Control Option Command

When Iceland went bust and started selling .is domains I grabbed martin.is. Of course I did. That’s the kind of guy I am. Even as I swiped that credit card (and by “swipe” I mean “typed in all my info into the appropriate boxes.”) I knew I had no idea what I was going to use it for, but what the hey; I’ve done plenty of even stupider domain purchases that never led to anything¹.

So finally, the other day I decided to set up a “lifestream”. An aggregate feed of all the highly interesting stuff I do on the web. Not because I think anyone particularly needs or wants to know. It just seemed like the kind of thing that goes on a domain called “martin is”.
I really didn’t want to spend loads of time on this. I have a job, a daughter and a blog that are all already wailing for my attention, so tried plugging all my stuffs into a WordPress install using FeedWordPress and a couple of other similar plugins, but I found the results to be (unreliable | explosive | bewildering)².

Alrighty then. What services do I know of that aggregate information like this? FriendFeed! I headed over to FF, and sure enough; Within half a minute I had managed to plug all the crap I generate into one massive hunka’data. In addition to supporting a bunch of services Friendfeed actually does pretty well parsing feeds from other sources and cutting the entries into little blurbs. Now only to get it out of there and onto my domain.

Read the rest of this article »

If you have been around on the web for ten years or more you will remember (or maybe even filled the role) of the mythical “WebMaster”. The WebMaster would design and program your site. He (or she… but lets be honest girls. Mostly he) would publish your articles and fix your site when broken. He’d do some voodoo behind the scene and something very close to what you wanted would happen. He’d tell you what would work on the net and what wouldn’t. He would not be questioned. He was The WebMaster.

Ok, so usually the WebMaster was someone’s cousin who knew HTML, where to cut’n paste JavaScript snippets from and generally no marvel to behold, but it was a title not to be taken lightly and godsdamnit we held it in high regard.

But I’m not here to wax poetic about the lost title of The WebMaster. I’m here to talk about how the position, once highly esteemed, as a “Jack of all trades” ¹ in, well, WebMastery; fits into the calculation nowadays.

Read the rest of this article »