Blogs

I first became interested in Drupal during the first BarCampMilwaukee. Blake Hall led a session on getting started with Drupal, showing basic installation to getting a site up and running (module installation, etc). Up to that point, I had used other blog management systems - MovableType, GrayMatter, B2/B2evo, Blogger, etc - but each lacked something that the others had or didn't leave any room to grow. With Drupal you can have as much or little as you want - almost all functionality is added with modules, allowing you to have something simple and fast or a site that is very involved and complicated.

Also, it's built all on PHP - what more could you ask for?

Join us for Wisconsin's (and Milwaukee's!) first DrupalCamp. The event is free and thanks to our lovely sponsors, we will even be feeding you! Sign up to attend, volunteer to teach a session, or suggest a session to be taught.

We hope to see you there!

I tend to not discuss more personal things here, but I needed to get all of this out. I don't intend for this to turn into some sort of philosophical/religious debate.

I've been pulling myself back a bit from things lately and disconnecting. A lot of people have noticed it and I hope it isn't something that is being taken personally. I consider myself to be a pretty optimistic person (obnoxiously so, to some), but I seem to have hit some sort of wall of depression that has left me a little... broken.

This past week my friend Amy's dad passed away, my grandfather has been in and out of the hospital, Boone's grandmother is seeming increasingly frail, and the news hasn't been able to pull itself away from the 6 teenagers that were killed in two car accidents here in southeastern Wisconsin.

And I am suddenly absolutely obsessed with my own mortality.

The other night I had so many nightmares in which I died that I cried myself dry. I was terrified to fall back asleep and being awake just meant thinking more about it.

I'm sure I am not the first person to be terrified of dying. I don't think that I am coming to some great philosophical realisation about the whole ordeal. I am just plain scared.

It's funny - I have spent all of my life thinking of my time as infinite and myself as untouchable. I mean, we all do it to a certain point - it is always someone else that gets in the car accident, some faceless child in Africa that dies of small pox, someone else that dies in a house fire.

Not only that, but I have been wishing my time away - wishing I were old enough to cross the street by myself, wishing I were old enough to drive, wishing I were out of school already, wishing it were just Friday so I could sleep in and not have to deal with this inane work.

Now it has finally hit me. I will die. All of the people I know and love will die. One day they'll go to sleep and they won't wake up.

I'm not so afraid of what people will think of me once I am gone or how they will regard how I lived my life. It is that sudden end to things that has crept into the corners of my mind. Everytime my thoughts wander a little from what I am doing I think about the fact that one day everything will stop for me. Being as obsessively scientific as I am - researching, collecting and compiling information, knowing every possible outcome - not being able to hold on to some tangible data on what happens when the heart monitor at the hospital finally sighs it's last syncopated beat is too much for me to handle.

I can't listen to the news anymore. I turn it off everytime I hear it come on. I just can't cope with hearing all of that stuff anymore. I used to have so much hope for everything - for things we could do to change the way things are. Now all I can think about are all of those people that no one will ever have the chance to help and at least I was lucky enough to be born into a country where the life expectancy for women is beyond our years of highest fertility. There are people who haven't or won't make it to even my age.

And here I am - crying, the blood pulsing through my ears - thinking about the fact that I may have possibly reached the halfway mark in my life. It's selfish and it's stupid and it's pointless to dwell on it too long, but all manner of rationalization doesn't change how I am feeling right now.

Everything I do I double think - do I really want to spend part of my finite time - the time I could have spent thinking about how amazing it is to be in love or enjoying my friends or playing with my cats - cleaning the bathroom or bitching about the price of gas or spending 10 hours a day at a job? Am I wasting what I have? Do I fully appreciate anything?

Discovering the magic that is an RSS feed changes the way I viewed the internet. Instead of having a massive folder of daily reads (which had grown to an amazing size over the previous 5 or 8 years), all of the updated content came to me. It seemed a novel idea - I saved so much time by not having to check sites that hadn't updated (and I would check multiple times a day. Okay, so I get a little obsessed.). I quickly pulled the RSS feeds of all of the sites that had them (and urged those that didn't in the right direction. Not entirely selfish on my part... right?) and made live bookmarks in Firefox.

