blogs

Reading a Hacker News post linked to a YouTube video yesterday, I spotted this comment by user tomerico:

I think [Shane Wighton's Stuff Made Here YouTube channel] illustrates well the transition from personal blogs to youtube videos.

If you go to his projects blog, https://shane.engineer/ you could see very detailed blog posts in the past that go deeply into the engineering, including code snippets. However, he only really go traction when starting to publish youtube videos, specifically youtube video with a clickbait subject (such as a self aiming basketball hoop).

What YouTube provides is a highly competitive environment that provides creators with constant feedback. This allowed him to identify and his niche as he uploaded more videos. With YouTube, the exposure these projects receive is orders of magnitude higher, while empowering its creators to be self sustainable with ads (and sponsors, patreon, and merch) revenue.

With the rampant speculation there will be a new Raspberry Pi model released next week, I was wondering if the official Raspberry Pi blog might reveal anything of interest; they just posted a Four Years of Pi blog post on the 26th, which highlighted the past four years, and mentioned the excitement surrounding 4th anniversary of Pi sales, coming up on February 29th, 2016.

Glancing at the blog's source, I noticed it looks like a Wordpress blog (using httpie on the cli):

Having set up a few WP sites in the past, I knew there was a simple way to load content by its ID, using a URL in the form:

I recently wrote a post detailing how to set up Drupal 8 on a Raspberry Pi using the Drupal Pi project (the same setup which is currently powering www.pidramble.com!) on the Acquia Developer Center blog: Drupal and the Raspberry Pi.

Hopefully people will find more and more useful ways to use Drupal 8 on the Raspberry Pi for automation, for interactivity, and most of all for fun and experimentation!

There's a new blog in town: thiscatholicgirl, by friend and former co-worker @ESWesthoff in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. She's witty, funny, and has good insight.

While I'm on the topic of new things, I can't forget to mention that I've been brushing up a bunch of new reviews of microphones and audio devices, and I'm hoping to start testing the iPhone 5 with as many audio gadgets as I can to supplement my article External Microphones for iPhone 5, 4S, iPad and iPod Touch Audio input. More to come!

This year's Catholic New Media Conference (held in Arlington, TX), came by so fast I didn't really have time to prepare any blog posts before hand, post pictures during the conference, or summarize individual sessions.

In years past (2011 and 2010), I've tried to dump pretty much everything I learned on my blog... but this year's CNMC was so much more broad-reaching that there was no way I could keep up with all the great content!

My relationship with writing is a funny thing; I've never been a 'writer', per-se, but I do love writing things from time to time. I probably write about as much prose as the average active blogger, but a lot of my writing never sees the light of day, nor is it focused in one particular area.

I blog about Drupal development and technology over on my Midwestern Mac blog, about the Church and technology on my Open Source Catholic blog, about life in general here, and about a variety of other things on various other blogs and fora.

But I think it's really important for someone who is serious about writing—and writing well—to do two things:

1. Stay inspired
2. Throw out the garbage

These two actions support and help each other; discarding mediocre writing projects and posts will allow you to take a fresh look at what you're writing, while staying inspired can help you more easily discern what's garbage, and what can be engaging and/or informative.

Dustin Faber, formerly known as the 16-bit Catholic who posted awesome articles about gaming from the perspective of a Catholic about-to-be-married on dustinfaber.com, and now posts awesome articles about marriage (and maybe how it's like gaming, except way harder?) with his wife on The Catholic Lovebirds (wow, is this sentance long, or what?), has honored Life is a Prayer with the esteemed title of Best Catholic Blog to read on the Toilet.

I have to say that I'm truly flattered—I am no stranger to the throne, as I spend many hours there, pondering the fundamentals of life. Or watching Star Trek. Since I have Crohn's, there's always an opportunity for spiritual growth or sci-fi entertainment on the ol' iPad (I'm currently progressing through TNG season 3).

To see that someone else honors Life is a Prayer enough to spend some of his most focused time reading it is truly edifying.

Starting today, I'm going to be slowly working on:

1. Upgrading some of my older sites to a newer version of Drupal.
2. Rethinking where I post about certain things.

With regard to the latter point, I'm going to start focusing more on life, religion, philosophy, and such things on this particular blog, while I will focus more on technology (and web development in particular) on my Midwestern Mac, LLC site.

I've hit a point where I think I'll start putting a few sites I maintain on mothballs (much like I have my old 2002-era Latin website, the Duel of the Seminarians site, et all).

I don't know what it is about today, but my name was mentioned on three separate sites! I guess that's what I get for my infrequent blogging, dropping behind on LOLSaints postings, and general lack of updates around the web over the past few weeks (I'm plugging away like gangbusters on flockNote v3!)...

The Crescat

One of my favorite Catholic blogs, by a great margin - The Crescat mentioned an OSV article (which I had almost forgotten about—that's how much my mind is focused on work right now!), and was pretty inflated after reading that I 'religiously' follow her musings. Still haven't met the lady, but I have a friend and former co-worker who I imagine to be her nefarious (I kid!) twin sister from St. Louis. You know who you are!