Anokwa.com » Archive for blog
July 26, 2008 at 21:44
tags: blog, life
I tried my damnest to live without Web 2.0, but I have to admit that the usefulness (tons of tools, simpler interfaces, momentum) outweigh the potential privacy and data ownership issues.
I’ve returned to delicious, last.fm and Flickr (although I prefer SmugMug). I’ve gone so far as to add Gmail, Twitter and of course, Facebook.
The good thing is that now that I’m no longer hosting most of my online identity, I can do things like drop in SmugMug photos (even ones taken from my iPhone) easily. I took this one from the new apartment.
I still think Web 2.0 in its current configuration is really bad for users. Just a few weeks ago, I ran an application that pulled all my friends information from Facebook. Facebook responded by locking my account and preventing me from seeing my messages, photos, events, contacts, links, etc. They did not let me know why they closed the account and all emails I sent to them went unanswered. A similar thing happened to internet hero, Robert Scobel. Luckily, I know some folks who are connected to Facebook and so I worked that social network for a few days and eventually got the account back.
These companies should not have that kind of power over our data, but until someone comes up with a better solution for me to keep track of my friends, I guess I’ll have to man up and take my chances…
November 13, 2007 at 9:47
tags: blog, rwanda
No big blog post today — just adding pictures to gallery. The first couple are from Juliet’s birthday, a low key affair with beer and brochettes. Then Chris, a Cameroonian surgeon and the hardest working man I know, left for his homeland and we threw a large but bittersweet farewell party. His ridiculous stories about water buffalo attacks and delivering babies here will be sorely missed. Finally, the EMR team had a small retreat at Akagera.
July 21, 2007 at 2:46
tags: blog, life
A few nights back, I tried to copy all my bookmarks in XML format from del.icio.us. Their XML exporter was down so I had to export it into the Netscape bookmark format, then do some grep/sed magic to transform it to XML before I could move it into a usable format. It was a total pain, but it gave me confidence that holding on to my own data is still a good plan.
There are a few del.icio.us clones, but the best out there is Scuttle which has the perk of supporting the del.icio.us API. The install was slightly irritating, and I can only tag bookmarks for people on anokwa.com, but I do have it running and it’s pretty good. I’ll hoping to code up cross-server tagging in a few weeks, but until then you can see my links at http://links.anokwa.com/.
Next up is a Flickr replacement which is coming along nicely at http://gallery.anokwa.com/.
June 19, 2007 at 17:03
tags: blog, life
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I think I’m done with Web 2.0 mashups.
Ever since the sale of last.fm to CBS, I haven’t felt comfortable submitting my listening data. Most of you know I’ve felt the same way about Google and now I feel the same way now about delicious, flickr, facebook, etc. I’ve already moved my data off last.fm and soon I’ll remove it from the others.
The biggest loss for me is delicious, but I think I’ll be able to do something similar in this blog — maybe with a plugin or just how I tag it. As far as calendaring, photos, video and music sharing, I think between iCal, iPhoto and WebDAV, I can do most of what I want to do. Dreamhost even has BitTorrent and flash encoders to do file and video sharing.
Once I have more free time, I’ll explain my master plan in detail, but by the end of the month, I’ll be Web 2.0 free. Seriously. Why should CBS have my music listening habits? Why should Google know who I have appointments with? Why should Yahoo know what sites I’m recommending to my friends? Why should Facebook know what movies I want to see? It’d be one thing if they had clearly defined policies on what they do with the data, but they don’t.
You guys should join the revolution.
June 19, 2007 at 7:56
tags: blog
I know there was some issues with leaving comments on the blog, and I believe all those have been fixed.
In case someone on the internets stumbles on this page (or I run into the same problem again), the solution is to add a function_exists around the gravatar div in comments.php template.
<?php if (function_exists(‘gravatar’)) {?>
<div class=”gravatar”>
<img src=”<?php gravatar(“R”, 40); ?>” alt=”Gravatar” />
</div>
<?php } ?>
If you have no idea what this means, then don’t worry about it.
