When I first started writing, I wrote stories for my middle-school journalism class longhand at my desk and then typed them onto a computer, editing as I went. I loved the physical act of writing that much – feeling the ink and paper blend. Beside wanting to fly jets in the Air Force when I was about six, all I ever wanted to do was to write.
So I wrote, working as a journalist, then copywriter. I loved bringing things to life with words, putting the pieces of stories together. When the journalism world evolved into something different with the rise of the web, I looked toward changing paths. I loved blogging, creating sites and building things… That’s where the coding comes in.
I earned my master’s degree in interactive media, thinking I would go into strategy or social media. I do both of those things at my day job and have a blast with it. But the more I build sites – writing HTML, CSS and Javascript – the more I realize that bringing a site to life, putting the pieces of code together, is just like writing stories.
Writing is art. And I’m learning that coding can be art too.
Note: This post first appeared on one of my discontinued blogs – WRPG. I salvaged this good post, and shared it here.
If you had asked my co-workers before the holiday season which tablet I might buy, they would have all put money on the Apple iPad. After all, I’m the only one in the office with the iMac, and I’ve brought up Steve Jobs at a few staff meetings.
But I never considered an iPad. Two days after Christmas, I let go of my Apple bias and bought a Kindle Fire. Why? Several reasons:
I already have a laptop, so I couldn’t justify spending $500 for another, no matter how beautiful and useful it turned out to be.
The main reason I wanted a tablet was to read e-books, so I knew cheaper e-readers existed.
I knew I would use my tablet for content consumption above all else.
First Impressions
The Kindle Fire does one thing well – help you browse and consume content. The other thing it does better – direct you to buying that content from Amazon.
Liking This…
Easy to set up, and get going with access to your Amazon content.
Changing the appearance of type while reading books is nice.
The size is perfect.
Not a Fan of…
Silk: It’s slow, very slow. I turned the acceleration off and it sped things up.
App Store: Not even a Twitter or Facebook app, but glorified links to mobile sites. That’s ridiculous. Updates come to the Amazon App Store much slower than normal. Sometimes, it wants me to update an app, but won’t let me update the app – probably because the Amazon-approved version isn’t available.
Navigating the perils of converting e-book files back and forth proved to be a learning experience. Luckily, there’s Calibre.
Final Thoughts
In the end, the Kindle Fire gives me what the iPad could not – a supercharged e-reader with a reasonable price tag. I can read and buy books all I want, and when I need to, check websites, blogs, etc. I’m excited to see how my reading habit will change this year. In the end through, if Apple made a $200 or even $250 iPad Lite, I would have bought it instead.
As one of the commenters points out – there is no perfect CMS. Each user’s needs differ vastly – especially enterprise clients. And as John James Jacoby says, Gallagher’s “they” are us. We can change the course of WordPress in a number of ways to make it more like the perfect content management system. You just can’t say that about proprietary systems.
Some of the proprietary systems do some of the things that Gallagher wants better, but none of them handles the user experience or ease of installation/updates better than WordPress. That’s something to remember. WordPress has nailed that pretty well, and can continue to build on it.
What do you think? Is WordPress as weak as Gallagher makes it sound?
(SOPA) [is] an ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation that is technically impossible to enforce, cripplingly burdensome to support, and would, without hyperbole, destroy the internet as we know it.
Let’s not let ill-formed legislation, written by people who know nothing about technology, destroy the Internet. Actually, screw that. This isn’t so much about technology as it’s about freedom. Act now!
It’s an amazing read, and I enjoyed it immensely. Some techies may not appreciate it as much as they could because it isn’t technical. You won’t read about all the ins and outs of making the iPhone or iPad, but you will read about the big breakthroughs, obstacles and quirks of Steve Jobs. That was just what I wanted.
I took away many things from the book and Steve Jobs’s life. Here’s a short list:
Be passionate. You can’t make any real difference with your work or life without believing in what you do. Jobs truly wanted to create great products. It showed in the results he and his team at Apple unleashed over the last three decades.
