The Trixie Update

I didn’t even look at the new blog software today, so it’s not really going to at 100% on Monday morning. The blog will probably be a weekend project. Here’s the game plan though in case anyone is keeping score at home:

1) Move all the functionality of the old Trixie Update to the new WordPress blog software. Right now the TPODs are still running in Movable Type. I need to move that next.

2) I’m using the Cutline theme right now. I like it a lot, but since I’m a designer I probably oughta skin my own I was anxious to get moved first, so I’m not really sure if I’m going to replicate the old TTU design (doubtful) or make up something new (likely). Haven’t thought about it too much. I’m just so glad to have a clean, standards-compliant document structure. Getting rid of the old code is like stripping off a festering cocoon. It’s a goood feeling.

P.S. Awesome. I just checked my google reader and I’m getting full feeds! Way to go Wordpress and .htaccess! (if you don’t know, you don’t want to ask.)

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Thanks for your patience as I migrate to new blogging software. My guess is that things should be working by Monday morning. I would check back then!

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I am switching the Trixie Update from my ancient MovableType install to a breath of fresh Wordpress this weekend. This is a good thing, but there’s a chance I may mess up the code that moves the site feed (RSS). If you don’t see any more posts in the next few days, please come visit the new Trixie Update and grab the new feed. thanks!

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I had an interesting conversation with my Mom earlier today about the flickr account I recently set up. She was very excited about all the new pictures. And to my surprise she wanted to learn more about the other web stuff I had mentioned recently. In particular, the feed reader. She didn’t quite understand what it was, but I’m super excited that my mom wants a feed reader, so this post is to help her (and anyone else) out.

What does a feed reader do and why do I want one?
There is too much information in world. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means that we need new coping strategies for managing the data deluge.

This is where feeds come in. Every website has the ability to wrap up a portion of its content, label it and tell the world, “hey, here’s my latest content. Check it out.” This is a called a syndication feed and it’s a very powerful thing for a couple of reasons:

1) You don’t have to spend energy searching for new content. It comes to you. You don’t have to visit 50 blogs on a daily basis. You visit one place — your feed reader — to see which blogs have been updated.

2) Syndication feeds can be sliced and diced like you wouldn’t believe. For example, do you check the Trixie Update because you like to read all the new comments? I could (should) set up a feed that syndicates user comments. That way you don’t have to come to the Trixie Update and visually scan the site to see what story has a new comment. You could simply add a “Trixie Update Recent Comments” feed to your reader. Pretty cool idea, right?

How do I get a feed reader?
Again, I’m going to strongly recommend Google reader. Go to google.com/reader. If you don’t have a google account, you’ll need to create one.

Once you are on your Google Reader page, it will be empty — but not for long. Click “Add subscription” on the top left. Paste ‘trixieupdate.com’ to the field and click ‘add’. You’ll then see the latest 10 articles from the Trixie Update marked as ‘New’ in your reader. As you click through each one you’ll notice that number of ‘New’ articles decreases until you’ve seen them all. Congrats! You’re all done. You’ve read all your feeds.

Add a few more blogs in there and you’ll soon start checking your feed reader before you spend time visiting actual site around the web. Mom, I hope this helps. Good luck!

PS. If someone says RSS, they are talking about feeds.

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Welcome Baltimore and Memphis! We’re changing up the format a little bit, and no longer exclusively talking about babies. However, you can check out our New Visitor page for a list of the best baby-related stories from the archives.

And if you’d like to learn more about your own baby’s patterns, why not give Trixie Tracker software a try?

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There’s a lot of new stuff coming to the Trixie Update, but it’s taking me longer than expected (as always). I’m working on a new install of WordPress right now. It’s dang refreshing! I’m definitely going to write more about that later.

In the meantime, I created a new flickr account to share. I’m a little torn about whether I’m going to keep up the TPODs. I like the idea of just choosing one and sticking it on my blog, but you can’t beat flickr’s ease of use. I am playing it by ear.

This is like 60 new TPODs all in one day. Except about 5 of them have actually been TPODs…. so it’s more like 55.

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Thanks for visiting! We’re changing up the format a little bit, and no longer exclusively talking about babies. However, you can check out our New Visitor page for a list of the best baby-related stories from the archives.

And if you’d like to learn more about your own baby’s patterns, why not give Trixie Tracker software a try?

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There were a million reasons I quit the blog 4 months ago. Here’s a handful.

I had grown completely tired of the site. I wasn’t interested in writing about baby data anymore. I was interested in writing my baby data software and working as an User Interface (UI) designer. I had different creative needs and I felt completely trapped by the scope of the blog. That kept me from being excited about working on it.

I worried about diluting existing content. As a blogger, I didn’t post every little thing that popped in my head and I certainly didn’t post on a daily basis (except photos). I was lucky to write a 2-3 stories a month. But I was very happy with the quality of the stories I wrote. Many had accompanying graphics, and almost all turned over in my head for a while before posting. They were all refined pieces (except some of the really early stuff) and that high standard became a disincentive for me to write more stories (unless I thought the story was going to be really, really, really good). It was hard to overcome that feeling.

I wasn’t able to experiment anymore. The stories on the Trixie Update had become so finished and tied to a very specific narrative (new parents raising a human baby) that I couldn’t try new writing or directions.

