Stuff that doesn’t fit – Climb to the Stars

I'm Going to Write an eBook [en]

For some time now, I’ve been toying with the idea of writing an eBook (well, more precisely, of starting to write eBooks in general). Now that my life is un-hectic and a little under control (fingers crossed, let’s make it last) I’ve decided to get to work on this project.

First, obviously, I need something to write about. My general problem rears its ugly head again here: I’m not sure what to choose (too much choice often turns into “no ideas”).

I’ve used the poll below to jot down some ideas that I could imagine writing a short eBook about.

– My survival guide to starting to blog
– Utiliser WordPress.com pour créer son site très simplement
– Freelancing: lessons learned
– Some advice for first-time conference organisers
– De l’usage sage de Facebook
– Adolescents sur internet: des chiffres, quelques principes, pas de panique!
– My life improvement tricks
– …

I’m open to other ideas, of course, but please use the poll below to let me know what you think would be the best pick? What would you want to read? What would you share with your friends? What seems most useful?

Thanks a lot for your participation and help!

The Four Lost Months Are Back! [en]

[fr] CTTS devrait avoir retrouvé tous ses billets et ses articles! faites-moi signe si vous constatez des choses étranges. Merci!

At long last, the four months that went missing when I dropped my WordPress database. Many thanks to feedly, who sent me an archive of my 1000 or so last posts, Backtype, who sent me a few hundred comments, and Claude, who stitched them all together with the last backup I had of my blog.

In the process, I discovered that WordPress is smart about imports: if you import over already existing posts, it will not squash them, but if there are extra comments in the import, it will add them. Yay!

Now, what’s left to do:

fix my sidebar content a little, and maybe my top navigation
do something about the face I now have 330+ categories (some tags got mixed up in there — how about I just convert all my categories to tags, and start building new categories that make sense from now on?)
a few posts have shifted dates (for example, the post below now has a date which is 3 days later than what it should)
I need to get rid of the duplicate comments left by the disqus plugin, again, but I can’t use the user-agent trick anymore (the field is empty) — anybody got a plugin or script which will clean out duplicate comments? 5000 of them?

If you notice anything funky with CTTS, please let me know.

And watch this space on the 24th of each month: I’m declaring the date Backup Awareness Day!

Lift09 — Open Stage: Daniel Kaplan [en]

How do we expose ourselves online?
How do we choose our online friends?
Results from a new kind of online sociological survey.

Survey: you can’t just go and ask people to put words on their practices. Designed it like a game. Shown images / I values and U values.

– “I” values: traditional – the more revealing the picture, the less people are expected to see it.
– “U” values: things you feel strongly about

People have a strategy! they know what they’re doing…

– traditionnals
– exhibitionnists
– immodest
– trash/playing with the game

Traditionals, biggest group:

– don’t display more than what you would put on your desk or in your sitting room

Are social network equalizers? No, we mingle with people who are like us or of higher social status.

http://sociogeek.com

Quick Update on Blogging Disaster [en]

So, most of you know by now, Tuesday night I mistakenly dropped the database containing my whole blog. No, I didn’t do it on purpose, imagine that — I intended to drop a table, and got confused by the PhpMyAdmin interface and hit the wrong button.

Long story short:

– I have all my data
– the data is in WordPress import format, more or less, so I should be able to restore all the past posts and comments (might lose some of the comments, if there were more than 250 comments made since last October)
– I might have time to do this this week-end, but not before
– I still have problems uploading the big WordPress import file, but need to try fiddling with Apache server settings

If you’re new to this blog and want to have an idea of what it’s about, you can check the Internet Archive, though the last year will be missing from it.

Thanks to everyone for your sympathy, support, and offers of help. As you can imagine it was pretty stressful (specially happening in the evening before Lift09) but I’m much reassured now that I have figured out that I have not, finally, really lost any content. It’s just going to be quite a bit of work to restore it all.

Please learn from my troubles (I’m learning, in any case) and make regular backups of your blogs and databases.

I’m having a wonderful time at Lift09. See you all tomorrow, Lifters!

Lift09 Workshop: Where will you work tomorrow? (Pierre Belcari) [en]

Workshop information. Watch the video.

Developing environments. Different solutions available at the moment in Europe. Evolution of the workplace.

Where do we come from?

Office: individual offices, cubicles, open spaces

Hoteling: book work spaces when you need them, inside the company.

Companies might try to encourage people to telecommute: save money on space, and improve work-life balance.

Evolution of technology has made evolution of the workspace possible.

Working from home? social interaction is lacking.

Coworking: Gathering of people working independantly but sharing values and costs. Synergy.

*steph-note: I talked about eclau and Coworking Léman here.*

Xavier: FRIUP incubator. Very different from a coworking space. Very startup-minded. Need to leave after one year. Have to present a project to a committee who will decide if they can benefit from the incubator.

Nicolas: on the road.

Hell [en]

Just overheated my second car in ten days : ( – is there a god of cars up there that I offended in some way?

Tag: Stuff that doesn’t fit

I'm Going to Write an eBook [en]

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