My New Avatar

Posted by Josh Harrison on December 13, 2008 – 2:30 am

Many websites require that you create a profile to take advantage of their services. Some of those sites give you the option to upload a picture of yourself. Depending on the norms of the that particular site, the image you upload can either be a real picture or an avatar (an avatar is a graphical representation of something).

Twitter lets you upload an image representing yourself. LinkedIn does it. Automattic has created the Gravatar service to let you leave your avatar wherever you leave comments on a wordpress.com blog or a wordpress.org blog that supports avatars. It’s a great service that’s very simple to use.

My good friend, Shane Lewis, is an awesome illustrator. I asked him a few months ago if he would take some time out of his busy schedule to draw me an avatar. I think he did a great job.

Shane says that whenever he draws somebody, that person usually complains because there is something wrong with the drawing. For example, you’ll notice that my avatar has more hair than the real me. I’ll take it. It’s a cartoon. Aren’t obvious things like baldness and big noses supposed to be accentuated in cartoons, avatars, etc. It’s not a portrait.

I’m using my avatar in lots of places. I can’t decide if I should replace the picture on my home page with my avatar. What do you think? I even took the liberty to make it my favicon (look at the url in the browser).

Everybody let me know what you think. And, Shane, thanks for your help. I might be coming to you soon for another drawing.

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Categories: Online Presence | Comments (2)

Good Luck Etelos

Posted by Josh Harrison on November 15, 2008 – 3:06 am

It’s been exactly one month since ended my tenure at Etelos. I loved working for them. In the year I worked there, I learned a lot and I worked on some cool projects. The people I worked with were great. They have some awesome talent there.

The Etelos platform is totally unique. The fact that a company or developer can use them to deploy an app to each user so they can have their own separate instance is something that I think should be a standard. I think it is perfect for either a proprietary app or open source. I have some ideas of apps that I would love to build – if I ever get time – and I hope that I will be able to use them.

If Etelos can monetize their platform quickly, they will be a force to be reckoned with. There is a lot of competition in the cloud computing space. All of the big guys are all fighting for application builders to use their platform. And they each provide something unique.

Maybe in the future I’ll write a post on what is so great about the Etelos platform compared to the other guys and why I like it and believe in it so much. But for now, I just want to tell them good luck.

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Categories: Career, Etelos, cloud computing | Comments (0)

Using Twitter Now

Posted by Josh Harrison on October 30, 2008 – 2:33 pm

A long time ago, I signed up for Twitter but have used it very little since. I used it privately in the past, mostly when we had our last child. I used it as a log of the night’s events.

Since then, I have tried to avoid Twitter and thought of some good excuses to do so. I wanted to use it on my own domain to do updates on family life. I can use laconi.ca for that. I didn’t want it to be just another thing I had to use to connect with people. I can barely update my blog. Then it was always offline. Since it has gotten better.

Enough with the excuses. Lately I have been thinking of how I can use Twitter together with the blog. I just have to do it now. I think it will be fun. My profile can be found at twitter.com/joshh.

In the future, I would like to add my feed to this blog. When I get time it will happen.

Still I see big value in getting a service such as laconi.ca working on your own domain. But this is not one of those cases. I am going to take advantage of the large user base on Twitter.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, here is a quick video on YouTube. Sign up for it and follow me and I’ll follow you.

Categories: General | Comments (0)

New User Approve Wordpress Plugin

Posted by Josh Harrison on October 27, 2008 – 3:58 pm

Finally I am getting around to releasing some plugins I have created for Wordpress. The first one is the New User Approve plugin.

New User Approve is a Wordpress plugin that allows a blog administrator to approve a user before they are able to access and login to the blog. I currently use it on my private blog and it serves it’s purpose wonderfully.

I have created a page on my blog that I will track any progress I make on it. I wanted to release it to the public to find out what everybody thinks and perhaps which new features to add. That and it most likely is not perfect so I would like input on how I can improve it.

I’m going to put it up on the Wordpress plugin repository. There are a few things I need to add to make that possible.

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First Release of my Picklewagon Wordpress Theme

Posted by Josh Harrison on October 23, 2008 – 2:14 pm

I’ve spent the last few nights getting my Picklewagon Wordpress Theme ready for release. The reason why I am releasing it is because that is what Wordpress is all about. Everybody releases plugins and themes they have worked on and contributes to the community. Perhaps somebody out there would like to use it.

I have submitted it to the wordpress theme directory. I will let you all know when it does get approved.

I built the theme on top of what I believe is the best theme available for Wordpress: Sandbox. But the downside of Sandbox is it’s just a plain template. So I used to add styling to all the template files. That way my theme inherits all of the benefits that the Sandbox theme provides.

