Engineering a New World
Tad's IT Blog
Tad's IT Blog
Aug 20th
I’ve got a couple of wordpress.com blogs that have gotten more popular and more extensive over the years, and which I’d like to migrate off of the wordpress.com hosted platform and move onto servers I control myself. Why? One word: plugins. Well, two words: plugins and stats. I just can’t live without my Google Analytics.
So, as I already know you can migrate the whole wordpress.com post/comment schema out of the platform and throw it wherever you like, I figured it’d be a well-documented affair of people out-growing their wordpress.com blogs and wanting to move to wordpress.org. Unfortunately, I’m not finding that to be the case.
The main problem I’m looking at is one of SEO. Some of these blogs I’ve got date back to 2005/2006 and have some major longevity with Google, meaning links they have carry some weight. I would prefer not to lose that SEO-juice when moving to a self-host platform.
So, I’m setting out to figure out the best way to proceed, and will catalog my results on this blog. Maybe I’ll be the only one that reads this, but if not, hope you can either (a) give me tips, or (b) learn from my mistakes.
First of all, this article on wordpress.com goes over how to redirect your wordpress.com blog to a new domain which you own. Hoping that works well as a first starting point.
So I don’t do this on my highest-pagerank domain, I’m going to start this out on a blog that I have that is doing great – but mostly from rel=nofollow traffic (i.e. traffic from Facebook / Stumbleupon / Twitter / etc, not pagerank-sensitive traffic from google). It’s my Scientology Parent blog – the one I use to catalog all the fun I’m having in my first year as a parent, using Scientology to raise my baby.
To proceed, I’m thinking this as a course of action:
We’ll see how this goes!
May 28th
I just need to take two seconds and rave about the driver support in Fedora 13.
Fedora installations on servers have always been notoriously painless for me, and for the last 5 years I’ve always had less trouble standing up a new Sun or Dell server on Fedora than on Windows. No driver disks, no nothing – just fire it up and it goes.
Desktops have been another matter entirely. If you read my other posts on ATI Radeon Drivers on Fedora, you’ll see I’ve had all sorts of issues getting Fedora (or any Linux distro for that matter) to work well with my 3D ATI cards and other assorted laptop drivers.

My HP Photosmart C4580 - just works on Fedora 13
Enter Fedora 13. One of the touted features of F13 “Goddard” is “…enhanced driver support.” Now, I had no idea what to expect, but I guess I just hoped it’d be better than before. Wow, how wrong I am. Driver installations are now just totally painless and are even better than a Mac in terms of “just working”. Specifics:
So, hats off to the Fedora team and the work that’s gone into driver support for this release. I’m truly impressed.
Apr 23rd
Seeing as I’m a borderline-obsessive geotagger and geotag every last photo I put up on Flickr, I’m still trawling the net looking for the perfect way to visualize it all. Still haven’t found it, but did find something cool. This is a tool called iMapFlickr – a tool that lets you visualize your FLickr sets on a Google Maps based app, and then hosts such in a way you can iframe them into your site, or short-link them in a Twitter post.
As an example, here’s a visualization of my Baby 365 Project set on Flickr:
It’s nice, in that you get a pretty decent visualization of all of the places I’ve taken my daughter, in one map frame. There are a limit of how many dots it’ll show on the screen at one go, but at least it’s not missing any major ones. The plus on this over flickr’s built-in mapper is that (a) you can embed it, and (b) more importantly it will actually plot the whole set, rather than just the items in the thumbnails. Flickr’s built-in mapper will only show about 20-30 data points on the map AT MOST, and this looks like it’s getting a good deal more.
What I’d like to make it cooler – and what prevents it from being my perfect map visualizer:
Still – a nice tool, and a nifty map that was easy to just paste on here.
Apr 3rd
I just saw this on Stumbleupon and almost soiled myself from laughing.
Original is here, as I found after Googling. Hope you appreciate it.
Mar 24th
In quite a few of the companies and government agencies I’ve worked with, nearly all of them say that in their Internet and intranet strategies, they want to “…be doing more Web 2.0” or “…maybe some Twitter or something” or other eager-yet-naive statements of that nature. Unfortunately, due to the fact that social media has finally hit every last major mainstream news channel (“Twitter” was 2009’s most popular word, according to the WSJ), it’s become an urgent priority for agencies & businesses to somehow “get into the Social Media space”. However, and rather unfortunately, most people and agencies don’t even know why they would implement social media features on their Intranet or external-facing sites, never mind how or in what way.
