Status Archives
Six years ago today I started this blog.
Over that time I've gone through four designs, written 1,429 entries (including this one) and gotten 5,504 comments (some of which are certainly spam). I've made countless friends, launched a global coffee meetup and a little brand research tool that went on to collect millions of perceptions.
It's helped me get jobs and is even responsible for me meeting my wife. I still am amazed every time someone tells me they enjoy my writing or takes the time to leave a comment. All the talk about blogs being dead is just dumb. While the blog as we knew it may not ever reach the mass that once seemed promising thanks to countless offshoot platforms, it's still alive and well here and elsewhere.
Mostly I just want to offer a heartfelt thank you for finding this, sticking around, reading, commenting, emailing, meeting up for coffees and beer and just generally helping me think about the world. As crazy as it may sound, I really can't imagine what my life would like without this site.
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Tags: me, status
Right. So I'm now married and honeymooned and almost back to reality. Before that, though, are a few days in Cannes for the big advertising festival. (If you're around drop me a line.)
That's pretty much it for now I think. Expect blogging to resume sporadically at first and then back to normal next week. Thanks everyone.
Oh, and sorry about the no guest blogging, apparently there was some technical difficulty.
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Tags: cannes, me, status
I mentioned last week I was getting married and now that that part is complete it's time for the honeymoon. I leave tomorrow and will be away for a couple weeks doing the best I can to not go on the computer.
Luckily for you I've had three very smart guys agree to take over the site while I'm gone: Rick Webb, Joe Liebman and Colin Nagy.
I trust they'll keep things interesting around here until I'm back. See you in July.
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Tags: marriage, me, status
Hey everyone, just a quick note to say posting will be pretty slow over the next month or so as I get married and go on my honeymoon. I may try to talk a few folks in to picking up the slack around here while I'm gone, but I'm not sure I'll actually get around to it.
In the meantime, there are lots of great sites out there to give you your fill of random links and interestingness, including these which I've been especially enjoying lately: The Awl, clusterflock, Scott Rafer's blog, Barking up the wrong tree and Sweet Station.
Enjoy and see you in a few weeks.
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Tags: marriage, me, status
A new coat of paint for the old site.
Hey all. Just a quick heads up that I've cleaned up the old site a bit. For the vast majority of you this won't matter, as you never visit the site and just read the RSS feed/email, but for those that do hopefully you like the new digs.
As always, if you run into anything that doesn't behave, please let me know.
Here's a quick rundown of the changes:
- Everything is in one big column: This was the big change. Basically I was tired of having two columns for my entries. Increasingly the quickies on the right were becoming the content of the site, but they weren't getting enough love because people weren't noticing them. This also takes a lot of pressure off me to keep the long-form entries flowing (which I've been totally terrible at lately).
- Thumbnail Stream: If you come over to the site you'll see a bunch of thumbnails at the top. This is just a little script I wrote that goes out and grabs stuff from Flickr, Delicious & Tumblr, makes thumbnails for all and then posts them. Seemed like a nice way to drive to the other stuff I read around the web and add a bit of flare to the site.
- Right Sidebar: Now that I don't have entries over on the right I had a bunch of space to work with. I'll try to keep that side updated, but for now it's a quick rundown of what this site is all about and will, in the future, include a bit of a blogroll. One big thing that's not changing on the right is the comments on the entry pages. This is something that I've had on the site for a long time and I still believe is the best way to illustrate my belief that comments are as important as entries.
Well, I think that's about it. Like I said, for most of you this won't matter, but for those of you that visit, I hope you enjoy. I have not done a lot of cross-browser testing with the new design, so if you run into weirdness please just take a screenshot and send it over. Thanks.
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Tags: design, me
I made a few tweaks to NoahBrier.com
For those of you reading this at NoahBrier.com you'll note things look fairly different around here. For those of you who get the RSS feed a) you'll have noticed a whole bunch of new entries pop up and b) click over to the homepage and check it out.
Anyway, I wanted to give a little explanation for what's going on:
- I wanted a new look. The other one had been around for about a year and a half and I was getting bored. If you miss it, you can still see it on every page other than the homepage, where I haven't gotten around to switching things over yet.
- I have changed the "sidenotes" thing. Lately I've been pretty busy and haven't been able to blog as much as I would like. However, that doesn't mean I haven't had lots of ideas and done a bunch of reading. The old format, which was just a straight feed from my del.icio.us, wasn't really doing the trick. So the idea for this new format is to do short posts, mostly around links and other assorted stuff, kind of like those links roundup I do every so often. The other big decision was to include them in the main RSS feed. I don't plan to post them that often, so I hope it won't get to overwhelming, but if it does I'll go back to the old version.
- I really wanted to better integrate the email subscription mechanism (now in the header).
- I really wanted a print and email buttons (now attached to each post . . . don't love the solution for email, but I'll keep working on that).
So I think that's it. Pop on over to the site and let me know what you think. If you have any thoughts on how to improve it, I'd love to hear them. I will try to roll out the rest of the site over the new week or two. Thanks for the patience.
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Happy birthday to NoahBrier.com.
Yesterday was the two year anniversary of this website. I actually had it marked on my calendar and everything, except for some reason I wrote it down for the 17th, not the 16th. Anyway, it's been a wild and wonderful two years and I wanted to thank everyone that's contributed to the site.
