Wicks Picks

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-7-6)

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:33:03 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-7-6):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr

Josh Jibberish

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 14:19:00 -0400

Josh Jibberish

Darth Vader Plays Golf (via asymptote9x)

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:03:11 -0400

Darth Vader Plays Golf (via asymptote9x)

Happy 4th of July!

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:01:59 -0400

Happy 4th of July!

orangesunshine:Peter Byrne July 4th, 2007Quays Bar, Galway,...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:10:00 -0400

orangesunshine:

Peter Byrne
July 4th, 2007
Quays Bar, Galway, Ireland
Peter Byrne is an Irish musician living in Galway. I had the pleasure of catching him at the Quays Bar where I snapped a few photos. Nothing spectacular, but this is one of my favorites because you can see he is putting himself into it.

Nice pic Kevin. I dig the lighting and you are the right, he is putting himself into it. Also like the guy at the bar with his head in his hands. Looks like he had just a wee bit much.

The re-construction of a personal website: part one

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:45:00 -0400

I don’t consider myself a web designer, nor am I a web developer. I know enough to produce CSS-based layouts, but my PhotoShop skills are average. However, I do consider myself a knowledgeable individual when it comes to building a clean personal website that enables:

1) The consolidation of all your major online activities without duplication of effort.
2) The elimination of producing an “echo chamber effect”.
3) The presentation of all content from a variety of different sources in a unified and clean user interface.

I am writing this post because I hope that someone will find one of my tips or tricks useful as they construct or tweak their personal site. I am not revealing any secrets or new ideas in these posts, but hopefully some of these pointers will provide some value in the evolution of your personal website. On to part one …

Wicks Picks has been the name of my personal website for 10+ years now. After 7 months of changes, I just put the finishing touches on Wicks Picks 2.0. Comments are more than welcome. I can always use the help. I apologize for using “2.0”, but it’s the truth. Wicks Picks 1.0 lived from 1997ish through 2004ish. Thanks to the Way Back Machine, you can see some of the remains on my flickr account. I shut Wicks Picks down sometime in ‘04 because it just took too much time to keep up and it wasn’t that rich in content.

In fact, I used to own wickspicks.com and let the registration expire because I thought I was truly done with it. I don’t know what lives there now.

Then in September 2007, Business Bullpen (my company) was asked to develop one of the first Facebook applications for Facebook pages. I signed up for Facebook, and ever since, I’ve spent the last 9 months taking a crash course in social networks, online communities, rss, blogging, and mashup tools. Besides Facebook, I’ve played around with (in no particular order) Twitter, MySpace, BrightKite, Fire Eagle, Last.fm, identi.ca, del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, MyBlogLog, Digg, Twhirl, AlertThingy, LinkedIn, Pandora, Feedburner, Feed Informer, Yahoo Pipes!, Wordpress, Google Reader, NewsGator, Snackr, FriendFeeed, and of course, my favorite, Tumblr. I discovered Tumblr in December 2007 and decided almost instantly that it was the perfect starting point for my personal website. I could import feeds from my other social networking sites, easily publish photos, videos, mp3s, and more, while being able to browse and follow new sites (tumblelogs) in a much richer format than a RSS reader. Of course, Tumblr doesn’t replace a RSS reader. I just enjoy “thumbing through” my Tumblr dashboard more than I do my RSS reader.

Tumblr was the spark, which ignited a long journey in determining the tools and online services that I now use on a daily basis. But, I took that a step further. I wanted my information from my favorite online services presented in one central location that would be easy for others to remember, using my own personal design. That became the goal of Wicks Picks.

I decided on three main sections for Wicks Picks: Home, Blog, and Music. Each section is powered by a separate publishing platform account, but all sections have the same design. I know that having disconnected systems powering a website is not ideal, but this is my personal website. I want it to look good, read well, and update easily. I don’t care about the back end. Part one of this post will focus on the contents and construction of the Home page.

