Light Side: My Other Sites

LibraryThing Books Site

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 05:56:52 GMT

I've added a link (at right) to my new LibraryThing page. LibraryThing is one of these rather simple ideas that somehow, when coupled with the power of the internet, actually produce interesting results (moral of the story: if you have a simple idea for the internet, it might actually be worth some serious $$!).

Anyway, LibraryThing allows you to catalog your books online. This seems pretty pointless, but the interesting part is that you can then find other people who have the same books, and not only network with them but also browse their catalogs, and find stuff, potentially, of interest to yourself.

You might want to try it out with a few of your more unusual/unique books just to find if anyone else out there has the same ones. They have a list of the top 100 books, and the top 6 or so are all Harry Potter. I think nearly all the top 100 are fiction, and while I've read several, I 'm not sure I own any of the top 100! I may have a copy of 1984 or one or two others around somewhere ... and I have a lot of books.

It just goes to show that the "long tail" as they call it, is actually the more interesting place to be on the internet. I grew up being pretty nearly the only space geek in my school (in Space City USA, no less), so I know how important it can be to be able to know there are others out there with similar interests.

Names?!?!

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 05:37:41 GMT

I've got a lot of stuff I want to do on the web and have been wracking my brain trying to come up with some good domain names (i.e. short, catchy, pertinent, easy to remember, not easily confused with something else, etc.). This has been both frustrating and surprising. Of course, a lot of the frustration and surprise both stem from the reality that, even when you come up with what you think is a creative, original idea, a lot of times that domain name is already taken (which, fyi, you can check from whois).

It seems like a lot of times, I'm halfway there on a project once I just settle on a name I like. It took me a long time to come up with a name for my Xanga site, for example. I finally settled on AeroGo, which is both a play on my name and a succinct summary of what the site is about, i.e. info for folks interested in going into the aerospace field.

Incidentally, it's also the name of a conveyor belt company, but I don't think there's likely to be any confusion there! Going through this naming process did in fact help me better focus on exactly what I wanted to do with the site.

I've noticed a similar thing when writing. Once I really settled on a good title for an article, finalizing the outline and the writing of it became a lot more focussed. So I guess I shouldn't be too frustrated about looking for good domain names, because it does seem to be an important part of the creative process. Maybe I'll write more about why I want various (more than one) unique names later.

The domain naming process also turned up one surprise. One domain name I had rejected as I thought it was too long, but now I wonder if I should have registered it anyway, since someone else now has! I suppose a company like IBM must register every suffix out there, to keep it out of someone else's hands.

Blogsome Blog

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 20:55:56 GMT

While I was stuck earlier this week trying to figure out how to get Spaces to do what I want (still working on it, but some progress made), I found a nice article by Stephanie Booth comparing different free blogging services. The article recommended Blogsome, which runs WordPress, as the best (though maybe not easiest).

Since I was already pretty interested in WordPress (which is open source), I decided I would put my next "feeder blog" (see first entry) there to get some practice with it. So far it is pretty nice, though I'm still trying to figure out how to get that blog to do what I want, too. So far I haven't found a theme I like very much; I actually like the basic blue theme here on MSN Spaces.

That blog is going to be about various of my interests, stuff that doesn't deserve a whole blog of its own. I've called it "All Things" (since it will be about a lot of different things/interests of mine), and I'll add a link to it later when I get it a little more the way I want.

Nevertheless, I still like MSN Spaces, though it is apparently easier for Windows users than for us Mac folks. I'm going to try making some changes with IE some time and see if I can do more, although IE for the Mac is an older version and may not make much difference.