Posts Tagged ‘blog’

Friendly Updates

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
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A couple of updates from the real world, many through the blogosphere.

  • We spent time this weekend hanging out with our friends Mike and Elisabeth (and their son, Rudy). It actually was really great seeing them, and it was great to get a chance to have Molly hang out with Rudy; as any amount of training and getting her comfortable around babys will make our lives easier once Hobey is born. (and for the record, Molly’s not ferocious!)
  • Congratulations to Carrie and Josh on the birth of their beautiful daughter – Ayelet Nomi Hearshen. The baby naming ceremony on Sunday was wonderful, and a great testament to the love you have for your new baby girl.
  • A few weeks late, but congratulations to Aaron and Julie on the birth of Eytan Henry – we can’t wait to meet him when we are next in DC (or overlap in Detroit).
  • Stephanie started blogging on the FidLorb life up in Lynnwood – welcome to the crowd! Abe has also been blogging, on a great foodie idea – there’s a tremendous amount of restaurants up on Hwy 99 (also known as Aurora) by them, some sketchy, but theoretically, some good – so their goal is to eat at all of them, and write up the experience. (in fact, we joined them for one: Spartas Pizza)
  • On a completely unrelated note: Seahawks and Lions and Michigan and U-W – wow, the football teams I like are awful. Combined record: 5-30. Not a fun year on the football side.

Interesting Articles in the Blogosphere

Friday, April 25th, 2008

As I’ve mentioned before, I do nearly all of my blog reading through Google Reader. One neat feature it has is the ability to “share” articles that one finds interesting out to the world. I’ve been doing that for a while. At first, it was just to send articles over to Joelle for reading, but recently, I have also had them posted into my Facebook profile, through the Feedheads application.

I realized I should share these through www.averbuch.net as well, in case any one wants to follow along on what I find interesting as I surf the blog world…

It is now up at averbuch.net/interesting-reading/, and will automatically be kept up to date as I add things (which I do more frequently than blogging itself).

RSS feed also available, by the way, of shared articles.

Blog reading trends

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

Ever since I switched to Google Reader for my blog reading, it has been keeping track of my blog reading habits. Taking a break from working on review-writing for a few minutes, I took a quick gander at it at to see what I’ve been reading most and where I stand. (and yes, I read a lot of blogs)

To be clear how it tracks, there are a few concepts:

  • Subscriptions – how many RSS feeds it’s tracking
  • Posts – # of posts the blogger/feed serves up, regardless of whether or not I’ve drilled into to actually read the article (often I just scan the title and discard)
  • Items read – how many posts/articles I actually look at the article for
  • Shared items – items I share as interesting to me; you can always find the list at: www.google.com/reader/shared/02645973665706385664 (rss feed available as well)
  • Starred items – items I star for myself so I can go back and look at later; not shared publicly. I tend to only do this if I do any reading on my cell-phone (i.e. on the bus)

My overall view stats for the past 30 days are:

From your 494 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,244 items, starred 2 items, shared 20 items, and emailed 0 items.

Items read by day for the past 30 days:

Blog reading trends photo   readbyday thumb

Top 10 feeds that get me to read articles – many of these are because they post so many articles, so they bubble to the top (this is sorted by  # read, not by % read)

Subscription # Read % Read

I probably will try to post about this every few months – it provides a nice view of what I am interested in over time, so I’d like it posted for my own archival purposes, if nothing else. Plus, if anybody else finds an interesting blog because of it, good for them!

WordPress Plugins?

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

This post is more for the geeks out there – if you have any favorite WordPress plugins (or a site you trust that reviews them), please let me know… I’d love the advice!

(also using this post to test Windows Live Writer interaction with WordPress)

Using Averbuch.net

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

<This post is cross-posted between my old blog at Windows Live Spaces, and my new one, at Averbuch.net>

With my transition to Averbuch.net, a few key settings will need to be updated on your end, depending on how you follow my postings.

  1. If you just visit the web site: Change your bookmarks to point to averbuch.net
  2. If you follow the RSS feed: Change (or add) averbuch.net/feed/ to your RSS reader
  3. If you like receiving email when I post, click here to signup.
  4. If you read my postings on Facebook, I already updated the link, so you have nothing to change here.

Please contact me if you have any questions about changing over or something doesn’t work for you.

NOTE: I will no longer be posting at averbuch.spaces.live.com again; all new postings will go to averbuch.net only.

Averbuch.net: Making the transition

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

<This post is cross-posted between my old blog at Windows Live Spaces, and my new one, at Averbuch.net>

I’ve been thinking about moving off of Spaces for a while, for a couple of reasons:

  1. More flexibility in hosting (i.e. stats tracking, plugins, etc…)
  2. A lot more theme choices
  3. I wanted to host fully on my domain name, averbuch.net, rather than just having it as a redirect.
  4. Microsoft locks down a bunch of functionality in the name of security, but this significantly impacts my ability to explore and play with various technologies.
  5. I wanted a server to do some exploration with Ruby on Rails.

During the President’s Day holiday yesterday, I spent time exploring various hosting options, and ended up setting up a plan at hostingrails.com, which had the price I was looking for (including coupons), along with providing Ruby access, WordPress, ssh/shell access, and a bunch of other exploratory needs.

I’ve got the new site up, so I am going to switch everything over there; you’ll just need to switch over once, but don’t be surprised if I change the look and feel a bit over time as I explore various options and plugins.

My next post will describe how to get setup on the new server.

Facebook…

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

I just realized you can automatically import blog postings onto Facebook notes – so if you are on Facebook, all of these postings will be cross-posted on there, under the “Notes” category, as they are posted. Of course, they bulk-imported the first bunch once I got setup.

By the way, if you are on Facebook, and are not marked as my friend, feel free to add me; if I know you, I’ll accept. If I don’t, I’ll ignore…. www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=694272115

Facebook... photo

Steps to do this if you have a blog and are on Facebook – posting since it took me a while to figure this out:

  1. Log in (duh!)
  2. On the upper-left side, under applications, click more
  3. Click “Notes”
  4. On the right side, under “Notes Settings”, click “Edit Import Settings”
  5. Type in the RSS or ATOM feed of your blog, and check the “this is my blog” checkbox.
  6. Click OK.
  7. Confirm the preview matches your feed
  8. You are good to go!

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Jarsenal of Democracy

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

About time my brother is blogging. Although, it does make me realize that somewhere along the way, he became a much better writer than I did!

jarsenalofdemocracy.blogspot.com/

Jarsenal of Democracy photo