Baggas' Blog

It’s quite possible that no-one even noticed this website was down but I’ve been busy over the last half a day. My old webhosting provider (netlogistics.com – stay away from them) was getting increasingly unreliable and their software didn’t allow me to take advantage of new features of wordpress. Finally yesterday after a week of crashes by account went offline and that was the last straw. I have now migrated succesfully to a new provider Dreamhost, who for about the same cost provide a much better level of service, or so it seems thus far. [thanks to ob1 for the recommendation]

Setting up email and transferring my domain over to the new host was very simple, as was installing the WordPress blog software which basically was a 2 minutes job. The tricky and frustrating part was importing my old blog database into the new wordpress install. I would hate to have to start from scratch and lose years of blogging history. After giving up about 1230 last night and fiddling for a little while this morning I finally got the database to import. Then I had the problem of all the permalinks to my posts not being in the right place. That took me another couple of hours of frustrating fiddling around between patients but I’ve got it sorted now so hopefully if anyone has ever linked to me the links will still work…

And now I’ve finally got the chance to try out all the wordpress plugins etc and it’s great! All the things that never worked on my old server now do, like one click automatic upgrading of plugins, and hopefully the Wordbook plugin which should hopefully cross post this to Facebook. Hello to all my Facebook friends if you’ve never discovered this blog before!

Finally, just for the purposes of testing, here’s a YouTube video I came across this morning – This is Perth. It’s a tongue in cheek documentary about our wonderful city. If you are from Perth you’ll probably think this is funny. If you don’t know Perth, you’ll probably be saying “what the?”

Mercifully this morning at work hasn’t been too busy to enable me to get all this done, but I really should go and see if any more patients have arrived…
PS – please let me know if you encounter any problems with the site…W

Haven’t been here much lately so let’s say this blog is officially in hiatus. Between Uni and family and church and what-not blogging has just been crowded out. I’m still fairly active on facebook, so you can find me on there most days. Also Owen has his own blog now which get’s updated every week or two – www.owenrocks.com. I’m sure this blog will become busy again in the future, but for now it’s just not a season for blogging.

In the meantime, for those who are on facebook… I think you’ll enjoy this clip that I found on Mark’s blog… 25 things I hate about facebook.

Yuu may have noticed a lack of activity here of late, partly because I’ve been so busy and partly because my online presence (like that of many other people) has sharply veered into the realm of facebook. I hate to say it (because I really hated it at first) but I think the “new” facebook has ultimately turned out to be an improvement, greatly enhancing the social interactivity of the site whilst reducing a lot of the spam and the preponderance of silly applications that were dragging down the old facebook. They are all still there, but much more nicely compartmentalised. In fact the new facebook has also in my mind effectively replaced Twitter – it gives the same functionality of microblogging with status updates, but allows for a much more elegant way of replying and communicating based on these updates, and with a much larger “audience.” I’ll still cross post to twitter using ping.fm (in fact as of today I now have the Australian leader of the Opposition “following” me on twitter) but facebook is where it’s at. Amazing how it continues to grow, and penetrate into more and different demographics. Wonder if the creators of facebook ever imagined how far this would go – from a niche site for uni students to arguably one of the two most crucial sites on the web (along with Google).

The other thing area that facebook has tentatively moved into is chat, with the little web-based chat in the lower right corner. I’ve used this a couple of times now and it’s not bad, although a little unreliable. The potential utility of this is that if facebook is becoming your communications hub, then instantly all of your FB contacts are on your chat list. It keeps it all centralised. At present though, facebook chat is under-cooked and very low powered. If they want this to compete with MSN, AIM, Yahoo etc then they will need to beef up it’s features and create stand-alone desktop software so it will run when your browser is closed, allow more customisable contact lists, availability status, invisibility, file transfers, and ultimately video and audio chat. Not sure if this is their goal but the potential is there. For Mac users, you can go part way to achieving this using Adium, a neat and powerful program that combines all your different chat accounts into the one client – and facebook chat is one of those. So you can chat with facebook friends even without your browser open. Probably there is similar software for Windows, but I haven’t been bothered to look for it.

I’m not planning on abandoning this blog any time soon, but the chances are you’ll be seeing me a lot more on facebook…

Social networking – it’s the big buzzword at the moment. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and many others are the latest extension of the blogosphere, and are reaching a much greater crowd for whom maintaining a proper blog would not be considered. Politicians such as Barack Obama and many other well known personalities are using these sites to their advantage.  Even my wife now has her own facebook!

The two main sites I’ve used are facebook and twitter, which have different, but sometimes overlapping, uses. Facebook has been good for connecting with current friends and family, old friends from school and Uni and elsewhere, and even allowed me to maintain some contact with some Canadian friends I met in Uganda last year. The applications of facebook are myriad – from messages and chat (as Jen discovered for herself last night), photo and video sharing, through to a vast range of mini apps, ranging from the useful to the completely stupid.

Twitter is much simpler – you just post a short, SMS length message which goes onto a timeline of messages from you and your twitter friends. It’s hard to explain the appeal of this but it can be good for just posting quick status updates or having extended (though sometimes difficult to follow) conversations. A primary use of twitter for me (as for ob1 and others) is to feed twitter posts into my blog so as to maintain a level of activity here when I am to busy to create full blog updates.

And these are just two examples – there are plenty more other overlapping and different social networking sites.

The problem for some of us then becomes that if we are signed up to 2 or more of these sites it becomes :

• (1) a chore to keep them all up to date
• (2) difficult to keep up with the activity on all of them

I know there are some apps which attempt to solve problem 2 but I am yet to investigate them. However I have found an excellent solution to the first issue – http://ping.fm

Using this site you can type in your twitter style update (or a longer blog for sites which support that) and it will be instantly sent to as many of these different networking sites as you are registered for. As I said my 2 main sites are twitter and facebook, however along the way I have signed up with plurk, livejournal, myspace and several others – so this stops them from lying completely idle. It also has the advantage that I can update ping.fm (and hence everything else) not only from a web interface but also by IM and a range of other mini-apps, which is useful for mobile updating. Definitely worth checking out if you use any of these sites. Currently it’s still in Beta (though works perfectly) and you need a code to register. The current code is “pingitlikeitshot” but if you find that doesn’t work let me know and I’ll try and get you a newer one.

EDIT (Aug 16) :  new code for ping.fm is “vivalaping”