Mind the details that matter. Details make the difference. Paying attention to how a product looked on the inside, even though no one ever saw it, helped Jobs build products that looked like nothing else.
Be a jerk. Sometimes. Issaacson’s biography recounts many instances of Jobs being a jerk. Sometimes warranted, sometimes not. That persona can prove invaluable when you can’t get your idea or vision through to people any other way.
Focus. The thing that I marveled at more than anything in the book is how Jobs reinvented Apple’s product line after he came back in the late 1990s. It took a lot of guts and vision to say “This is what Apple is good at, and this is what we’ll do,” so to speak. So many companies and organizations fail at this.
What obstacles? Issaacson writes a lot about Jobs’s “reality distortion field.” Jobs certainly set unrealistic goals at times – almost always. However, it was that shooting for the impossible, and ignoring limitations that made him and his team at Apple do groundbreaking things, and make a “dent in the world.”
Have you read the book? What did you learn. Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
Most techies have blogged much longer than I have. I didn’t start until early 2009, on a blog called Trust the Process Now, and I killed that blog a long time ago. Being a former journalist, I had the wrong view of blogging. I thought it would take away from my writing juice on my day job as a reporter, and I couldn’t imagine having enough to say.
I was wrong. I wish I would have started blogging earlier in my career. But since that first blog, I’ve experimented to find the right mix between blogging, social media and providing value to readers and the web. I think I found it. Here’s what I’ve been doing:
davidakennedy.net: I started the current iteration of this blog in September 2011, turning it into a life and hobbies blog.
Many of the posts that populate (e)INTERtain come from a blog I started in grad school at Elon located at davidakennedy.wordpress.com. DavidAKennedy.net has gone through a few versions. It started as a learning journal, powered by Posterous, then a hobby blog powered by Tumblr before its current form – a combination of the two on WordPress.com.
Retired Blogs and Domains
journalismlives.com (still active): Steve Earley (my co-blogger) and I haven’t blogged here in awhile, but we’re not ready to abandon this project yet.
trusttheprocessnow.com (no longer own domain): My first blog, I wrote a lot about my philosophies in life, a la zen habits.
davidakennedy.wordpress.com (deleted): A WordPress.com powered blog that I used as a learning tool in grad school. I imported many of the best posts to my current blog.
gutcheckrunning.com (no longer own domain): I created this blog as a running journal, but when I didn’t keep a consistent running schedule, I killed it.
trusttheprocess.net (no longer own domain): This was a short-lived photo blog on Posterous. When I learned more about custom post types, I created my own section for photos on my self-hosted WordPress install.
davidakennedy.net (on Tumblr): The site WRPG started on Tumblr and I had fun with it, but ultimately I liked how WordPress.com gave me better flexibility over exporting content and more features. I do miss Tumblr’s better mobile blogging features. I also went with WordPress.com so I would fiddle less with the inner-workings of the site and theme, something I do too much, taking time away from blogging.
Five Things I’ve Learned While Killing Five Blogs
I hate leaving blogs and domains behind, but I also believe in trying new things, experimenting and working hard to create value for readers and the web in general.
Try platforms, but build on your writing. A platform, no matter how new and advanced its features are, or how vibrant its community is or becomes, you writing must be the focus.
Start with your passions. They fuel your blogging better than anything.
I haven’t blogged as long as some of the pros, but I learning, moving forward… What about you? How have your blogs evolved over time, and what have you learned?
Recently, I wrote about how I believe myself and others would pay for beautiful, efficient services on the web. I still think that’s true, and now I have a bit to add to the mix – inspired by the latest, hot online start-up, Spotify.
Yesterday, I purchased a premium account on Spotify. My wife and a good friend had raved about the service, and they both had premium accounts. I checked it out, loved it, signed up and promptly closed my free Pandora account. I did all this in about 24 hours. The whole process got me thinking:
I still own a bunch of CDs, but have them all in digital format, and haven’t bought a physical CD in more than a decade.
I have always bought my digital music through iTunes, but haven’t regularly bought music there in probably five years.