Trixie started fighting me tooth and nail on the photography. It was probably a stage and had nothing to do with the site, but without the TPODs there wasn’t anything new on the site. Trying to get a photo became a coercive activity and I really didn’t enjoy being in that position, so I quit. After I stopped the blog, I didn’t take any pictures for 2 months and enjoyed the break immensely. Now, however, the bug is back. I’m looking to sell my current camera and upgrade.

There was too much of a disconnect between the way I felt and what I posted on the site. I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid writing anything personal on the site. My goal had always be to simply observe. There’s plenty of hard data which some many consider personal (diaper counts, anyone?), but there’s not any emotional revelations. I got to the point that I was tired of posting and tired of not being able to say I was tired of posting.

Some old RSI (repetitive stress injury) issues started to flare up again. This was a show-stopper. The last thing I wanted to do was spend extra time photoshopping a TPOD if my arms were hurting at the end of the day. This is a completely manageable condition, and I’m doing 99% better now. Of course I wish I didn’t have it at all, but I will say that it’s forced me to work smarter over the years. It also helped me kick the Starcraft habit back in 2002.

A lot of these reasons are now resolved. My goal is to have fun writing and stop worrying. I also feel recharged to a certain degree. I add that qualifier because I’m also exhausted from my job, parenting and running my own business, but I feel pretty good about everything and glad to be back in the saddle. Incidentally, all of the above issues can be bullet-pointed as impediments to creativity. I want to flesh out some of these ideas here the future.

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One of the directions I’ve steadily been moving over the last 6 months is away from my desktop. By this I mean my dependence on any single computer. Instead I’ve embraced web applications and the network for as much of my daily routine as is practical.

I wasn’t very mobile when I was staying home watching Trixie or working at home on Trixie Tracker. I didn’t have a need for mobility. Everything changed once I started working as a contractor again. Suddenly I was trying to manage and synchronize data across multiple machines and not having a lot of fun with it.

Here’s a couple of highlights from my switch from the computer to network:

Email: I’ve managed my own email domains since 1999. And I’ve had the same email address — benmac@artshare.com — for about eight years now. So it was with great deliberation that I decided to switch over to Google’s Gmail. There were two main reasons for the move:

1) I needed to consolidate my email and get access to all of it in one place no matter where I happened to be. I started by first forwarding all my accounts to Gmail. But after a few months I realized that Gmail was good enough to replace my personal accounts. So I started using it as my primary email account. Contact me at ben.macneill@gmail.com .

2) I was tired of losing the spam war. I was sick of trying to manage email spam from the server side. It was a waste of my time, and I took absolutely no pleasure in trying to beat spammers. I gave up. On the other hand, Google is absolutely amazing at killing spam. No one on the whole planet does it better. See, Google is so awesome, I have no qualms about publishing my email address above. Side note: Is Google evil? Maybe… But they also rock. And I’m more than happy to take that chance.

Bookmarks: del.icio.us is such an amazing tool, I can’t begin to describe it. In its most limited scope, it’s an app that allows you to move your bookmarks to a web page instead of limited to a specific browser on a specific computer. However, if you embrace all its features it becomes a collaboration tool that allows you to share and exchange ideas and and information with a network of friends or complete strangers in real time. I highly recommend it. If you are interested, here’s what I’m looking at: http://del.icio.us/chillnc

Baby tracking: I was using 2 or 3 different baby tracking desktop clients between home and work as well as little scraps of paper scrawled with nap notes wadded up in my pockets. It was impossible to synchronize everything. I also couldn’t believe how bad diaper spam had gotten. But then I discovered this amazing little web application…

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Since I’m serious about starting bloggin again, there are a number of technical issues that need to be addressed.

RSS: If you are reading this as a feed, you may be a little irked that you are only getting a partial…

(this joke is for RSS viewers)

… feed. I hear your pain.

Back when I was actively working on the site, I didn’t care too much about my RSS feed. I set my own publishing schedule and if folks didn’t want to drop by and visit, then that’s their problem. Partial feeds were the default when I installed, and I never gave them a second look.

However, I recognize that the technology landscape has changed since I last thought about the blog architecture. “Wait a minute!”, you say. “You stopped blogging about 4 months ago — feed syndication hasn’t changed that much since then.” True. However, I haven’t thought much about blog technology since late 2003.

If you like to read blogs, but are totally lost right now, allow me to explain a cool technology that may change your life.

There are two ways to find out if something new has been posted to Trixie Update. The first way is to point your browser to www.trixieupdate.com and see if anything has changed since your last visit. This method fails miserably when a writer decides to shut down a blog (for, let’s say, about 4 months) and then starts it back up again. If you are a dedicated reader, then maybe you check back a few times or for a few weeks, but eventually you’ll come to believe that the blog is truly dead and stop visiting.

The second way to keep up with a blog is to get a personally notified when a new article is posted. This is accomplished using a syndication tool. Most every blog publishes a list of recent posts called a feed. You can get yourself a feed reader (I recommend Google Reader) and add a list of your favorite blogs to it. When a blog on your list is updated it shows up in your list. Now you don’t have to run around checking to see if your favorite blogs have been updated. Instead you’ll get an immediate notification when a new post (or Picture of the Day) is published.

I wanted to introduce this second option because I know a number of my readers aren’t familiar with feeds. Those are the dedicated folks who have been checking in over the last 4 months to see if anything has changed. To those folks, I thank you for continuing to check in, but I hope that you’ll check out Google Reader so that you can save some time should I take another hiatus.

Back to the folks who use RSS readers. I’ll fix the issue soon. We will have full feeds.

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