Monkinetic Weblog

@chrismessina yes, I can has @steveivy, too. Perhaps I should tweet here and save @monkinetic for blog posts #identity #confused

It's been 11 years since I "became" redmonk, when I registered

.

At the time "redmonk" had meaning to both Jodi and I, and it was the name of my first freelance business. For 11 years I've used redmonk as a chat name, domain, email address, irc handle, and username on seemingly countless websites.

Several years ago (7 now, OMG) I was contacted by James Governor, one of the partners in a relatively new IT consulting venture: RedMonk. James and I had a pleasant talk about the work he was doing, and he approached me about parting with the redmonk.net domain. I wasn't at all interested in parting with it; 'redmonk' was a core part of my net identity.

So, every couple years, James pings me and we have a nice conversation, and I politely decline to give up the domain.

Over the last few years, I found myself using the redmonk moniker less and less. My blog has long been titled 'monkinetic', and I began using that as my username of choice. I recently moved the blog itself to , and have been redirecting all redmonk.net traffic there.

So, a week or so ago, when James' annual "hi there, how are you, would you be willing to part with redmonk.net" email came around, I was finally in a place where the idea didn't seriously offend me. I talked it over some with Jodi, whose blog is still hosted on redmonk.net, and who has also had a real emotional investment in our domain, and for the first time we were kinda like "maybe?"

So James and I had a few emails, and we came to an agreement that works for all of us. RedMonk will get ownership of the redmonk.net domain, and James will (well, already has!) assume the @redmonk Twitter username.

It feels weird, bittersweet, and even a bit freeing to be letting go of this long-time part of my digital identity. Even apropos, as I work out what it means to be both a netizen and a family member; as Jodi and I have rented our house, are living with the girls in a studio apartment, and are trying to figure out what that means for our family.

There are lots of changes afoot for me and mine, and this one feels right.

Updated 2016-12-12: cleaning up

Deciding to use HoDL instead of LOL (review your Monty Python, Bruce). (P.S. rhymes with Wattle)

So this is why my TypePad Dashboard got even cooler and hard to resist: http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2009/11/typepad-micro-blogging-announcement.html

So, this is day 3-ish of my attempt to cease "reading The Whole Internet" and focus more on my family and spiritual life.

TypePad Micro launched today from (my employer - wooo!) Six Apart. Amidst the tweets you might miss that existing TypePad blogs - like this one - also get the new features. So while the hype is on microblogging in TypePad, I'm happy that we're also lowering the friction points for posting quick updates, photos and videos to our existing blogs #goteam!

I'm trying to swear off micro-twitto-blogging for a month, and TypePad adds that addictive little "write in me" box. Dangit.

Whoa, new Dashboard just showed up in Typepad! Nice!

I'm performing a personal experiment.

I've built a new site I'm experimenting with: kinetic energy. KE is based on Six Apart's new Motion codebase (python + django + typepad apis) and is generously hosted by strangecode. I don't get many non-spam comments here, b/c I'm a lazy blogger. :-) But this is a neat app and I wanted to play around with it. So check it out, post something you find interesting, and if I think so too maybe I'll repost it on the front of the site here!

Nothing to see here! Move along!

In this series of posts, I will be discussing these philosophies, as well as how NPR applied them and how we were able to do so much with so little (including our NPR API).

COPE [Create Once, Publish Everywhere - Ed.] is really a combination of several other closely related sub-philosophies, including:

• Build content management systems (CMS), not web publishing tools (WPT)
• Separate content from display
• Ensure content modularity
• Ensure content portability

He talks about clearing your life of posessions, how you should divide everything into four categories: 1. Beautiful things. 2. Things with emotional value. 3. Functional things. 4. Everything else.

Divide each category into the things you keep and the things you get rid of. In category 1, you can keep it if it's on display in your house, if you show it to your friends, if you share it. If not, then you don't need it, it's taking up space and time, which you're paying for with your money, time and health. Take a picture, put it on a thumb drive, take it everywhere with you and get rid of the original. In category 2, if it has a compelling story, one that you actually tell people, you can keep it. In category 3, unless it's very good at what it does and it does something you do a lot of, it goes. And of course everything in category 4 goes.

He says you shouldn't try to do this in normal times. Wait until a spouse dies, a divorce, a child is born or a child leaves home. Wait till you move. It pays to figure out now what you want to do when that time comes.

Some of you may have noticed links around here starting to point to a new domain: www.monkinetic.com. Well, today I finally pushed the Big Red Button that directs all traffic from redmonk.net over to monkinetic.com. In some ways this is a bittersweet moment for me - I still feel a close personal connection to the redmonk moniker (though this site fell from first place in the google war long ago). I first started using 'monkinetic' as the blog title back when I was trying to make redmonk.net into a business site (ca. 2003 I think) and the name stuck. I've grown to love it, and I'm glad to finally be giving it it's own domain!

Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a posts purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise 99 Answers to Your Problem That Were Telling You Youre Having. Yeah. Id like to get back to that here. -- Dan Cederholm

This Javascript Tools bundle for Textmate totally saved my sanity while debugging a recent javascript bug. Best feature: it can run a selected section of Javascript code in Textmate's webkit-based Preview window.

I logged into Get Satisfaction recently (using an OpenID of course), and something about this simple act got me thinking. Ive got two accounts on Get Satisfaction - one using my personal account, and one using my work account. One of the features of OpenID is that you can maintain multiple identities (one might say they tend to proliferate too easily, considering the number of providers coming online) and use them for various purposes.