Yesterday was day 1 (of 2) for WordCamp NYC 2009. Wow. What a brilliant and wonderful event!
I missed the opening remarks and first few series of workshops, which I ultimately regret but had no control over given my recent workload and absolutely need the night before to get at least 5.5 hours of sleep (yes, when I need sleep I sleep more than 4… I wound up waking at the 5 hour mark but staying in bed until the 6 hour mark – but I digress!).
I wound up arriving at around 11:48am, and as soon as I registered and received my kick-ass tee-shirt and badge, I was standing in the middle of the room glancing over the post-lunch programme when I turned around and suddenly there were over 500 hungry participants standing behind me! FTW! I was the first in line for the vegetarian sandwiches – sweet!
I had a great conversation with Jim of zemanta.com, and met a couple other really wonderful people before the afternoon sessions even began. Which is one thing I’ve always really liked about geek and tech meet-ups and gatherings like this, is generally people are very approachable and friendly. Not to say people in the art world aren’t, but it’s a completely different set of standards, and, well actually people in the art world aren’t as approachable! There, I said it. Yes it is difficult to explain how as an artist I work with WordPress – usually the response is, “so you’re a Designer?” , “no, I make installations” (like holoscape, which is built on WP) – or how I work with NYC-area non-profits and always recommend WordPress as a tool for their projects and missions. But whereas in the art world people usually just don’t care about “code” (or the political ramifications of blog culture and terms or language like Creative Commons, GPL, XML, etc.), at least at these events people are always willing to listen to what you do, or in this case why you do it with WordPress!
I first went to the WP in Education round table. I forget all of the presenters’ names, but that’s Matt Mullenweg on the far left, and two of the other blokes (middle and far right) were from Virginia of all states, which was interesting – and they both had very strong ideas and opinions about how WordPress has pro-actively been used to advance pedagogy and educational enlightenment! A wonderful topic indeed! It’s a shame there was just not enough time for Qs & As because this one in particular could have gone on for another hour.
While I noticed as the day went on that most people went to one room and stayed there all day, I bounced around, probably walking a whole mile inside the building from class to class.
I nipped over to the WordPress for Non-Profits seminar:
This lady Amanda was a hoot, and she had one really great message in particular:
(I only wish I could convince more non-profits of the why!)
Don’t be fooled by this image! The WordCamp was packed, over 700 people were in attendance! These big rooms were definitely a bit intimidating, but I guess better this than a room for 30 and have 80 people show up!
A random encounter in the hallways – Matt Mullenweg must get stopped all the time to be asked a simple question, and the question turns into an informal discussion and seminar! He’s so pleasant and positive about people, and code, and discussing real issues, in this case the topic was canonical plugins and language localizations.
Are they sharing notes? LOL!
My laptop went kaputz less than 48 hours before WordCamp (anybody want to donate to help me get a netbook?), else I totally would be one of these people, and probably would have been drafting this post then.
One of the most interesting seminars I went to, because it’s a hot topic I’m developing for my own intents and purposes right now for another project, this notion of “hyperlocal” and community building with WordPress. This speaker was talking on behalf of InJersey.com which runs on WPMU and BP.
All in all a wonderful day! I wish there were more events like this, which is why I’ll have to follow through on my plans for some hyperlocal-wordpress-for-artists-meet-up-tech-exchange-and-talk thing to do on my own soon!
I haven’t done enough with or for WordPress as of late, but it’s so good to watch videos like this and know people like Matt are steering the blogosphere and the software that runs it in the right direction:
Documenta 12 is running a blog, powered by WordPress. Blogs are great ways to immediately convey your message around the world, but I still feel the need to actually go there, you know, to purchase a T-Shirt.
In case you haven’t noticed, this blog is a little bland. Fact is that since I committed to putting time and energy into this blog, I haven’t given much attention to a natural gesture of blogging: blogrolls and links. It’s an old aspect of the web to link to all the other sites that please you. It’s natural, really. It’s how networks are formed.
Today it’s increasingly important how those links are exchanged. Blogrolls were developed within software such as WordPress which runs this blog, to help maintain the link network, and divide it into categories of sorts.
Unfortunately I’ve never developed my blogroll just yet. A peek at my backend shows that I haven’t changed it from the default links that come packaged with WordPress, which lead you to prominent WordPress developers’ personal blogs and affiliates.
Of course as an artist I think it’s important to question all of these methods, as though they were a medium.
For starters, I get bogged down by the thought of having to maintain a blogroll. Having to click into a menu and a sub-menu and edit this and update that. Sometimes links expire or get moved and then I have to do more work. It’s a positive development in how it forms networks, but still creates more work than it returns, sometimes. Are there any alternatives?
My newsreader – I use RSSOwl – already acts like my personal blogroll. It delivers all the content from dozens of sites as its published. My newsreader is for me. My blogroll is for everybody else. I want to make transparent both arenas of content – I want people to see what I see. I want it to be dynamic, shared and immediate. I want it to be excessive, demanding, to be as organic as code can be with room to grow. Plenty of others in the field talk about the feeds that filter in and out of their readers; or use their posts like link-lists and blogrolls with content; there are services that can build blogrolls to embed in your site (such as this list for newsgrist). But all of this is still not-quite what I’m interested in, or what I’m trying to say – and eventually I’m looking to avoid yet another service, site, or software necessary to deliver said content, I don’t want to have to remember or rely on another name, password, menu, etc. I just want to publish-and-play.
