Nasty little bugger

I have managed, after much fighting and arguing, invited the flu in for a visit - as per usual the chap is going to stick around for a week (or two), then leave without so much as leaving a thank you note.

I do not normally get sick - I may get a sniffle for a day (during which time I am the worst person to be near because I am a ‘carrier’ of said sickness) the next day I am healthy and well but every other soul within a 5km radius has the full blown flu.

For me to get properly sick (as I am now) I must have completely ruined my immune system by doing something stupid, and in this case it was overworking the brain - behind the computer screen - without rest for the past 5 weeks.

Busy Worker: The Office
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Go Away. I iz writing my memoirs… Image credit: misshepeshu

The difficulty of blog writing

Maintaining a blog does not usually come easy, most of us in the blog space need to work really hard to maintain our blogs outside of our regular work, and with the need for regular and interesting content updates, the odd blog/website design change, replying to comments, and managing your online persona in general - all while attempting to win one of the categories in the next Blog awards - Suddenly having a blog may seem more work than it is worth.

For some (including me) blog writing is not our main talent, words do not seem to flow as easily as it does for those that place beautiful prose on the web with little to no effort.

Suggested writing inabilities aside, even if you have the most wonderful and interesting stories to share; should you forget to post on your blog one too many times (the biggest bloggers sin I am guilty of) you will watch it die a slow and often painful Internet interest withdrawal death. Should you allow this this fatal blog sickness to pass, reviving your blog to its former glory will be one of the most difficult online things you may ever do.

What I am doing to repent my blogging sins

The final result? Unsuccessful blog that will remain obscurity or Successful blog revival - I will investigate, and hopefully find, the root cause within myself and my daily/general habits that lead me down the path of the “once every three month post” blogging style my own blog is now following. A studied choice which will offer me one of the following result options:

1. Should I keep this blog and maintain it properly (an all round improvement) OR
2. Permanently archive my blog (maintaining my current “Odd occasion and blue moon posting” habits) OR
3. Remove my blog entirely - let Twitter be my blog

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Compliments of Heidi I have been tagged (for the first time mind you) to fill in this 50 question internet meme.

So without further ado:

8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning?

1. Do you like Blue Cheese?
I dislike the smell enough to have never tried blue cheese. Will let you know when I do.

2. Have you ever smoked heroin?
Nope.

3. Do you own a gun?
Nope, and doubt I ever will… Went shooting at a range with some friends a few months back - Guns do way too much damage way too eaasily.

4: This number is missing.
Nope. See.. number 4. is right there, just a little left of “This”.

5. Do you get nervous before doctor appointments?
Not since my first HIV test 10 years ago.

6. Real or fake nails?
I save the fake ones for special people on special days - I will tell no more.

7. Favorite Christmas song?
I worked in retail for 5 years. There are none that I still enjoy.

8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning?
Orange Juice (the fresher the better), Coffee, Ice Water - In that order, and preferably all every morning.
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I enjoy social networking; it allows me to keep in touch with friends, family, and sometimes complete strangers relatively easily from the comfort of my desk.

I love meeting people; As much as social networks keep me in contact with my friends when I am stuck behind my desk, I still crave the interaction of actually meeting someone face-to-face and chatting about life over a coffee or a beer.

Going to the Twitter meet at The Baron in Santon last night was definitely the most fun way to meet the like minded souls I know online, get the face-to-face interaction I crave and as an added bonus I got to meet a whole bunch of new and interesting people and play with a couple of cool gadgets.

One of the cute/fun gadgets that floated around the table during the evening were the social contact sharing Poken devices, which I believe are only recently trying to make a mark in the South African scene. The Poken is a small USB / RFID reader that can “high-five” another Poken device, thereby transferring your pre-selected social network contact details to the other Poken.

The whole process is a much quicker and easier (albeit geekier) way to share contacts than trying to figure out how to spell a Twitter username into your phone or even trying to save a phone number (I remember the days I tried to get a number in a noisy club and couldn’t hear a word that was said).

When you get home, you plug in the USB portion of the Poken and it will update your selected online social network with the details of all the users you high-fived during the night.

I recall that the panda and the bee versions were popular among the ladies at the tweetup, and if you have a unique design, and have a need for a few extra Poken (say for corporate gifts) then you can get your own unique Poken design made.

The venue and service was good, even with us moving around a few times and being with some rain it didn’t bother us too much.

I had an absolute blast meeting and chatting with @SheBeeGee, @SnowGooseSA, @nickjackson, @Walterpike, @snappingturtle and our guest of honour from Cape Town @gabyrosario. I will definitely set time aside to get to a meet like that again.

Thank you all.

My pictures of the event are up on my flickr page and I will link to @craign’s photos as soon as he puts them online here and here .

Go here if you are interested in buying any Poken in SA.

UPDATE: Heidi has added her update of the evening on her website. A little more articulate than my post.

As the first month of 2009 draws to an end, the dust on most of the New Year resolutions is settling, I start to re-look at all the goal lists I have made in the past, review what I have completed, and add the items I want to do going forward.

I don’t call these lists “New Year resolutions” because they often have longer time requirements to complete that a year and I don’t always start at the beginning of the year (Some are added in July).

