Happy BlogBirthday to Lornitropia!

Today is the 1 year birthday of A Visit to Lornitropia — a friend and fellow Milwaukee blogger Steve Duncan. Steve and I have already had several great coffee meetings, talking blogging, mobile tech, the web, podcasting and more. Steve works as a Competitive Analyst by day, and likes to share insights from his career, though he covers a wide gamut of thought.

http://www.lornitropia.net/

Happy BlogBirthday Steve! :-)

Technorati Tags: blogging, milwuakee

BlogDay 2005 Recommendations

A few weeks ago, I came across the BlogDay 2005 event and thought it would be fun to participate. The idea to have bloggers share 5 different blog recommendations was proposed by Nir Ofir, a blogger and editor for the Israeli portal Tapuz.co.il.

Nir wanted to learn about new blogs, and offer blog readers a glimpse at other blogs as recommended by the bloggers they already read.

Here's the idea behind BlogDay in the words of Nir himself:

BlogDay was initiated with the belief that bloggers should have one day which will be dedicated to know other bloggers, from other countries or areas of interests. In that day Bloggers will recommend about them to their Blog visitors.



In one long moment In August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new Blogs, Preferably, Blogs different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.

Here are my 5 recommendations:

Rands in Repose

I enjoy Rands in Repose quite a bit, because of the writing quality and thoughtfulness of each post. Rands doesn't write often, but when he does, it's very good quality stuff, that gets me thinking. I also quite like his blog design.

Selected post: The Bear Story

Daring Fireball

The blog of Jon Gruber, who comments mainly on technology, particularly the Mac, user interface and reading between the lines of news stories. Like Rands, Jon posts less regularly, but when he posts, the writing is excellent and thought provoking.

Selected post: Ronco Spray-On Usability

Tech Ronin

This is the weblog of Janet Tokerud, who often writes about various tidbits that seem to interest me. She also buys all of the gadgets I wish I could buy, but can't justify! As a fellow Mac OS X user, avid reader, Moleskine and pen freak she provides good insight on many of my favorite things.

Selected post: The World is Flat, Now What?

Veerle Pieters

Veerle is a Belgian blogger covering design, music and other related tidbits. I love her excellent tutorials in graphics and web design and have also enjoyed her music suggestions. I appreciate that she shares her knowledge.

Selected post: 5 Steps to achieve a nice aqua effect

Jordon Cooper

Blog of a Canadian pastor and techno-junkie. Jordon provides challenging writing on culture, faith and technology, along with great contextless links. Jordon is currently going through a tough time physically, but manages to keep writing somehow. I like Jordon's honesty and the revelation of his personality through his posts.

Selected post: Summer Reading List

I hope you enjoy checking out my recommendations and look forward to checking out others in the BlogDay collection at Technorati.

Technorati Tags: BlogDay2005, blogging

Busy, Busy Busy!

Apologies for being a bit quiet here the past few weeks. life has been very busy on both the professional and personal side of things and blogging is a lower priority right now.

However, i have some posts brewing on my mind right now that I'm looking forward to writing up, that will be coming in the next few weeks.

On the pen front, Michael Leddy in the Pen Freak comments helped me sort out the exact model of Shaeffer fountain pen I have here, with broken off pen cap clip — it's the Triumph Intrigue, which looks very much like the image below:

I think I'm going to try and locate a new pen cap for it, and maybe even locate a backup of the same or similar pen online somewhere. we'll see. There's always the Lamy Safari line that interests me, Fisher Space Pens and the Vanishing Point fountain pens from Namiki to explore. So many pens, so little time :-)

Have a great weekend!

2 Years Blogging

Two Years.

It's hard to believe I've been hammering away at my blog for two years.

I had been reading several blogs for over a year. I admired the writing of blogs I read and I began to look forward to the thoughts being shared at those favorite places every day.

I thought, "Why couldn't I write a blog? Why not just try it?"

So I did. I got a free Blogger.com account and began writing. At the same time, I was letting go of the Palm Tipsheet, mainly because I felt it had run its course, and I longed to write about so much more than just Palm handhelds.

My next concern was, would I lose interest in writing? Would my blog end up another ghost town of ancient, rotting posts?

Here I am, two years later. Now I can't imagine not having a blog.

My blog has become a public place to share thoughts, float ideas, share stories, sketches and design work — a place to experiment and receive feedback from interesting people. It allows friends, family and new readers to explore my stream of consciousness. It's like a vapor trail of thoughts.

It's funny, because last week I met my first fellow blogger from Milwaukee, Todd Sattersten. In our lunch conversation, he told me how much he appreciates meeting bloggers, because he can read their archives beforehand to get a much deeper, clearer picture of them.

I think blogging is hitting mainstream now, for that very reason. Regular people are finding other regular people freely sharing of themselves. It may be the sharing of wisdom, or stories, or opinions. Whatever the "it" might be, the act of sharing reveals that we are all human beings, who think and laugh — and screw up.

Blogs provide a way for people on a digital network to connect. Blogs are great, because people make them so. It's not the features, or the platform, or the design — it's in the stories people are sharing with each other. It's the conversation, just like the Cluetrain said.

For me, blogging has challenged me to think, to write, to sketch and to share. I've met many new people through this space, and have most importantly, learned more about myself and others through the experience.

So, if you aren't blogging now, why not give it a shot? :-)

Rohdesign Weblog RSS Full Posts Enabled!

Hey RSS fans, tonight I've finally worked out how to setup full blog posts on my RSS 1.0 feed! I learned from a post by Lee LeFever at Common Craft, that the 'MTEntriy' tag needed to be changed from 'MTEntryExcerpt' to 'MTEntryBody' and it works!

You may need to refresh the RSS feed too see it, but it now includes all text, formatting, links and even images (e.g sketchtoons, photos, etc.) for the last 10 posts.

If you haven't subscribed to the Rohdesign RSS feed yet, check it out here.

In other RSS news, iSiloX 4.2 was released this week, with RSS conversion features.