Category: netwert (Page 2 of 3)

18

November 1, 2016 /

The Ideapad turns eighteen today. I first posted here on November 1, 1998, with a nod to Jason Kottke (who renewed his own commitment to blogging today with the launch of a membership program).

My blog isn’t the hotbed of activity it was in the early aughts, but it remains a going concern for me, and I remain immensely proud of that. I often wonder how many of the 500 or so weblogs in the first Eatonweb portal are still chugging along—however many there are, this is, and shall remain, one of them.

Day 1 with an Apple Watch

June 4, 2015 /

I’m on Day Four wearing my Apple Watch, and I like it very much. I’m finding it useful, attractive, comfortable, interesting and fun.

Of course, my first day wearing it was something else entirely. And while reviewers intentionally give new products some breathing room, I thought I’d take a stab at quantifying the first impressions of a Watch wearer. This is a product with a learning curve—does it create impediments? Frustrated expectations? Or would it all be part of the fun?

So I live-tweeted my day getting used to the watch (to the chagrin of my friends on Facebook, where my tweets cross-post). I’m a few days removed from the experience, so they are presented below as-is. All in all, it was a very good first day.

Job hunt best practices

May 18, 2015 /

We’ve been doing a fair amount of hiring at the office of late, and my reputation as a stickler for detail has rapidly resurfaced. Colleagues are amused at how I’ll give my head of research a hard time for interviewing a candidate with a pair of typos in his or her resume and how I’m parsing the grammar on thank-you notes.

I stand by my practices, because the printed form says a lot about a person: attention to detail, communication skills, drive. The same holds true for the interviews I get to take, where I can spend more time gauging someone’s intellect, curiosity, and enthusiasm for the position (even though I think Seth Godin is onto something, and my interviews typically run 40 minutes).

So I was going to do a write-up on resume and interview best practices, and then I remembered that I did this already, way back in 2000. The tips contained therein are still accurate and sound. Well, maybe not the note about avoiding italics for fax machines, but the rest of it.

If you’re on the market, or will be soon, take a read:
How to Succeed at Getting Hired (and Lots of Ways Not To)
Good luck with your search!

Fifteen

November 1, 2013 /

When I launched the Ideapad, on November 1, 1998, it was rather ugly, it cribbed off others, and it didn’t even have its own directory.* But what it was, it miraculously still is: a home online for me to publish independently, everything from mundane thoughts on shopping and puppies to important perspectives on usability, digital life, the Internet business and my own evolution.

Fifteen years on, the Ideapad is one of the world’s oldest and longest-running online blogs, which I take less with surprise or pride so much as contentedness. The good ol’ ‘Pad is still here. I’ve gone through a couple of phases where I almost stopped writing—once, I even blogged about not blogging, and promptly lost half my audience–and in retrospect the best thing about this page is its consistency.

I’ve had more than my share of reminiscences in this space over the past few months, so it’s best to look forward here, to many more years of satisfying self-publishing. Thanks for reading.

-David

* My incredulous kudos go out to Net Access, my old web host, for fighting link rot and keeping my old directory live, for more than a decade of uptime since I deactivated my account. I’m not even sure they have individual user accounts anymore, but my old pages are still live. The World Wide Web purist in me is very appreciative of this.

The all-new Ideapad

August 1, 2013 /

Hello from 2013! This page is still a bit of a work in progress, but I’ve migrated Ideapad to WordPress, after many reliable years on Movable Type. Some visual and structural updates were overdue, and while launching a WP blog is far from revolutionary, it’s a breath of fresh air around here.

In the update, I’ve also, for the first time, done a proper content migration. All my blog posts from 2001 to the present, covering the MT era and prior years in a home-rolled PHP CMS, have been pulled into the new layout. I seem to have lost some paragraph spacing in the transition, but all the entries are properly categorized with working HTML.

At the same time, I’ve managed to maintain my flat-file archives dating to 1998, which I invite you to explore, if only to laugh at the things that were interesting to me a dozen years ago.

Welcome.

My thanks to David Miller for ongoing tech support.

Mazel tov

November 8, 2011 /

I missed the big day last week, but Ideapad turned 13 on November 1.
It isn’t often a blog becomes a bar mitzvah, so let us briefly celebrate the occasion. (I suppose I should really post this on a Saturday.)
For comparison’s sake, this site is thee years older than the original iPod.

“Me-gregation”

March 7, 2010 /

After more than a month of neglect–and really, what’s a month or two after three years–I took advantage of Oscar night to work on my home page while the Mrs. watched the Oscars. So my home page is finally new. Whew.
In a fit of abject creativity, my new home page is, well, basically a bunch of links. But that’s sort of the point. In an age where one’s social profile extends to myriad web sites with poorly interlinked commonalities, I like the idea of having a pivot. So no more netwert.com branding, as I did for more than a decade; instead, a little more me branding, or at least, me-gregation, or whatever the word would be. In due time I’ll get the utility of the interior pages of the site to more or less match, and as I play with the site design, I’ll give the new home page some much-needed design flair, too.
I also went about perusing my website archives, and I must say, long before it became a paragon of boredom I had some pretty sweet home page ideas. All hail flatbed scanners and randomizer scripts!

Changes afoot

January 29, 2010 /

So I’m showing my niece, a freshman at the Newhouse School at Syracuse, my web work, and she’s all excited by Amy’s site and so on, and then I send her to this site, and she says, “Really this is it?”
Sufficiently needled, I am going to get my two-years-overdue redesign in place soon. Netwert.com will have a shiny new home page (incredibly, I used to do them all the time) and some updates to the Ideapad’s layout and orientation.
I’d like to think Lindsay is at least impressed that when I began this blog, she was in second grade. But I doubt it. So: onward.

It’s not you, it’s the feed

November 6, 2009 /

For some unknown reason my most recent links post, which is pushed to my blog from delicious.com/werty once a day, won’t stop posting. I went so far as to turn off the notification stream this afternoon, but it’s still showing up. Apologies to folks whose RSS feeds are choking with my repeats.
I’m not sure how to fix it–suggestions are welcome (@djacobs, hint hint).

Eight years on

September 11, 2009 /

I thought of my go bag yesterday as the city prepared for its annual 9/11 rememberance. Did you have a go bag?
We still do, packed with old shoes and gym shorts and now-sketchy bottles of water and a dog bone or two. In a sign of evolution, there are not yet baby supplies in the bag. Let’s hope we never feel compelled to update it.
I commemorate this day, as always, with links back to the related posts on Ideapad:
My blog posts about the event, September 11-23, 2001
Adam Oestreich’s first-person account, September 12, 2001