Archive for January, 2009

Writing about milestones?

Blogging, Opinion | Thursday, January 29th, 2009

The last post I published was a look at the ‘1 month after relaunch‘ milestone which I just hit. Before I decided to publish such an post I had to decide if I wanted to get a milestone post online or not. I have spotted some pros and cons of writing such milestone posts on a personal blog:

Pros

The milestone post shows readers that there is something happening – not just some post hitting the rss reader – and it shows what is happening. A short review of what happened and a short look into the unknown future. I, as a reader, appreciate such posts cause than I can better see what is happening with the person behind the blog and the blog it self. I think especially at a personal blog that’s very important.

A second pro is your own ego. I like to see the good going on – who don’t? – and that includes hitting milestones like the ‘1 month after relaunch’. I take the publishing of future plans as a incitation to get the goal hit by the deadline I wrote in the post, which is a great reason to publish such a post – at least in my eyes.

Cons

If you publish a milestone post at your blog you may turn some readers off cause they just like to get information and don’t want to get a note in their rss reader that you changed the design. The second reason is that maybe the feature plans don’t fit the expectations of the reader. This is for a personal blog both not that important I think, cause people who read your blog are interested in you and your opinion which means they are interested in what you think and what you write.

Conclusion

In the end I decided to write such an post. I decided that way because I want the readers to know what they have to expect and what happened since the relaunch. That shows that something is happening and I’m looking forward to get out more great content and improve my writing skills.

This thoughts are for my personal blog. If I would run a business blog which could make me money, I think I would write the milestone post in a completely other way.

What do you think about publishing milestone posts? Please leave a comment or just send me a email.

One Month Later (after I relaunched my Blog)

Blogging, Design, Personal, Web | Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

4 Days ago. The blog turned one month – after the relaunch. For me the experience till now has been positive. Writing is fun, reading other blogs is fun and I get it done on a regular bases. In the beginning I didn’t thought I could really make it, two or at least one post per week is in my eyes hard work. Especially if you have some other passions and jobs to get done – like school, photography, coding and design. Till now I have made it through and I’m looking to the feature which looks exiting!

That’s it, the way till now. Now I want to give you a quick preview on what I have planed to come in the coming weeks:

Design Update

The last month I have been improving the design locally and in a few days I want to get it online which will change some little things – like the sidebar, menu bar and Flickr hovering and improve the validity for some browsers. This will get it’s own attention cause I’m going to post something about updating your theme.

The About Page

In my eyes the about page is the worst part here at this website. There is no content and just some ‘coming soon’ text. That’s bad! Everywhere you can read that you miss getting subscribers and or readers if you don’t have a well done about page in the first place. I wanted to publish some posts about my passions and my workflow in the first place and update the about page with this posts. That was planed to happen in the first weeks of January. Well I didn’t made it. I plan to get that done in the near feature – it’s one of my top priorities for the coming weeks.

KwasK.com

This domain name is now no more under my control. After just one year, I shut the domain down – I already owned KwasK.de since July 2006 and last year thought I would need KwasK.com which now seems like a wrong decision. But I think no decision is wrong if you learn out of it. I learned and now I know that I don’t need that domains anymore. I think I’ll get some other domains in the feature and this two are hooked to an history which I lived, but not to the feature I want to live now!

To come?

There is much on it’s way to come and I just started out. I hope everyone reading this blog stays interested and my content stays interesting. I would love to get your oppinion about my writings so that I can improve through your thoughts!

New Licensing

Blogging, Design, Photography, Web | Saturday, January 24th, 2009

With the relaunch of this blog I changed my licensing to the Creative Commons 3.0 license. I already have been using the Creative Commons, but till the relaunch of the blog, the use of licensing was not consistent. Every time a work was done I had to decide which license I wanted to use. That created a fairly deep jungle of different licenses used for the same kind of work. In this post I’m trying to describe why I now have different areas of work sorted in categories and why I use different licenses for different kind of work.

What is the Creative Commons

If you already know this, you can go on to the next heading.

The Creative Commons is a license free to use and in my opinion it’s absolutely easy to understand. You just need to leave a link to the creative commons homepage, with a phrase at the end (such as by-nc-sa) which indicates the exact license and the person looking at that page instantly knows what he or she can do with the work and even what is not allowed. This is written down in a great amount of different languages, which means that really everyone can understand what’s allowed and what’s not.