The main content area of my home page consists of two simple things: 1) an automated daily feed from del.icio.us, which they term “daily blog posting” that presents the bookmarks that you saved during the last 24 hours, and 2) a flickr slideshow.

I wanted a home page that did not change as frequently as a tumblelog or blog, but that also wasn’t completely static. The del.icio.us solution, which I’ve named “daily picks” was perfect. I noticed it first on Mike Doeff’s mad dog in the fog website and Mike pointed me in the right direction on how to set this up for my own site. You need a blogging platform first, so I installed Wordpress just for this feature. I don’t know if that was the smartest thing to do, but I know Wordpress rather well, so the install and theme development took less than an hour.

The theme development is important to note. I already had my tumblelog theme design completed when I added Wordpress, so I took the style sheet and HTML from my tumblelog theme to create a new Wordpress theme. With Wordpress, I had to break the code up into more than 2 files, specifically header.php, index.php, sidebar.php, footer.php, and the style sheet. If you aren’t familiar with the file structure in building Wordpress themes, this step will take longer than an hour. Once the Wordpress theme is created, set Wordpress to show as many posts on a page as you want. I’ve set it to 1 obviously.

It takes about 5 minutes to set up the del.icio.us feed. Within your del.icio.us account, go to https ://secure.del.icio.us/settings/INSERT USER NAME HERE/blogging/posting. For a Wordpress installation, the out_url is your blog url/xmlrpc.php. The out_blog_id is 1 and you don’t need an out_cat_id. One thing you might miss is the out_time, which is the hour that your daily picks will post to your site. It’s in GMT, so make sure you input the time accurately for your time zone.

To really make your daily picks interesting, one should use the notes field in del.icio.us when bookmarking because that data will display along with your bookmarks (and tags). So now I’m not only tagging and cataloging bookmarks for future use, but I’m are also sharing them with the world (in my case, the 3 people who read my site) in a tumblelog/blog type format. Again, I realize that installing Wordpress just for this function might not be the most efficient method. If I knew that Tumblr could handle it, then I would have gone that route, so if there is a way to do this with a tumblr account, please let me know!

The photo gallery was also very simple, so simple in fact that I don’t even recall the slide show I decided on using. Instead of displaying all my flickr photos or a set or a collection, I decided on creating a new tag just for the slide show. Therefore, I could create a slide show that presented “a few of my favorite things”, essentially a life story in photos. Several months ago I switched from Picasa to Flickr, primarily because I bought an AppleTV and one can access the Flickr website via AppleTV. In addition, there seems to be a whole lot more widgets, plugins, services, and tools out there using Flickr than Picasa.

The home page sidebar consists of my three rss feeds, one for each section, all powered by feedburner for tracking purposes. Below that is the last 3 posts across the entire site. I use Feed Informer for this. Feed Informer lets you combine 6 RSS feeds into one so that you can present the results on your own website. Feed Informer results are very easy to style. They provide about 8-10 canned templates that you can then change by stripping out their HTML code and just plopping into a div that you have defined in your style sheet. The only issue I have with Feed Informer is the presentation of their logo at the bottom of each feed. If anyone knows how to remove that, please leave me a comment. I would prefer to just give them a credit in my footer with the other credits.

Below the latest picks is my last 5 actions recorded by FriendFeed. I am going to assume you know what FriendFeed is if you’ve made it this far in my post. FriendFeed does not make this simple to find, but here is mine. Just substitute my user name with yours and then you can grab the code. In order to style it so it can work with your own custom design, you will need to overwrite their default styles in your style sheet. Thanks to Josh Jenkins for helping me with this one.

That’s it for the home page. I purposely selected this content for my home page because it provides a good snap shot of who I am while also providing the visitor with an overview of what’s inside the site and an opportunity to follow/subscribe.

Ok, it’s quitting time. Enjoy the 4th everyone. I will try to get out parts two and three soon. Cheers!

