Moving into the Cloud

justisengard — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:33:31 +0000

After making the argument a while back with several of my friends to use Site5 to host their blog and other web services, I am moving my blog to wordpress.com. Nothing against Site5, it is just a change of life and priorities that is creating the move more than anything else. Hosting your own blog software requires geek time to review and update from time to time, and at the point in time, I need something that requires no maintenance. WordPress.com fits the bill. So as you will start to see, all my online services and life will be moving into the Web 2.0 cloud.

Personal Blog: WordPress.com (http://justisengard.org) — still using my domain name though.
Photos: MobileMe Gallery (http://gallery.me.com/justisengard) — Photo Albums and Movies
PhotoBlog: Flickr (http://flickr.com/photos/justisengard) — Snapshots from iPhone with the cool new apps with geo-tagging
Micro-Blogging: Pownce: (http://pownce.com/justisengard)

Also created a new blog for Anita and I to share stories, comments and opinions during our travels. For those wanting to now where we just came back from, what happened or where we are planning to go, or what unique food we had – this is the place we will capture all this.

David & Anita’s Epic Adventures: (http://davidandanita.org)

I have to say I have been plessantly surprised how well WordPress.com works. The advanced fucntions on the GUI editor are nice, and I do not have to struggle with inserting pictures, etc. ScribeFire (blogging plugin for Firefox) works well with it too. You will see me changing themes for a bit until I find one that works for me. I may just have to break down and do some CSS editing…but I am not there just yet.

To Tweet or to Pownce, that is the question…

justisengard — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 16:16:27 +0000

Many know that I tinker in the social networking side of the Web 2.0 technology extravaganza. I have introduced several friends to Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, etc. In return a couple of these friends have introduced me to other things as well, which is part of the idea behind social networking. However, with all these sites and applications popping up everywhere, one only has but so much time in the day. For anyone who knows me, over the past several months my time as been a wee bit occupied. So to better organize my ‘geektime’ it would seem that I wil have to prioritize my activities. As you will notice, I have been blogging a bit more, and I plan to keep this up. I typically keep my Facebook account updated – it is just fun. However, the microbloging with Pownce and Twitter seem to be a bit redundant. So I have come to the conclusion that I need to pick one.

Twitter came first, and basically started the whole craze. It is centered around a webpage, multiple Twitter apps and getting updates to your mobile phone. I never really got into the mobile phone part and neither did any of my Twitter friends. So I found Twitterific (application), updated this blog with a nice little Tweet update box, and discovered PocketTweets for my iPhone. At times however, I wanted to do things a bit more, post more than 140 characters, or reply more easily to friends, or even post a picture I just took spontaneously with my iPhone to say look at this. Twitter really did not provide this experience and really it did not seem if the developers wanted it to either. But it would seem that I was not the only person thinking this. Kevin Rose and Leah Culver evidently were thinking similar thoughts, because along came Pownce.

Pownce builds on Twitter and takes it into a new direction. It is a web page, just like Twitter, and there is a desktop app based on Adobe Air. The best part is that you can create groups for your friends, you can send pictures, files, etc., links and even create events. So now when I want to say, checkout this website or look at this picture i can easily post it on Pownce. I can also limit to message or all or a subset of friends, and they can reply to just me with comments. So immediately signed up.

Well, it seems a bit redundant to post the same thing to both, and unlike others I do not see any different between what I would post to one or the other. I have noticed Veronica Belmont seems to differentiate between the two a bit. On the other hand it comes back to time, which is limited. So given this limitation, I have decided to Pownce rather the Tweet. If anyone has any other opinions on the difference between the two, please feel free to comment.

The ePiC rAMblInGs of Justisengard » Pownce

Moving into the Cloud

To Tweet or to Pownce, that is the question…