Recently in writing + blogs Category

Some folks I truly like and respect have been participating in the month of Dec 2011 #resound11 blogging where they respond to a blogging prompt every day or nearly every day or occasionally.

It is J's post on #resound11: 12 in 12 that got me thinking about next year.

So here are the 12 Goals I would like to accomplish in 2012:

1) Get one of the three mobile apps I am currently working on in the Nokia and the Android stores before the end of Jan 2012. Get the 3rd one in by the end of March 2012.

2) Take the #2 mobile app idea and make it a full working web app that any mobile phone browser can use, which will be a mild challenge as the iPhone doesn't do this activity in the browser.

3) Go visit Cami and Alan in London before they depart to go live in Africa, which they depart in mid-January 2012, so I better hop to it. Hey London friends, I will most likely be in your city very soon.

4) Go visit Abhi & Sudha in their new place in Mumbai. Which then means I also need to get to Agra and drop some of Grandpa Bill off, hopefully CJ will still want to come with me. And then there is the Ladahk trip idea that Dhruv, Seetu and I have... Ok! So it is time for me to stop applying for the 6 month multiple visit tourist visa to India and just apply for the 5 year multiple visit visa. ;o)

5) Go to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and attend Swedish Beers, even if I don't drink beer.

6) Read more fiction. Spend less time online in the evenings and read more books.

7) Move. I love my immediate community, but my apartment is the size of a postage stamp and I would like to be able to invite folks over for dinner. More than anything, I want the adventure of a new city. And a kitchen that more than one person can kind of fit in.

8) Make more art. Be it photos, or drawing, or painting, or writing, or poetry, just make more art.

9) Go visit Grandpa Jim and Nellie in Uraguay. Even if I don't speak Spanish, I do understand most of what is said to me, and if my Grandpa can go to South America for 4-5 months per year, I can go for a few weeks.

10) Go skiing at least 2x this season, as I miss the mountains and snow.

11) Even if various iterations of my Creativity in Mobile session idea has been rejected by the SXSW committee for several years running, I would like to write more in this space on creating with one's mobile. The mobile web is wonderful, but my true heart is encouraging folks to create with their mobiles, not just browse.

12) Leave the house more often and interact with more folks more often in real life. Most of my LA friends will be shocked to read this, as they remember my great Extrovert era of 1998-2005, but in the last few years, I have cycled through some introverted times and need to see some more folk regularly.

And you? What do you hope for 2012?

Tues 11.22.11 - Looking ahead, looking behind. Photo taken late this afternoon when I was driving east on Westminster Ave through the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Base as the sky was very lovely.

Today was a busy day and when I had time to sit down with my computer tonight, I found out that Anne McCaffrey passed away at her home in Ireland yesterday at the grand age of 85.

While I didn't find Anne McCaffrey's Pern series until late in college, it was a perennial re-read fave throughout much of the last 20 years. I have loved the Tower & Hive (Rowan/Lyon) series as well as the more recent Freedom series that was an re-write & expansion on a short story she wrote in the 1960s. I loved how her worlds were built so well, like Tolkein, that in my mind, I can still wander Pern, Altair, and Deneb.

Anne McCaffery stands with Madeleine L'Engle and Ursula Le Guin as the trio of writers who have greatly influenced my life, my imagination, and my hopes for being a smart woman in this world and for the future.

Thank you, Anne.

****

John Scalzi's RIP, Anne McCaffrey

Jenna Busch's RIP Anne McCaffery, the single biggest artistic influence on my life

And the MeFi folk

Fri 11.11.11 - Remembrance or Veteran's Day depending on where you live. A day set up to remember the WWI veterans, who are all gone, and the WWII vets are passing now.

Two of my great-grandfathers who served in the Great War, both returned to father daughters in February of 1920, one to still have relative good acclaim in the family and one who returned quite twisted and the echos still reverberate.

In Flanders Fields (1915)

In Fanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae (1872-1918), Canadian Army Medical Corps

While tech pundits love love love to proclaim the DEATH of [insertwhateverissupposedlydeadthisweek], as a way to have something to write / talk about or as a way to drive traffic to their blog, the majority of the users on the web continue to ignore that [insert name of] is dead and continue to use it or they have never understood how to use and don't as a result.

If you have a blog, your blogging software most likely provides a subscription feed, be it RSS or Atom, or you subscribe to a service like Feedburner which produces a feed of which you can then track the statistics on.

Depending on your blog and readers, folks may find your subscription feed(s) easily and use it or they are baffled by how to use it or are indifferent. Some bloggers have actively pushed an email or twitter subscription as an alternative to their RSS or Atom feeds.

I have now been blogging for 8.5 years here at BlackPhoebe.com and my logs show me that I have more folks accessing my feeds (RSS & Atom) than Google Analytics says I have regular returners who access the blog via a direct link. The grand majority of the folks who subscribe to one of the RSS or Atom feeds to this blog and don't use the Feedburner one. Other bloggers may have a different experience, but I write from mine.

As a regular reader of blogs via their feeds*, it drives me nuts when a blog I like changes their feed URL with no warning. Much of the time it is when a blogger changes from one blogging CMS to another and in the stress of the move doesn't think about how the change in feed URLs will affect their feed subscribers, or other times it is during a redesign or a big re-arrangement of files and blogging structure.

Regardless of how the feed URL gets changed, I would like to encourage all the bloggers using a CMS that generates a subscription feed to pre-think any architectural changes and warn your readers before it happens, as well as keeping the old feed open for at least 2 weeks after the move/redesign/cleaning/change with a last post on the feed that tells folks where to find the new feed URL.

Be kind to your faithful readers.

* I am a fan of Sage light RSS feedreader Add-on for Firefox.