New Blog Design!

Posted by lemiffe in lemiffe on Jan 4th, 2010 | 0 comments

I Just finished giving my Blog a new look, which will probably suffer a few more changes in the upcoming weeks. Give it a look, and don’t forget to tell me what you think.

Thanks to Carrington for such a great theme. If you experience issues in other browsers, or platforms, please give me a shout. I’ll be happy to look it up for you because as you may notice while browsing through categories, AJAX loading has been enabled and may, or may not, work on different browsers.

I also added a few new sections (pages) to the site. Browse around!

Have you ran out of ideas for your blog posts?

Posted by lemiffe in Communication, Literature, Misc on Oct 8th, 2009 | 0 comments

I mean, seriously, we all face creative block sometimes, however, you might want to ask yourself this sometimes: Is my life really that interesting? Is what I have to say really that interesting? and, How can I spice it up?

I just read an interesting post that talks about cross-dressing as a method of overcoming the creative block, to be able to develop another “way” of thinking, as in thinking as the opposite sex would. It sounds interesting, however, I don’t think it should be necessary to reach those extremes. I live by a basic rule:

If you wouldn’t read what your writing down, you probably shouldn’t be writing it down in the first place.

If you run out of ideas, probably what you are doing right now isn’t interesting enough. The thing to do is find something you would really like to do, then blog about that. For example, go explore the world, take photos, learn a new language, start software programming, make your own website, learn to use photoshop, or a thousand other things come to mind.

Why? This is not only about blogging. Expressing yourself or your thoughts via a blog is only a way to reflect your own self on the web. So if your own self is boring, the best thing to do is to make your life less boring. And it is possible, it doesn’t matter if you work, or are too busy all the time, there is always a way to inch in a few things you would like to do. Think about it.

If someone managed to make a whole vlog series about “You Suck at Photoshop“, surely you can come up with something creative and blog about it. I don’t know, just evoke your wildest dreams, just think and act random, sometimes that’s the best way in enabling that creative part of your mind. That way you will never run dry. However, don’t blog without a reason. If you are not feeling it, then don’t go posting it.

The increasing level of connectivity between Social Sites

Posted by lemiffe in Business, Computers, Internet, lemiffe, Security, Society, Technology, WebDesign on Jul 31st, 2009 | 0 comments

A few years ago I dreamt of being able to have all this connectivity, lets say, things being published here, automatically-published there, and elsewhere. I knew we were getting there, as I have been configuring my services for the past few months, but I didn’t know we are so advanced.

If I made a rundown or a graph explaining the connectivity between social media sites I currently have, it would grow too large, or the connections would not exactly be easy to draw. * Update: Well I’ve decided to draw it anyway:

For instance: My Youtube is posting to facebook, google reader, twitter and two of my blogs. One of those blogs is lemiffe.com which when receiving a post will alert ping.fm which will then release a post of my new blog post to facebook, twitter, my blog at blogger, myspace, google talk’s status, and quite a few other sites.

Now, the only problem I currently see is the level of redundancy. Sites talked to other sites, which in turn talk to other sites, so whenever these sites provide much more connectivity to other services we might end up in a cyclic-post system in which one service posts to the other which in turn posts back to the first one initiating a never-ending cycle in which the user would have to stop one or the other service manually.

I really believe more insight should be applied, like, verifying the other sites connectivity and checking it will not repost to a site the first site has already posted to. This can be done via pure XML transactions between both sites, I mean, thats what web services are for, right?

Another thought I came up with is a Centralised User Account Service, which deals with the connectivity between users of different sites. Lets say: Gravatar meets facebook and ping.fm. All the services first verify the users information on the Centralised service, then they verify which permissions the user has applied concerning posting, which pages must the service send the new update, video or blog message to, and negotiate it only with the Centralised site, which will in turn send off the appropriate XML for all other “connected” sites.

It’s just a thought, Security-wise I am not sure where this would lead to as very tight security would have to be placed. Gaining access to the account of a user at the Centralised Site would be, well, Armageddon for that user. So probably a tighter security would have to be placed, with 128 big encription, SSL sockets, MD-6, who knows what else, but it’s just a thought anyway.