It definitely was nice, but it didn't do for me what Google Reader does. Google has this way of creating/acquiring useless (::cough:: Orkut ::cough::) or industry changing apps.

This reevaluation of my feed habits was inspired by Kevron's session at BarCampMilwaukee2.

Organization

I am a compulsive checker.

I do a little work. Check my emails. Do a little more work. Go to the bathroom. Check my feeds. Think for a second... check my email again. Push around some papers on my desk. Check my feeds.

I would probably win some kind of contest that would allow Merlin Mann and David Allen to come to my house and break my fingers with binder clips and then paper cut me to death with folders and index cards (If this contest exists, please do not enter me in it. Kthnxbai).

The importance of the order of importance

I never really had much of a process to how I digested my feeds. I had everything sorted into rather broad folders with 10 or so feeds to a folder. This would be okay if I only had 20 or 30 feeds, but with the 100+ that I had and the 500+ posts that hit my reader every day, I couldn't keep up. Nothing seemed to have relevance from post to post (as I browse by folder) and I found myself actually reading about 5% of the posts and missing a lot of the important news topics.

Which is okay when you don't hang around a bunch of techies that are amazed that you hadn't heard about the new redesign on XYZ or the fact that there is another hot/lame social networking site out there.

You know me. Gotta be ahead of the trend and all that.

So I removed all of the folders and went a couple days reading posts by site instead of by topic. I would tag the site with a couple of different keywords that I found relevant to me. Before the tag I would put a number, 1 - 3, denoting how and to what extent they stuck to that topic. If one out of your ten posts was about typography you were labeled "1typography". If nine out of your ten posts spoke about CSS, then you would have been labeled "3CSS". In this way I rated the worth how close they came to what I wanted out of my experience with the site and moved on to the next feed.

At the end of five days I had a ton of tags, but a very good idea of what sites I could nix from my opml and which had a lot of value.

Each feed was put into a folder with the highest number tag. For instance, if I tagged a site 1PHP, 3Drupal, I would put it in my Drupal folder.

Those feeds with tags that all started with 1 I deleted. I obviously wasn't getting enough out of them to make it worth going through them everyday.

Reading vs. Skimming

My method is pretty simple. I have all of my feeds in the extended view. I scroll through them, skimming for things that might interest me. Instead of reading them, I star them. This saves me time and I don't worry that I will miss something important (does anyone else have those anxieties?).

Starring

After I have gone through all of my feeds, I go through my starred and dwindle them down further. Those that are worth reading or saving for later I save to my delicious account. Once I have hit the bottom, I unstar all of them.

Sharing

I very rarely share stories. I don't think there are that many people that actually subscribe to my reader feed and, to tell you the truth, I am too damned lazy and have far too much other stuff to do. So follow my delicious instead ;}

Analysing Trends in reading

Of course, in my head I am thinking "I save so much time by not going to every one of these sites everyday, and I doubt this guy will update all the time. One more subscription won't hurt..." and then I am swimming in posts that I will never have the time to read. Part of my monthly review process includes checking ou the trends in Reader to see what I read/star/email the most to make sure I am getting the most out of my time. I have found that not doing this allows for unnecessary bloat and it really kills my productivity ("OMGZORZ I have 700 posts to read?! This super time-sensitive design project will have to wait!") and makes me feel a bit buried.

Improving the process further

If Google could do one thing to vastly improve Reader, it would be the ability to pull posts from feeds based on certain keywords. There are a few blogs I read that cover a variety of topics - maybe only one or two that I find interesting. I would love to be able to either create tags based on the keywords to apply either to my whole opml or to one specific feed. It could put everything else into a folder that I could choose to read, when or if I wished. It'd be much easier for quick reference, too :D

So what about you? Do you do anything that has really improved the way you digest your feeds? I am open to suggestions!

This Saturday was completely AIR filled - there was a Tech Cafe at Bucketworks in Milwaukee and the OnAirCamp in Chicago.