I listen to music all the time, and have maxed out my listening time on my free Pandora account almost every month.
Why? What made me go for Spotify so quickly? Why not just buy more iTunes music? Or go with Pandora?
The answer: valuable content. I never bought more iTunes music because even though I was getting the same product as a CD, I didn’t get something physical that translated into value. I just owned a bunch of files as zeros and ones. I wanted those linear notes, CD covers, etc. What I needed was that value.
Spotify gives me that. For $10 a month, I get access to tons of music, some that I would buy, much that I would never discover without the service and I don’t have to worry about files, storage and more. I don’t get those linear notes and CD covers, but the mass of content (music) is just as, if not more valuable.
Content is what myself and everyone else on the web really wants. How are you making your content valuable?
When I saw the above tweet a few months ago, it got me thinking. I couldn’t believe I graduated from Elon iMedia grad program more than a year ago. I started asking myself question after question:
What had I done since?
What had I learned from it?
How has it impacted me?
What I’ve Done
I landed a job as the Online Communications Manager for The Arc, a national nonprofit that advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It took some searching and more than a handful of interviews, but I was happy to find a role that lets me do a bit of everything: strategy, design, code, social media and more. Since then I have:
I can’t think of a week where I don’t learn something new. Sometimes you don’t learn anything new, but rediscover lessons from the past. My first year since iMedia has been a good mix. Here are the top nuggets:
Listen. Always listen. It fuels the success of any project.
It starts with content. No website can be truly great without it.
Website statistics mean nothing, but the trends in them do.
It doesn’t matter how popular you are in social media or how many pageviews you get if you do not know your message.
Teamwork. Nothing else needs to be said.
Shortcuts are dangerous. Standards are the road less traveled. Know them and follow them.
The above may sound like common sense, but it never hurts to be reminded of where you’ve been.
Free services litter the web. The web is built on “free” after all.
Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and the like all give services away, supplementing it with advertising and account upgrades. That’s called freemium. I use to be totally opposed to paying for things like that. Friends upgraded their Flickr accounts. Not me. I switched to Posterous.
Lately, my thinking has shifted. I laid down the paltry amount of $25 a year for an upgraded account to Remember the Milk, an online task management app and site. The upgrade gave me the site’s sweet Andriod app. Just yesterday I paid $9 to open an account on Pinboard, an online bookmarking service. Sure, Delicious is still viable, but I grew tired of it long ago. I tried Google Bookmarks, but missed RSS feeds and the public nature of bookmarking. Thanks to a post by Andrew Spittle, I discovered Pinboard.
I love both these services. Does that tell you that you get what you pay for? Probably not. I just think it means I, and others, are willing to pay a little extra for an efficient and beautiful experience in our web tools.
We’re thrilled so many people have found it helpful and insightful. Steve Buttry, the Director of Community Engagement at TBD, shared a few related posts on landing a digital journalism job in the comments. That and another comment by Anna Tarkov inspired this post.
It jumps off of Buttry’s posts on landing your next digital journalism job and redirecting and rejuvenating a career. It’s my advice for making sure you’re always learning, and learning what you need to, to survive in the fast and furious digital world. You have to embrace your own story, and ensure it involves you always taking on the new and unknown.
It’s About Places, People and Projects
Find places to teach yourself and learn. I love Lynda.com. I used it extensively in my grad program to learn things the professors couldn’t cover and/or didn’t know. I continue to use it and other tools to do the same thing now. Find communities that are passionate about what you want to or need to know. Listen and engage there.
Create a side project or two (to implement those things you’re learning). Buttry touches on this in a way, but I have learned so much from developing, writing for and maintaining Journalism Lives. In such a short time span too! What’s your passion? What can you make from scratch? Let the possibilities guide you more than the limitations.
Partner with good people (to learn more of what you want to know). I had the initial idea for Journalism Lives, but it certainly would not be what it is without Earley’s knowledge and passion. Thanks to him, the learning is always on. Find people you admire who know more than you, and work with them. You’ll have a lot to teach each other.
This is just what works for me. How are you always learning?
