 April 2006 Permalink

Blogging is a Body Business :-)

A friend commented last week, while I was traipsing around the Bay Area, that I seemed to have a penchant for white T shirts with software company logos. And it’s true that I like them. It’s almost a uniform for me: blue jeans, white T shirt, my grey fleece sweater, cap on backwards (it’s not a beret), and various sorts of footware.

So, I had a brainstorm — partly because I don’t really have enough T shirts to actually wear them all the time, but also because it seems like a fun thing to do: I am going to invite Web 2.0 app developers to dress me for the year.

I promise to wear no shirts except logo’ed T shirts for May-Dec 2006, under the following conditions:

1. Participating companies have to provide me at least the number of T shirts necessary for the agreement. If you want me to wear the shirts one day, one shirt is enough, but otherwise, its the number of days divided by two: 10 days, five shirts. Then I don’t have issues with cleaning when traveling.
2. There are 8 months involved, so let’s round it off and call it 8 months * 30 days = 240 days.
3. I don’t want to wear the same logo for 240 days, so the maximum days I will lease to a single vendor is 20 days.
4. I promise to randomize, so that every vendor will have an equal chance at the big days — like walking around at Web 2.0, CTC 2006, DC 2.0, or OnHollywood — as well as an equal chance I will be sitting at my desk, writing all day.
5. I will also create a side blog here at /Message, where I will post the weekly schedule of T shirts.
6. A bonus: the highest bidder will get an additional prize. I will replace the picture of me over there in the right column with a new picture, wearing that company’s T shirt, starting on May Day.

17 April 2006 Permalink

Starting From Zero: Day 90

So the 90 day period is over, and the result: Rank: 3,130 (818 links from 382 sites). Started at 0 links from 0 sites, with a rank of 1M+. RSS readership is steadily growing, too:

This will be the last post in the starting+from+zero series.

My understanding of the Technorati algorithms is that rank is determined based on a 6 month window, so I willl revist 3 months from now, and see if I get back to where I once was with Get Real. Last fall, my Technorati rank was around 1,200. We’ll see.

12 April 2006 Permalink