Category: Website

When I relocated to the east coast in August, I left Microsoft’s employ. I’ve been doing some contract work for them off and on over the last few months, but that’s finished and I’m looking for a new full time opportunity.

I believe that somewhere in the greater Boston area there must be a software or Internet focused company that needs a software product manager who’s been at Microsoft, worked in a CMM Level 3 organization, has been a developer, technical architect, tech support team lead, business intelligence analyst, and sales support engineer, and is an authority on corporate blogging and content syndication. (See my resume for more details.) Anyone want to call me on that bet?

(By the way, it was the hardest decision I ever made to leave Microsoft, but I needed to come east and they don’t do software product development too many places outside Redmond. I have a lot of respect and admiration for my former team members and wish them the best.)

My workflow for blogging has changed with NetNewsWire. With 264 subscriptions, I can’t read everything in detail. I scan headlines, pick out the ones I want to pay attention to, and open them in browser tab windows in NetNewsWire. Then I’ll read the tabs that are open, and close the ones that I’m done thinking about. There will always be one or two that I want to blog immediately; I’ll switch to MarsEdit and write about those (though since my style is to combine two or three different links in a post, I don’t generally take as much advantage of the MarsEdit integration with NNW as I might).

But there are always tabs left over after that. I like that NNW saves my open browser tabs. If I find one or two that persist across sessions, I’ll come back and blog those later.

So what makes me blog something? Generally, these days, I don’t point to things unless I have something to say about them. They could make me mad; make me laugh (not as often as I’d like); make me say “This is really cool”; or tickle a connection with something else I’ve read, said, or thought. The last is my favorite category of blogging material—it’s where I can actually add value as a blogger.

Very long time readers of this site (and you two know who you are) will remember it used to live at another domain, on Userland’s free servers. When I switched over, even though all the content migrated, the Google index didn’t pick things up right away so I left everything in place, put a note at the top of each page with the new site address, and forgot about it.

Until this morning, when I woke up and found two pieces of comment spam on the site. I promptly deleted them and blocked the member who left the comments, but now I’m wondering if it’s time to take more drastic action on that site.

Manila gurus: is it possible to do page-level redirects on a Manila site such that someone coming to http://jarretthousenorth.editthispage.com/faq ends up at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com/faq instead?

Or should I just blow the content away? I hate that it’s attracting comment spam.

I’m almost out of space on my .Mac account. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good photo publishing methodology? My constraints:

• The method has to work pretty well with iPhoto
• It should leave the photos on my server, not a hosted service (I believe this rules out Flickr)
• It should produce clean index pages that include captions and thumbnails with links to larger images
• I have access to a server that supports FTP, but can’t do solutions that rely on FrontPage extensions
• Solutions that rely on server-side CGI are going to be tricky because I don’t know if I can install anything on my server

Surely someone out there has done something like this before. Ideas?

Time Passing: the birth of Paul Colton’s son Lex. Plus leaving on our trip to Italy, which was the start of one of my longest blog outages: ten days, not counting the post Esta made in my absence.

A year ago yesterday: To Hell With Good Intentions. In my opinion the best installment of my Internet Lyric Poetry experiments.

This is another SmartManila test.

To those struggling through the lengthy posts today, I put an archive of all the posts about Dave’s speech at Microsoft on a single page, in proper reading order (or what you might consider “reverse reverse chronology”). Enjoy, all.

I’ve added a few new features to the site that hopefully improve discoverability of some of my older content and provide better access to other information about me.

The first feature is the display of my list of RSS subscriptions, which is now finally available at /about/mysubscriptions.html (it’s a long list, so be careful). I haven’t finished setting up an automatic update yet, partly because it would require me to use limpet (since NNW doesn’t allow direct automation of subscription list export), and I want to preserve the groups in the OPML file which is only enabled by the latest NNW beta. So for now the underlying OPML file is updated manually about once a week.

The second feature is my alternate news item archives. The main department pages list only 50 of the most recent news items, which for the Music and Internet groups (among others) is nowhere near enough. So here’s /oldnews. It contains links to the various site departments, each of which have one archive page of news items per year, all thanks to the magic of viewNewsItemstrue. I’ll be adding additional departments here as time permits.

I started playing around with a Manila macro that I had had filed away on my to do list for a while, the viewNewsItems macro. It’s a pretty powerful macro, allowing you to take your content and slice and dice it chronologically and by news department (aka category), as well as changing the presentation.

The only problem was I couldn’t figure out how to get the date parameter limits working. Every date string I passed in seemed to be ignored. I finally realized that I needed to let Manila figure out the appropriate date format for itself. So instead of trying to figure out the appropriate date string format, I used the date verb instead:

{viewNewsItems (n:100, department:"Music", maxDate:date("12/31/2001"), minDate:date("1/1/2001"))}

It seems like every programming language I run into has the same issue about how to deal with date formats. Here the safest thing to do seems to be to use the programming environment’s typing capabilities rather than figure out how to format the string properly.

I’ve updated the navigation on several subpages, particularly in the Esta and Mothman sections, to add Prev/Next links via the Manila hierarchyPath macro. I’m still rolling those pages out to the static server, but you can see them in action on the dynamic server. In some places you may see two sets of prev/next links; I’m working on that.

You may also find cases where the paging occurs out of order; if you do please contact me so I can fix it.

The last remnants of the outage that started on this site on December 15 have been corrected. My genealogy data has been restored and is finally back on line and available. Thanks to Erin at Weblogger for the assistance, and to all of you for your patience.

Oh, the title of this post is a hat tip to George Clinton and the PFunk crew. Fight the power, brother…

George calls my new design “cleaner” and says the new graphic is “cool.” Greg tweaks me, pointing out in his “on the side link” that the site now, for the first time almost since its inception, “features [an] actual house.”

About that graphic (I’ll add this to the FAQ): the photo is not the Jarrett house, or even a Jarrett house. I took the picture in 1998 or 1999 on the Manassas battlefield in Northern Virginia. The house is a dwelling that survived the battle, despite heavy fire. Something about the day and the picture spoke to me, and I used it as the navigation graphic for the whole site in the previous iteration. When I was looking for a new site logo graphic, this one leapt out at me. I think the appeal of the graphic is a combination of nostalgia (I took the photo the fall before I left Virginia for business school) and aspiration (the desire for a house, and a family, that would last through war, fire, and time).

It’s time. I’m pulling the trigger on the site redesign. Doing it incrementally isn’t really possible, but I’m rolling out the first phase separately anyway: doing away with the news item department icons on each post. Their time is up.