I am not a web designer, but I know a little about web design...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:42:00 -0400

I am not a web designer, but I know a little about web design and usability and this has to be one of the worst websites ever. A friend asked me to vote for their firm in one of those “Best of” contests at this website. I landed there and my eyes hurt from all the flashing ads, number of columns and colors.

They must be giving away the ad space for free because no way would I pay to advertise here. It’s a sure way to have your company message get lost amongst a bunch of other junk.

Sorry. I can’t vote for your firm because this website sucks.

Rant over. Thanks for listening.

"It’s all ball bearings nowadays."

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:50:15 -0400

“It’s all ball bearings nowadays.”

- Fletch

A new personal worst

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:41:41 -0400

A new personal worst

I've been stimulated!!!!

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:50 -0400

I've been stimulated!!!!:

marco:

This is one of those posts that’s going to look really funny in two years.

Me too! It will go right back to the Feds in my next estimated tax payment. Woohoo!

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-6-29)

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:13:24 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2008-6-29):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr

My last.fm profile using Wordle, thanks to Master Giraffe.

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 01:54:39 -0400

My last.fm profile using Wordle, thanks to Master Giraffe.

Swurl

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 01:53:20 -0400

Swurl:

joelaz:

Create your own lifestream that aggregates your content from Twitter, FriendFeed, del.icious, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, Last.fm and more. You can customize your page and host it on your own domain.

Looks very cool so far: toddwickersty.swurl.com

Photo

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:04:16 -0400

"The culture of free, seductive as it is, is destructive to everyone involved. Everyone is..."

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:26:36 -0400

“The culture of free, seductive as it is, is destructive to everyone involved. Everyone is undercutting everyone, until nobody is making a profit. At best, the winner is the group that can survive off of (usually meager) ad revenues.”

- Matt Maroon: Bubble 2.0 (via marco)

Pasta on the Mountain - Leftover SalmonFor Friday Cover day,...

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:55:00 -0400

Pasta on the Mountain - Leftover Salmon

For Friday Cover day, an oddball cover of The Grateful Dead’s Fire on the Mountain.

photo by Luiza

energyface:byrdie:yourmonkeycalled:Eddie Murphy’s giant...

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:43:30 -0400

energyface:

byrdie:
yourmonkeycalled:
Eddie Murphy’s giant head on the interstate.
(via ahhhitshayley —> emptyage)
How odd and what a gloriously strange site indeed.

Now that’s some serious rubber necking.

bijan:Space Wrangler - Widespread PanicMy song of the day...

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:04:00 -0400

bijan:

Space Wrangler - Widespread Panic
My song of the day inpsired by Bob Lefsetz letter “Track of the Day”. You should read the entire letter but I love when he says:
Listening to “Space Wrangler” is like having your best friend drop by unannounced and insist you get in his car for a road trip. The automobile’s not a Ferrari. It’s probably not even a convertible. And a movie star is not sitting in the backseat. But staring out the windshield, you’re in heaven anyway. Thinking that being alive is so fucking great! Thinking about the unknown, contemplating your adventure.

You know when anyone posts a Panic tune, I am going to reblog. It’s standard protocol. I will have to check out the Lefsetz article. Sometimes he gets on my nerves though since he can be so negative, but it sounds like this is a positive one.

newspeedwayboogie:Black Rebel Motorocycle Club, Ain’t No Easy...

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:44:40 -0400

newspeedwayboogie:

Black Rebel Motorocycle Club, Ain’t No Easy Way
These guys clearly want to be rock stars, they think big and far, don’t always succeed but when they do it’s amazing, like this song.

I really enjoyed seeing these guys last fall.

(via david)I have been told that this photo reminds some...

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:02:53 -0400

(via david)

I have been told that this photo reminds some people of me after “Man Night” in Nags Head a couple weeks ago with two exceptions:1. Cheeze Doodles was my food of choice, not doughnut holes.2. My belly was hanging out