Another reason I created my own theme is that I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted out there. Now I have one that I can take to where I think a Wordpress theme should be. I have lots of cool ideas that I would like to add to the theme, such as an option panel that will allow an admin to easily change the layout, for example.

The most immediate changes that I will be making to it will be providing 2.7 support.

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Following Your LinkedIn Network

Posted by Josh Harrison on October 16, 2008 – 12:01 pm

LinkedIn has been adding lots of new features over the past year. The one that has proven the most useful to me has been the RSS feed allows you to follow updates to your professional network. It is a convenient way to follow any changes made to anybody’s profile that belongs to your network.

Something that would make it even better would be if everybody update their profiles often. It’s really easy to forget about your professional network and your LinkedIn profile until you need to use it.

For those of you who belong to LinkedIn, go to your homepage and find feed and subscribe to it. Not only will you be able to help others more effectively, but when you need to connect with others or find a job, it will make it so much easier because other will know exactly what you need. For those who don’t belong to LinkedIn, make sure you do it when you get a chance.

The groups LinkedIn has added has proven useful as well. It would be great if they also offered RSS feeds for updates made to the groups that you belong to.

It looks like this feature was released in the middle of March. Here are some blog posts that describe it better:

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Categories: Career, Networking, Online Presence | Comments (1)

BrickCon 2008

Posted by Josh Harrison on October 6, 2008 – 11:39 pm

This weekend I dragged my family to BrickCon 2008 in Seattle. I was very excited to go and it was very good for the most part.

Some of the exhibits were amazing. There was everything from very tall space needle to some awesome medieval scenes. I was hoping there would be some Star Wars Lego scenes but there was none of that.

There were so many people. I was kind of surprised. It was difficult at times to get in to see some of the exhibits. And not enough Lego for sale.

It was fun to go with my family though. It is a lot of fun to build Lego with my daughters. My oldest daughter loved looking for the girls in the scenes. Girls are not found in too many Lego sets.

Here are some of the pictures I took. Enjoy! (link to the set on Flickr)

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Categories: Lego | Comments (0)

Apple Drops the NDA for iPhone Development

Posted by Josh Harrison on October 1, 2008 – 11:49 pm

My latest project involves writing a program for the iPhone. And I kept on getting caught up on the fact that I can’t share anything about the code I am writing. Or I can’t go to an online community to get help or some pointers to make myself a better programmer.

I was excited to learn today that Apple decided to drop the NDA. Now developers can share details of released software. Hopefully some online communities can be created and thrive because of this announcement.

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Open Business Models

Posted by Josh Harrison on October 1, 2008 – 1:15 am

The past few days I have been thinking about the business models of companies that produce different products that I own and use often. At the same time, I can’t help but think of how much better these products would be if these companies changed their business model to be more open.

I love open companies. My definition of an open business model is allowing your customers add to your product by providing a platform to do so. By doing so, the customers that add to the product can benefit by receiving revenue for their contributions. In turn, the companies benefit by having happy, passionate customers and more revenues.

The best example I can think of to illustrate what I am talking about is Google. They have a very healthy business model they have created by monetizing search through advertising. They were smart to open up their ad platform to allow anybody to buy keywords. Another smart thing they did was allowing website owners to monetize their site by including advertising on their own sites. The result: a multi-billion dollar company, happy advertisers and happy website owners. Each party benefited and made money from this model.

I have some companies in mind that I would love to see open things up little. A lot of internet companies have opened up in the past few years. It has been great. But there are still a lot of walled gardens out there. I think this applies to companies outside of the internet industry. Hopefully, I can stick to my plan and give ideas and critique to some companies that I would love to be more “open”.

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A New iPhone From The Genius Bar

Posted by Josh Harrison on September 24, 2008 – 9:35 pm

My last two posts have been about my iPhone and how I have a dead strip on it. I promise this will be my last update. It actually turned out well.

I received lots of helpful comments that gave me other options. One in particular was very helpful.  An anonymous commenter mentioned that he went to the Apple Store and they tried to fix it and then gave him a brand new one.

We happened to be near an Apple Store this past weekend so I gave it a shot. The Geniuses first tried to restore it without any luck. Then they said even though it was out of warranty they would replace it for free. Wow! I was totally shocked. Unfortunately it was not a 3G but I’m not complaining. I was trying to think of a reason why they would do this. The only one I came up with was that they could be trying to get rid of inventory. Just speculating though.

It’s experiences like this that make me really like Apple. But I often hear things that make me not like them.

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Categories: iPhone | Comments (1)