Social media is tough to measure, and is easy to just get “sucked into”, so is there actually a real, tangible business case for using social media on your network?
I wrote a fast blog post on this subject following an excellent talk on the Business Case for Social Media at the SharePoint 2009 Conference in Las Vegas, but wanted to expand on this as it is still-salient topic that continues to confound all too many IT planners and strategists.
Now, as a note, much of the content below should be credited to the profound Daniel Rasmus, Director of Business Insights at Microsoft. His job is to utilize advanced crystal ball technology to give as best an insight as is possible on the future of tech and IT trends. Hats off to thinking people like that – it’s what makes the world go ‘round.
You Can’t Stop Social Media in the Workplace
The first lesson on social media in the workplace is that it is a fruitless exercise to try to stop social media in your enterprise. Myth #1 on enterprise social media is that it’s even possible to firewall-off Facebook, Twitter and the like.
If nothing else, smartphones make such a feat impossible, with Facebook & Twitter clients on nearly every wireless device sold today. So, firewalling off Twitter and Facebook and such is a silly exercise, unless 100% of your workforce resides under a mountain or in a ballistic missile submarine. And I’m almost willing to bet it’s a matter of time before Ohio-class SSBN’s have wi-fi.
So, if you can’t stop it, how do you use it?
Myth #2: Measuring ROI from Social Media is Impossible.
Apparently, per studies that Mr. Rasmus brought to our attention, 84% of people don’t / can’t measure ROI from social computing. Why? They probably don’t know how, as it’s quite a bit different than the traditional ROI calculation.
So how do you measure ROI for Social Computing? 
It’s not just pure numbers you’re going to want to quantify on this. It’s also qualitative enhancements to your organization’s operation which can indeed be qualified & quantified:
Myth #3: Twitter will save the planet
The uninformed will sometimes think that just by opening a Twitter account and putting a big Twitter icon on your homepage, that this will somehow make you “Web 2.0 compliant” and thereby drive millions to your site.
In reality, there’s a proper social media tool for many things, and there’s a ton of applications where social media has no place.
First off, posts in the social media space are usually what Mr. Rasmus referred to as “small atoms”. For example, you don’t usually see someone pop up on Facebook and say, “Dude, here is the 67 page strategic plan for my company, what do you think?” It’s usually more like, “OMG WTF??”
As such, there are a number of differences between social media uses within the Enterprise, and social media uses to interface with your customers, suppliers and business partners.
Mr. Rasmus’s slide illustrates such differences between Enterprise & Personal Social Media:
Myth #4: We May Not be Ready for the Investment in Social Media:
There are biiig differences between what it takes to dive into the external world of social media, and what it takes to retool an internal enterprise IT ecosystem to deal with social media.
If you decide to make yourself a presence on Facebook, you don’t have an infrastructure problem in “migrating data from MySpace to Facebook”. You just do it. However, migrating from legacy systems is a big deal in the enterprise. Enterprise systems are generally very document-centric, so one then does have much more of a hump to cross to implement in the business space.
The bigger hump to traverse in the enterprise, generally, is a need to manage how social media is regarded in the corporate culture. The two biggies are, (a) a fear that if in corporate knowledge management, if you share all the goodies you know, then you are “not doing your job” as you’re ‘not working’, or (b) an aversion to sharing your hard-won knowledge, as then you “won’t be necessary anymore”.
Both are factors that in your business, you’ll need to traverse in one fashion or another. The solution to this generally boils down to smart enterprise policy on social media, and validating & rewarding those people that make the job easier for the rest of us by sharing their knowledge & expertise.
The Bottom line:
Be strategic about implementing social media. Don’t just do silly & random experiments, work out a strategy and do it. It may not work the first time, but as the overhead for implementation is relatively small, just work out a sensible first project and do it.
The risk for not doing so? If you don’t build it, they will go someplace else.
Mar 24th
In looking for some good “startup” references to give to a client who wants to be able to do their own SEO, I found a number of them that were listing out good social media services that could be used for link-building. A number of these posts (dated 2009) listed Flickr and Digg both as services which are excellent for posting content and links, and thereby getting some additional search engine juice.
