Category Archives: Ideas

Come Back to Blogging

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I see a lot of tweets saying that people don’t blog anymore because of micro-blogging.

Keep tweeting but and come back to blogging as well. On a blog you can build a longer lasting impression where a tweet would have past someone’s time-line even before they saw it.

Blogging is more personal since you don’t have to compete with all the other tweet noise. People who follow your blog is more likely to hang around and comment on a few posts, micro-bloggers are jumpy, trigger-happy clickers who will just scroll away you well crafted short message to the world.

Refresh Colombo

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I finally managed to make it to a Refresh Colombo. It was a good ride except it took longer than I expected. I suggested to @nazly they keep things down to a few talks (like 3) and keep them short!

@chamara did a web standards talk which was good and useful. Web standards is the thing that we think at an end of a website as something that would be ‘nice to have’ but as he puts it should be practiced earlier and more evenly throughout a web project.

@devaka did a good talk about innovating vs. outsource services, and how well they were doing innovating. The audience didn’t ask him the most important question. Are you hiring? :)

@gihangamos talked about Colombo Ride 3D and the future of making games in Sri Lanka. You have to hand it to him for trying. Its a space that most people wouldn’t get into in Sri Lanka.

Overall good effort by @refreshcolombo I will try to attend more often and even attempt to present something myself.

Selling out

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The state of Java and MySql are changing. In case you missed it. Sun bought MySql and Oracle bought Sun. I’ve been working on Java for over 10 years and MySql for over 5 now. I’m not happy with what is happening.

The Java and MySql websites have changed. On the mysql.com site there is no prominent link to get to the community edition. If you go to mysql.org to redirects to dev.mysql.com where you can find it.

This is not good for me or a country like Sri Lanka. Most of the solutions I’ve been involved over the years have used open source foundations. So we were able to deliver solutions to clients at a very reasonable cost. If things get too commercial I’m a afraid the licensing costs will far overtake the implementation costs.

I’m sure there will always be open source or free to use versions of Java and MySql, but with a large commercial entity backing them profit comes first then community. I don’t know I think its time to look at some alternatives.

Update: They got to VirtualBox too.

Social Network Status Mapping

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I use a plugin to post to twitter every time I post a blog post. I also have Facebook pull in my new posts and notes. This works reasonably well and I get some traffic from them.

You can also use twitter tools to post your tweets on your blog after a certain threshold. I don’t use that because I want to keep things separate. I’d rather have a block that shows my latest tweets somewhere.

There are so many ways you can cross post from your blog to twitter to Facebook and LinkedIn. For me personally this is too much cross posting of not too related content. Let me explain.

On twitter I have mostly techies, locals, bloggers and new age marketers. On Facebook I have friends and family who for the most part are not techies at all. On LinkedIn I have co-workers and professionals.

So for me at least these networks mean different things. I saw a tweet yesterday on LinkedIn it was a personal quote about love. Also when you see auto posted blog posts with tweets and link bits it seems less personal and mechanical. You know the blogger hasn’t taken the time to write something.

I prefer to post separately to each network depending on what I have to say. This is except for getting link backs for my blog posts which I mentioned first.

I’m sure there are people with a consistent profiles across networks that pull this off well, but I’ve yet to see one.

My 2 cents is keep things simple and think of the audience for your post before you setup automatic cross site posting.

Open Path IT Rebooted

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Open Path IT

I’ve finally got around to putting up a page (ya just one for now) showing my freelance work. I’ve been freelancing here and there since around 1996. Most of the things I built have been too small to mention.

I give you Open Path IT.

Just a basic start for now. Open Path IT (Information or Inspiration Technologies) was supposed to be a software company that never got formed. One day maybe.

So if you got some work or looking for work within the skill-set I’ve mentioned get in touch.