I’ve found over time that chances are, on the nets, if you’re thinking about something, so is somebody else. I’ve done programming but I’m not inclined to it – I prefer to take pre-existing code, hack and mash it up until it does what I want and usually a few things that I don’t! The WordPress community has grown to such an extent that software (plugins) are being developed for it all the time.
Back to the content: how to make transparent my feeds while maintaining a blogroll? I’m in my 8th month of blogging and I need to engage further audiences, I need to expand the network. But I need to question the medium and understand how concept, code and the notion of access all work together. Transparency is key.
RSSOwl can export an OPML file (basically a list of sites); any artist who sets up a blog or publishes at wordpress.com or blogspot.com is then publishing feeds and thus can be integrated into OPML files; the OPML file can double as my blogroll; I have a thought, what are other artists doing with OPML files – unfortunately a search for “artist” & “OPML” turns up some not-so-pleasant results (but I digress); a search leads me to yabfog who has written a plugin that displays an OPML file – BRILLIANT, that’s it!; now I can rely solely on my newsreader to pump out feeds, drop that file onto my server and my WordPress blog automatically updates everything!! Additionally, it looks nice and is even more-interesting than I thought: you can scroll the feeds live, and it even displays the entire posts, images and all! The images break the site but I don’t really care about that – it’s not something I have nor want control over. More important is that everybody can now easily access and even subscribe to all my feeds through their own readers! So in the sidebar now you will see a list of available sites and feeds! Enjoy!
(When I started writing this post I had exactly 100 feeds in my reader. Not a lot by any means – I’m sure there are dorks out there who have five-fold that number on a slow day; by the time I finished compiling this post I had 106 in my reader. And all I need to do is upload one file! Finally!
And this can all be collected into my ‘for artists’ series of posts; I understand this post is still pretty unclear for the ordinary user, especially for most artists, but again the purpose of this blog is to build and expand over time, not to publish an entire survey at once – that’s the beauty of the web, yo! WOOT!)
the nameservers switched over sometime this morning!
the blog is back online!!
in the process i lost one database. and i didn’t really lose it proper, but rather decided to simply let it fade into the ether. i’ll likely re-establish it at some point in the near future, but i have to think further about its importance, purpose, message, etc. it was the fluxphblog, for those who followed that project.
in the process of restoring the database tables, there was a feature that didn’t get properly re-implemented nearly 8 or so times. this feature, called ‘AUTO_INCREMENT’ is pretty important, because it tells various functions that WordPress performs, to automatically go to the next number; i.e. this is post #65, so the next one would be #66, and so forth.
first off recognizing that there was a problem, and then finding the right group of words that others might have reported for the same problem, took a couple of hours before i stumbled upon the ‘auto_increment’ suspect. then having to search this further, and find how others might go about fixing it, all took too long.
but i reckon i know why this problem emerged in the first place: my previous host was running MySQL 4.1.11, and my current host, while ‘better’ so far, is running an older version of MySQL, v3.23. when i migrated the database, i told the exported database to become 3.23 compatible, but with such a drastic move, any number of variables could have caused the drop. oh well, lesson learned!
the tables seem solid now, after all, i’m posting again!
i’ve been contemplating this blog project for some time now, since November 2004 to be precise.
the story goes that i started ‘normalblog’ with a MoveableType(MT) install, in November 2004. then i was hit by a car that month and left with a wrist fracture that seriously impeded my blogging potential. i deleted my MT install, knowing that i couldn’t actually dedicate any time to it. over the past 19 months i’ve attempted a few other installs of ‘normalblog’, eventually migrating to WordPress, frustrated with the closed architecture of MT and inspired by the community development that revolves around WordPress.
with the release of WordPress 2.0 i started to notice (through some test installs) that the software developed in the vector i would request or require of it: lots of backend control, the ability to highly manipulate how the blog displays itself (not only aesthetically, but how concept -> form -> display (of information)), while maintaining room for future growth and development, both within the software itself, as well as by external developers, the comments and desires of bloggers, etc.
And so, as an artist, I have set about to launch my weblog.
My interests lie in ‘what is a weblog to an artist’? Why are artists drawn to weblogs and contemporary forms of information-exchange? Do weblogs facilitate dialogue, or are they merely for bloating, or both? And increasingly importantly, are there ways or methods to question the nature of the weblog under the control of an artist (actually the notion of control is very important here: so often artists are secondary to the form of communication display, and weblogs put that control back in the arena of the artist/s)? In other words, what is a blog, why even invest time in one, and is it art? These questions and many many more will be my pursuit for as long as this weblog lasts. And since data is easily stored in database tables, I can move the information around endlessly, and everything can always be accessed (also important).
As such, there is not much to look at now, but everything will be developed, input, expanded, collapsed, questioned, re-coded, and especially hacked into and out of existence, over time.