So without further preamble, here is my current TODO list:

1. Increase my gym attendance from twice a week to 4 times a week.
   This relates to losing some of the weight I have gained over the past few years and needs to be done in conjunction with following a healthier diet plan.
2. Get my Honours Degree out of the way.
   This requires starting it (currently in July 2009) and finishing it in one to two years.
3. Get one business off the ground and start another one.
   This is half done with the start of Devmaxis (in partnership with three colleagues) and two business contracts secured. I would just like to have some more options outside of that businesses scope and therefore need to push for Darwinshome into its own niche markets.
4. Do more for my online and offline communities.
   I’m sure, subconsciously, that this is a refection of one of Barack Obama’s statements working its magic. Doing more for my community (real life socially and in a Web 2.0 sense) is a broad way of saying I have many little plans that I just need to finish. This should help kick the brain into gear if I forget.
5. Pay off my car.
   Some changes in work circumstances has placed me in a position to settle my car a year to a year and a bit early. So following up on actually doing that before August 2009 is a must.
6. Purchase a new high end personal laptop.
   I am still unsure as to what machine I want, and I have been looking very seriously at the new MacBook. But this is where spare cash comes into play – I will make this a goal to complete before the end of November 2009.
7. Develop one application outside of work.
   Be it a twitter application, a Facebook application or a custom built web application. This serves twofold in that it helps expand my own skills and it could also be used to either benefit my business or social goals.
8. Save enough spare to cash to take my wife overseas.
   USA would be nice, but my wife has her heart set on Europe – can you blame her? Italy here we come.

I am sure there are more things to add (like “Blog More”), but for this post I think this list will do for now and actions do sometimes speak louder than words, here is the first step. I will update any on the list that I complete (if they can be “completed”).
Have a great 2009.

Following a post on an Internet forum, here is a small expansion on my Country / State dropdown selection script to enable a third level drop down. This additional level would allow for a country / state / city drop down selection on an XML file as apposed to just a country / state drop down selection.

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The regular visitors to my website would have noticed the new website structure and design that I finally got together; to say that I am proud of my work would be understating the huge pride I have in my website.

Humbleness aside, I have not been the only website to recently update it’s design:

TheOpenSurgery an open source and tutorial based website by Jason Dugmore recently finished with updating a new layout and logo.

TechMongrel another technology based tutorial and review website by Matthew Vorster had a great monster logo addition.

And lastly NoBoxMedia an Ajax, DHTML and JavaScript site by Robin Pietersen finishes off my list of new website updates (the Noboxmedia website update coincides with a SEO competition which springleap.com is currently running).

All three website owners are colleges from my University days and I believe these are excellent examples of great websites, for content and design, to assist any developer in today’s chaos of information.

A special Thank-you to Robin Pietersen for introducing me and teaching me the basics of Adobe Photoshop; I wouldn’t have been able to put my current or past website designs together without the initial teachings I got from him.

Getting your blog (and blog posts) out there into the Big Wide Internet can be difficult at the best of times, but trying to get people that do visit your website to help you out shouldn’t be.

Social Networking websites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Facebook all have methods to allow their users to submit links to web pages that they find interesting, funny or just worth sharing. Allowing these users to quickly and easily add your blog post to their favorite website is a must for any blogger.

Below I have started making available the images I made for use on darwinshome (both the current size of 20px X 20px and the previous incarnation of 45px X 45px). Listed with the images are the links used to submit your website page to that Social Networking website.

This is not currently the full list of all the social networking websites available, as the weeks progress I will add more to the list until complete.
After a few weeks I will also design a wordpress plugin, to join the ranks of many like it out there, using the images and links listed.

[YOUR LINK URL] means the full URL of your blog post on yout website (eg: http://example.com/post/ )
[YOUR LINK TITLE] means the full title of the submitted page (eg: My Blog Post)

In alphabetical order:

Bloglines

http://www.bloglines.com/sub/[YOUR LINK URL]

De.licio.us

http://del.icio.us/post?url=[YOUR LINK URL]&title=[YOUR LINK TITLE]

[More images and links after cut]
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UPDATE 26 January 2009: Fixed the XML file load Bug that was affecting Chrome and Safari

Making use of my XML based Country and State/Province file I have put together a small script to populate two drop down lists with the complete Country and the selected countries Province or State list.

The code is ALL client-side based, so it will suffer from browsers without JavaScript enabled, but it is a very fast and light weight script to use if you want to quickly add a Country and State selection box to your registration forms. This script does not require any database to function.

Demo page
Download Country/State Code (160)

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I have been looking all over the Internet for an AJAX or similar dynamic drop down tool for Country and Province/State selection (You select a country from a drop down list and the country/state drop down selection automatically populates with that countries list of provinces or states)

The good news is I found various versions, from ASP.NET controls, to simple JavaScript files, but the catch was that although I had the tool, the tool didn’t have all the counties of the world, never mind their respective states or provinces.

So after much trawling, and searching, I have a complete world country list (including Antarctica) with their respective states and I have placed them all together into an XML file for ease of development use:

- Country State/Province XML lis (176) - [29.3 KB ZIP file]

Please leave a comment should any errors exist in the file, from broken XML, to incorrect spelling, to having a province not listed, I will fix it if it checks out.

Hope it helps.

[EDIT1 11/03/2008] - Removed Yugoslavia. Changed “Macedonia, Former Yugoslav Republic of” to “Macedonia”. Added Serbia and Montenagro, with states. Thank you omBRE for pointing out my error on the NoBox Media blog.

[EDIT2 24/04/2008] - Corrected spelling of Antarctica (Thanks Ryan) and updated the “Regions” in New Zealand (Thanks David for pointing that out over on the NoBox Media blog).

[EDIT2 08/05/2008] - Corrected spelling of Czech Republic, Thanks Tim.

License and Copyright:
The country and province names in the file are public domain.
XML file in its current format is licensed to Michael John Grove under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 South Africa License.