After 8 years of hosting my blog and self-managing my blog at Dreamhost, I have finally moved to WordPress.com. Back in the day I had time to manage my own upgrades and tinker with things, but over the past 5 years I have had little time to be my own System Admin. The reality is I have had little time to Blog and only my link monkey feed has been updating the site. The migration was forced by the ever increasing Hack fest the web has turned into. The site had been hacked on 2 occasions due to the very outdated version of wordpress I was running and some poor chmod choices only part. So keeping Tom The Architect safe and up to date is now the responsibility wordpress.com. I hope now to devote more time to writing, with the hopes that I might remember how to spell and form coherent sentences.
Category: tomcarroll.org
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I created my own Simpsons Avatar. This is Tom the Architect in Springfield. I can’t say I did a great job, but its close. Get your own Simpsons Avatar here.
Well as you can see I have changed my theme. I was getting a bit tired of the old theme. It was a good theme it’s just time to part ways. I am now using Cutline from Personified. I haven’t seen it in on many sites and I thought it looked great. So I am working out the changes I am going to make. If you have any issues drop me a comment.
I have finally joined the Mac user community. For Fathers day I received, from my wonderful girls, a 15″ MacBook Pro. My first impression is WOW what a wonderful piece of hardware. The key board is excellent with key breaks similar to my favorite Thinkpad. The finish is awesome in many ways this laptop is a work of art. I will have to get used to different commands but that is a small price to pay. I first started programming on a TRS-80 when I was 11 years old. I moved to an Apple II when I was 13. At that time I thought the Apple II was incredible, sadly I only had access to the Apple II when I was in computer lab in school. I would spend the next 22 years working on PCs, Oh what have missed.
I have finally closed on my RFP for feed management. It only took me 10 months, that’s about right for an IT project. I have to say the set up was easy and straight forward.
I look forward to the day when Google analytics is merged with FeedBurner. Google will soon have a comprehensive offering for collecting behavioral data for websites. A belated congratulations to the folks at FeedBurner, I hope that the acquisition goes better than others (blogger, dodgeball).
Ok, I have been gone for far to long. Back at the beginning of March I started work for a new company. I thought that restarting my blog would be fitting. So, I have returned to the town where my career started. I have enjoyed the questions of my friends. One question I found funny was “Do you control your own lights?”. I guess the ability to control your own lights is an informal measure of accomplishment. I wasn’t aware of that measure, but for the record I can control my own lights.
I have been living in a hotel for the last month, about 1 minute from the office. I would like to coin a new disease iPodus no Updatus. My iTunes account is on my home PC ugh! The hardest thing of all is being away from my family. So look for regular posts from Tom The Architect.
I have taken anew position at work and have been swamped for the last few months. As I get my arms around the new position I should get back on my post a day pace.
I am re-compressing after a wonderful vacation. I will be back on schedule starting Friday morning. Wow, I really have a backlog of feeds to read.
Well, I put out my RFP for feed management services last Thursday. I have received one thoughtful and rapid reply from FeedBurner (a Chicago company, that makes me happy). I have received visitors from some other companies that offer feed management services (You know who you are) but none as of this post have responded. So I will leave my RFP open until the end of the week.
On Friday August 11, I will make my decision and publish my findings.
So, if any of you lurking companies wish to take on FeedBurner, you better get to it.
Links:
reply from FeedBurner
I am looking to migrate from my WordPress generated and managed feeds to a third party service. So I thought I would spell out my requirements.
The important stuff:
- The migration to the service must be seamless for my current subscribers (Yeah I know all 3).
- The service should provide a suite of metrics that allow me better understand who, how often, when, how long, how many times (You know what I mean, the numbers).
- In the case that I choose to leave your service, I must be able to migrate my feeds transparently and also be able to migrate my usage data.
- I would like support for one click subscription to the various news readers.
- The service must have tight wordpress integration.
- Integration with analytical packages say like Google analytics
- feeds must be human readable
- I would like it to support leave comment from the feed.
- Configurable support for social network services like Digg or del.icio.us (Sometimes I want it on, sometimes off)
- Support for the widest set of RSS extensions (This is what I mean)
- A strong record of availability, reliability and scalability (I might hit 4 subscribers someday)
- Should support multiple feeds per site, no limit.
- Integration to see where my feed is bookmarked and subscribed (share.opml.org, del.icio.us, Google reader ect…)
The not so important stuff:
- Advertising, I prefer none. ( I know that say for a free service this is negotiable)
A free service must support the first 3 bullet points in my important stuff list. The rest Is negotiable. I may be willing to pay for no ads and really cool features. I would like to see a track record of satisfied customers, transparency is good. So that is it so far, if I think of more I will be sure to spring it on you in the 9th hour.
So make your case (reader recommendations welcome)
Tom The Architect 