However, in September of 2009, Digg implemented a policy on nofollow links, making all but the most popular items carry a “rel=nofollow” tag in the link, making Google essentially disregard the link, in terms of page rank calculations.
There have been a number of other services which, in 2006, were part of your average SEO staple to quickly and easily generate some back-links for your news or video content. Now, they’re non-entities, with the services switching to nofollow links to discourage link spamming.
Such services that now are void in terms of SEO benefit are:
The good news is, that this allows these services to be used more for what the creators intended them for, instead of an SEO link-spam playground. The bad news is that, for SEO’s and people looking to get continuing benefit from links posted to such services, one has to work a bit harder to find services and sites which will carry links to yours.
Jan 19th
Scientology Volunteer Ministers, on arrival to Haiti, did an up-to-date & on the ground assessment of the area. Based on this, the most important and urgent needs were isolated. If you’re planning on assisting with the relief efforts in any way, think with these as some of the core items needed:
These are:
VOLUNTEER MINISTERS AND VOLUNTEERS WITH THE FOLLOWING SKILLS OR DISASTER AREA EXPERIENCE:
Volunteers are needed with the following skills:
- Search and Rescue experience
- Anybody with skills in setting up communication lines
- Coordination skills
- Crowd control skills
Anyone with these skills or who wishes to be trained to help in this capacity, contact the Volunteer Ministers Disaster Response office, and they can get you free training for this.
MATERIALS THAT ARE MOST URGENTLY NEEDED:
-Water (especially water sanitation equipment/materials)
- Medical supplies
- Non-perishable food supplies
- Other commodities such blankets, tents, sanitation materials (e.g. soap, toilette paper, Diapers, shampoo)
Your help is definitely wanted! If you wish to help in any of these areas, contact the Volunteer Ministers Disaster Response office and they can direct you to the way you can best assist from your area, skills, and capacity to help.
Jan 15th
You’d have to be living in a cave to not know by now that Haiti has suffered a 7.0 richter scale earthquake, and with an already-shot infrastructure, is now in a worst-case-scenario disaster as volunteer organizations struggle to coordinate their efforts and bring help to the millions that need it in Haiti.
I’ve got a little 4-month-old, so I’m not in a position to go down there and pitch in with the Volunteer Ministers already on their way there, but what I can do is help get the word out.
In coordination with the Scientology Volunteer Ministers of Washington, D.C., we now have a blog to give you the latest on what’s going on in Haiti, as well as a twitter account that will be kept up to date on how you can assist – or how you can get help if you or someone you know is in need.
Dec 30th
Unfortunately, the wonderful Flickr map only lets you display as many points on the map (at a time) as you can fit in thumbnail photos across your screen. So, for someone like me who meticulously geo-tags every photo taken (in the hopes I’ll one day be able to locate the ideal geo-data visualization app for my photos) the closest thing I can get to a good map is the Flickr Organizr. Here’s a photo of how it looks:
Nov 17th
I just ran across an awesome article while browsing ScientologyToday, an article in the Maritime Reporter & Engineering News which goes over the complete refit and restoration of the Scientology Motor Vessel Freewinds.
From their pull quote:
In today’s “I need it yesterday” world, emphasis on quantity often overpowers quality, while the quick fix can supercede the correct one. Step back, take a deep breath and enjoy the fruits of a tremendous labor, a labor of love that resulted in the top-to-bottom renovation of a storied ship with a unique owner. — Greg Trauthwein, Editor
The article then goes on at quite some length about the amazing attention to detail that was paid to every last piece of the restoration of the Freewinds, including before-and-after photos of a number of sections of the ship (something I had never even seen before).
In elucidating the incredible attention to detail demanded by the project managers and the Captain of the Freewinds, the editor of this article was also floored with the amount of responsibility the ship’s own crew was taking in the renovations project.
Making the scope of the renovation all the more amazing: while the organization brought on a bevy of contractors to fulfill much of the heavy-duty fabrication and construction, it was the crew who was responsible for the intricate and laborious renewal and renovation, including a meticulous cleaning and rejuvenation of the engine room, the engine control room and the bridge (including the machining of the new stainless steel parts, overhauling the equipment, painting and polishing), all while the ship stayed in operation.
And I don’t doubt it. The crew of the Freewinds are some of the most amazing people I have ever met.
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