Why I use the Creative Commons

The reason why I use the Creative Commons is that the license is free to use for everyone, not just just that, the Creative Commons is understandable and absolutely easy to use. You leave a link attached at your work with the license and the user will see an easy to understand list of thing he’s allowed to do an what not and under which conditions, which makes it really easy to know what you can do with this work and what not. Which is great because you don’t have to read through pages and pages of licensing.

Differences

The reason I use different licenses is that I think that different content should be used differently. At the moment I’m using a system of 5 different types of content sorted in 3 categories of licensing.

Photography & Web-Design & Design

About one of my passion, the photography, I’m going to post soon but now it’s about the licensing. I struggled a lot with the licensing of photography, cause I want to make it possible that anybody is allowed to publish my pictures but if that person is going to make a great amount of money I really want to get a peace of that sweet cake. But if a blogger would like to use one of my pictures in one of his or her posts why shouldn’t that be possible? Well there is a problem with the bloggers who make money with their blogs. I want that a little blog making a little money – like I’m – should be allowed to use my pictures for his posts. That’s why I use the ‘NonCommercial’ in the photography licensing. Even though I want to specify the word ‘NonCommercial’. In my eyes ‘NonCommercial’ means that you don’t make a living of what you are getting money for. But even that is not clear enough. I think about getting a post written about the clarification of ‘NonCommercial’ usage but for now, if you want to use one of my works with the ‘NonCommercial’, please feel free to contact me and ask if you can use even if you make money. We’ll find a way. With Web-Design and even just Design it’s just the same.

Web-Design should be easy to understand, in my case I think of WordPress themes and PSD templates as well as simple easy one page HTML and CSS layouts. Simply sad every homepage theme I create. Design it self for example is a Wallpaper, a Business-Card as well as a Logo. All this things are free to remix, share and use. If you’d like to use it and just make a decent amount of money with the project, please send me a short email, we can discuss everything!

The licensing for this is simply the – in my eyes – nearly standard Creative Commons License. The Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (by-nc-sa), which allows to use it for non commercial usage, share it and remix it as long as you name me as the author.

Writing

In short the category writing is pretty much every text I publish, weather it’s a post or just a page here at my blog or some other arrangement of words like a e-paper. I wouldn’t stop anyone of quoting me – if he or she wants to do that – but I don’t want to see writing created by me somewhere else with just some paragraphs rearranged. That’s the reason I’ve chosen the Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported (by-nd) for writing. This license allows to share the work but have to name me as the author and you are not allowed to create a derivative work of the writing.

Code

Code in most cases is licensed under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (by-sa) but I also often use the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (by-nc-sa). The reason for this differentiation is that I think some scripts can be used by everyone – like a CSS framework – but some PHP – such as a database framework – script should only be used for NonCommercial projects if the person using it also gives it away for free. The license which is used, is normally mentioned in the code file.

In Short and what if there is no note?

Under this paragraph you see a list with the licenses described above in a short version, with the rights and the link to the license page. But what happens if I haven’t made a note at the work which license is used? If there is no note with the license named, the license listed in this list is used. That means for example, every text I publish is automatically licensed under the Creative Commons by-nd license. If I used a different license I’ll add that for sure. Just at pictures you’ll never find a text where it says ‘licensed under the Creative Commons by-nc-sa’ cause that breaks the whole picture. For that reason please contact me and I’ll tell you which license I used for the particular picture.

  • Photography & Web-Design & Design
    • URL / Short: by-nc-sa
    • In Words: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
  • Writing
    • URL / Short: by-nd
    • In Words: Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported
  • Code
    • URL / Short: by-sa (sometimes: by-nc-sa)
    • In Words: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Conclusion

Different licenses is a great thing but like everything, it has some cons. It can be confusing, caused by the use of different licenses, but also is great cause different works should be used in different aspects and for that the different categories of works need different licenses, like in my list above. To prevent confusion I decided to write down which licensing I use for what, for that reason I just have to look at that paper and decide which is right for the work. But that does not mean that I’m going to stick to the licensing given for every and all works. I’ll decide each time, especially if I do client or stock work. The last thing is that I don’t guarantee that this licensing system never changes, that being sad means that this can change!

If you read this and although have such a system or just use one license or have some other thoughts, please leave a comment and let me know your opinion on that licensing things.

Cameron.io has published a short note about the WhiteHouse.gov page, which has been updated today short after Barak Obama was sworen in, mentioning that there is something missing at the page, at least for now, which really excites me.