I often try to explain to people why I keep a website like this, but I never quite do it justice. At its most basic it's an expression outlet. I get to keep track of new thoughts and ideas as they pop up and, on occasion, even get to discuss them with the world. More importantly, though, having this outlet has allowed me to stay in a perpetual state of critical thinking. Anything I encounter I treat as possible fodder for the site. Whether it's an article in the newspaper or a sign on the street, having this outlet lets me think about its relation to the rest of the world. I guess what I'm saying is the site is my excuse and I love it for that.
On the other side, of course, are the many great people I've met as a direct or indirect result of the site. So many of the most interesting conversations I've had in recent memory have been with random people. It's nice to know that there are so many people out there that are excited as I am about thinking about the future.
Anyway, all that was a longwinded way of saying thank you. Thanks for sticking around, for reading the site, for entering conversations and generally for being a part of my life. It's fun to know that anything I write will be read by hundreds, many of whom are complete strangers.
Finally, my usual request, if you've been hiding for all this time, why don't you come out of the shadows? Leave a comment or drop me an email, tell me who you are, what you do or what your blog is. I'm a real person. I swear.
Oh, and for those interested, how about some stats from the last two years:
- Entries: 493 (including this one)
- Comments: 764
- Redesigns: 3.5
- Incoming Links: 110 (according to Technorati)
- Jobs: 2
- Links Saved on del.icio.us: 4,160
- Tracks Submitted to Last.fm: 25,664
- Domains Purchased: 17
Well, that's it. Thanks again for everything.
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It seems like Movable Type's dynamic publishing isn't performing with the upgrade.
A lot of things stopped working around here today. Haven't completely nailed the problem, but I believe it's because of PHP 5.1.2. If anyone's got any info about why Movable Type 3.2 dynamic publishing and PHP 5.1.2 might not play so well together, please let me know.
Essentially what was happening was that container tags were only looping through once. Actually, if you pop over to the archives, you can see the problem in action. Monthly archives only display one entry
Anyway, forgive the problems around here for the mean time. I'll try to get everything fixed.
Update (4/20/06): I fixed it! Turns out that PHP 5.12 doesn't play nice with the version of Smarty that comes with Movable Type 3.2. For those of you having this problem, all you need to do is go into the folder you installed Movable Type and open up the Smarty folder (php/extlib/smarty). There you should install Smarty 2.6.13 (older versions may work, this is what I installed). When you're all done, just go do a rebuild and everything should be back to normal.
Since I had a hell of a lot of trouble finding anyone else who had written about this problem, here are some Google keywords to help potential troubleshooters: dynamic publishing, movable type, mt, php 5.1.2, 5.1.2, error, problem, smarty, 3.2. Anyway, hope this helps someone out.
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This site has now moved to its third design in three years. Here are some reasons why.
So everything on my 3rd redesign is starting to come together and I just wanted to give a quick explanation for the changes.
Over the last year or so I have been tweaking the design to make it work, but I've still been kind of upset about the overall usability. The archives sucked and there was just a lot of room for improvement. So when I started out I wrote down these as my goals:
- Fix the archives: Make them easier to browse.
- Make the search work better: The old version had links on top and entries beneath instead of having them split up.
- Make it not hurt my eyes: How come no one ever told me it hurts your eyes when you look at it on a real monitor (not a laptop).
- Bubble up categories: There was no mention of categories on the homepage of the old site. I wanted that to change.
Here's how I addressed those issues:
- I made the archives revolve around categories now, since I think they're far more important than dates. If someone is looking for a date they're most likely looking for something specific that they can use the search for. Categories are much better for browsing. I also added a way to browse categories by the number of entries in the category. This required a bit of PHP, but I think it's a very logical way to browse. I'm also in the process of paring down the categories and adding descriptions for each. That will take a bit of time, though.
- I split the search to display entries on the left and sidenotes on the right. Now you can see them side-by-side rather than having to wade through a bunch of links when you're looking for an entry.
- By adding some more contrast and changing the link color to a darker green it shouldn't be as painful on the eyes. If it is, let me know.
- The importance of categories as a browsing tool I already mentioned. I wanted a way to see the category of an entry on the homepage. That's what the little last five table does. (I used a table, blasphemous, huh?)
There are some other little changes you'll discover (changed the comment form, added previous/next entry links). There are also a few things that aren't done (haven't quite figured out what's going in the lower right box on an entry).
Otherwise, though, I'm very happy with the way it's working. I think that I've improved not only the look, but also the experience of the site. Let me know what you think (and if anything is wrong).
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I'm about 40% done changing the look and feel of the site.
For those of you seeing this at NoahBrier.com rather than in an aggregator, you'll notice things look a little different. Since it's really late right now I don't really feel like getting into everything, but this is the beginning of a realignment. There's still lots more work to do, but feel free to poke around and let me know what you think/what doesn't work. The archives still need lots of work (which is ironic since that's the main reason I wanted a change). If you visit them, though, you'll start to see some of my plans. My goal is to make this site as user friendly as possible (which includes a little more readable). Why didn't anyone ever tell me the bright green on a regular monitor hurts your eyes?
Lots of pages still have the old design, so you can get a last look at it.
Anyway, I'll give the full rundown when I get a chance to finish up the changes. Until then here's to hoping everything's working that needs to. For now, I'm going to bed, I've been staring at this thing for about seven hours.
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Hi, I'm 