Tech Cafe

Ryan Stewart, an Adobe RIA Evangelist on the Platform Team, was kind enough to come visit us for a Tech Cafe in Milwaukee to talk about AIR and what is going on with Adobe.

He explained that Adobe created a bridge between the web and the desktop with AIR. We talked about some of the more popular apps like Buzzword (which Adobe just announced that they purchased), Kuler, and Pownce that were made into AIR apps. You can find a list of sample apps on Adobe's site, or on the wiki that Ryan created.

OnAirCamp

Jordan and I drove down to Kenosha and met up with Matt before grabbing the Metra down to Chicago. We walked down Canal Street to our hotel where we met up with Wubr and then headed over to the event.

The venue was an old warehouse building with exposed brick. They had set up video games (including Guitar Hero), there was good music playing, and servers were walking around with plates of food (unfortunately they were fun dishes that neither Matt nor myself could eat - like Bacon-wrapped Bratwurst.). Kevron met up with us and we hung out for a bit before they called us into the main room.

I had been talking to Mike Chambers on the bus via twitter about cheese curds (of all things) and made it a point to buy a couple bags for him on the way out of Wisconsin (at the world famous Mars Cheese Castle, of course!) and in his welcome speech he called me out and gave me a bag of O'Reilly books for the cheese. Thanks, Mike!

Ryan Stewart gave the keynote and he went over a lot of the things he talked to the Milwaukee crowd about earlier in the morning. Including Adobe's market penetration and how quickly new versions of Flash are accepted.

Mike Chambers showed us how easy it was to create our first AIR app in Flex builder, which you can use as an IDE in Eclipse (which is great for me, because I feel like I am on familiar territory, because I use Aptana).

We learned how to use HTML and Javascript to create AIR apps from Kevin Hoyt. It really gave me confidence that I could put something together seeing how easily he did it. If you are familiar with XML and you have created a site in HTML and JS, you won't have a problem pulling something together.

Grant Skinner's presentation was called AIRborn. The guys and I were impressed right off with the slick look of his presentation - before he even got into the AIR stuff. He ran through a handful of apps that his team had worked on, including desktop flickr app that blew us away (anyone have the link for this one?).

Daniel Dura showed some ActionScript examples and was harassed via twitter during his presentation.

Oh, and I finally got a chance to meet Aral. He's even more smiley in person!

I was really disappointed at the lack of hospitality in Chicago. Having lived in Milwaukee for so long, I love that I can randomly walk up to people and have amusing little coversations. Even when I was just thanking someone for letting us take a cab before them or trying to help
someone not trip over their shoelaces, I got really curt reactions. I definitely don't miss living in Illinois.

Really exciting things have been happening and a lot has progressed since we first started talking about BarCampMilwaukee2 back at the beginning of the summer at Web414. We have been really lucky as an organization to have the help from the community that an event like this needs to continue to grow into something greater every year.

We are heading into the home stretch - with only a month to go until the event that some of us have been waiting for since last year's ended, we can still use a lot of help. This is a call to action - help make BarCampMilwaukee2 an amazing event; let's get people talking and interested!

What we still need from you

• Register! - We need to get an accurate number of campers for the event. This will help us figure out how much food, space, tshirts, and the like that we need.
• Spread the word! - Tell you friends and your friend's friends to sign up! We need to reach all of the passionate techies in the Milwaukee area - not everyone has heard of BarCamp yet or might not be aware that we have one.
• Donations! - We want to keep BarCampMilwaukee a free event - but that doesn't mean that it is free to put on. By donating even just $5 you can help us put on the best BarCampMilwaukee we can. Thank you to all that have donated so far!
• Sponsors! - We can always use more sponsors! We wanted official sponsorship to be as accessible to small startups as it was to big corporations, so we have set the minimum at $200. If you know someone who might want to sponsor or if your company or organization (or even you!) is interested, email me.
• Helping hands! - We are going to need people to help us coordinate things when BarCamp time gets here - helping to direct new campers and to just lend a hand with the general physical organising.

If you want to help out in any way, send me an email.

Thanks to everyone who is helping make this a great event!