One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

~ WhiteHouse.gov

That feature really sounds great, interesting and revouluting. We here in germany can just dream of some technical improvements in legislature, which is used in the USA.

Would be exiting to see something similar here in germany, at least it seems possible!

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If you like flickr, you’ll most likely love blackr as well.

Later, when you are on a photo page or one of the “All sizes” pages on flickr, you can click the bookmarklet and it will hide everything on the page behind a soothing black canvas except for the photo.

~ blackr page

I used it some days and it’s crazy awesome! Now there is no need any more, to move over to bighugelabs to few a picture on black or white background.

How it works? Just click the bookmark and everything but the picture gets invisible, the background black or white you choose which bookmark you use.

It’s that simple!

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Time Machine and Aperture Vault saved my Live

Apple, Technology | Friday, January 9th, 2009

About 4 month ago the internal hard drive of my MacBook died. The problem is that I don’t own a second Mac or have another Mac in my family which means that I’m not able to get on working like normal and have to move over to my old windows machine for work, which is not really possible cause nearly all applications I use are Mac only. The last time it took about 3 days till my new drive arrived and I was able to restore my files via my Time Machine backup. This time was a little different. My internal hard drive died again some days ago. Here is the story what happened and how I got out of it.

Apple File Vault

Normally I’m not a big fan of Apple’s File Vault and for that reason I haven’t activate it till the 25c3. I thought that would be a security option which I shouldn’t miss. So, I activated it, went to the 25c3 and nothing happened. I came back home and plugged my Time Machine hard drive into my MacBook and still nothing unusual happened. But some days ago – it was the first of January – after that I came back to my MacBook and it wouldn’t start.

Restoring

That was the first moment I thought that, there is something wrong. Future testing and it turned out that the hard drive broke again. I was lucky that a family member of mine was able to give me a 2.5″ hard dive to plug into my MacBook and I was serious that I’m able to restore the system with my Time Machine backup. But that turned out to be wrong. I tried to install the system via the Mac OS X 1.5 Leopard DVD and restoring, everything went well. I tried to log in and an error message popped up saying that something was wrong with the users File Vault image.

Seeing something like this really scares me. All work gone? All pictures taken at the 25c3 gone? But I didn’t gave up. I tried again, this time with the last Time Machine Backup made just before I left without File Vault turned on. And the restore and the following login went smoothly. But there was still the problem with my Aperture Library which was rearranged entirely in this few days I was not at home. There I just had luck, that I backed up the Library via Aperture Vault just after coming home. I restored the Aperture Library via this Vault and had my system back where it’s now. Just some little changes, some text files and apps deleted, some new installed and written down some text and everything works again.

Conclusion

That’s the story how Apple’s Time Machine and Aperture’s Vault saved all my work don mostly in 2008. And I even learned a big something, that I have to be careful with File Vault and should use more than one way to back up my files – on a regular bases.
Have you ever had such a extreme case of backup need?

Never tell anyone that you’re writing a book, going on a diet, exercising, taking a course, or quitting smoking. They’ll encourage you to death.

~ Lynn Johnston

Why? In my opinion, the pressure which is put on you by people in you live is the best thing they can do and can happen to me. The pressure tells me to stick to the work which has to get done.

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Everything is a picture waiting to be taken.

~ via tmantob

That is how I see photography. Even though, I think not everything hast to get published, even if it got photographed.

I try to take great photos, but no all turn out that great. I try to erase crappy shots but I tend to hold every single. I try to sort them as well as I can but most of the time I’m not very happy about how it turns out. I try, I try, I try. In the end I think I shouldn’t try any more. I just should do it. Which sadly does not mean that I can hit the goal in the near feature but I’m heading forward.

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I’ve decided to share something very personal with the Apple community so that we can all relax and enjoy the show tomorrow.

~ Steve Jobs at Apple.com/pr/

Is this what we all needed? A official statement about the health of Steve Jobs? I think that this statement is a great thing cause we now all know what’s up with Steve’s health but in the same moment I think it’s very personal and should not be our only thought, Jobs is a famous person but even he has a private live! Even though I’m glad to know what’s up and looking forward to the keynote tomorrow. Steve Jobs did a great job and he’ll go on doing a awesome job in the future as CEO of Apple.

via @kevinrose

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Time has value. Money does not.

via Michael Mistretta

I love this quote, but I think a line has to get drawn. I think not all money should be spend on having good times. But even though, not all money should be saved and people shouldn’t scarify them self’s just to get more money.

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