LostFocus

A weblog by Dominik Schwind

I have nothing to say, really.

Fuck off.

Journaling

By Dominik Schwind

I have written on more than one occassion that I really like 750 Words, a page that asks it’s users to write 750 words every day. In typewriter-lingo, that’s three pages. It’s private, it is daily and it‘s – well, actually rather pretty.

In the beginning I was quite eager to finish the 750 words. But pretty soon a certain fatigue set in. I’m not a writer, all in all and writing long texts never was my forte. Even my final German literature exam paper was only two pages long – as far as I was concerned, I said all that was worth saying.1 So after a while, I just stopped. 750 words take a lot of time – time, which I unfortunately have to sacrifice to the gods of commuting every day. There’s also OhLife, which was described as “750 words for people with ADD. Or stuff to do” by Philipp Moehring which does something clever – it doesn’t expect any long texts, it sends it’s reminders in the evening and it works via email, which is where most people might be writing anyway.

But somehow, it still doesn’t quite trigger my writing reflexes. I did need to find something else.
And so, about two months ago, I started to fill up one of the many needlessly bought Field Notes notebooks that seem to litter every surface of this apartment by now with very short notes about the day. A lot shorter than 750 words – and in my completely illegible handwriting. But it does work for me – I’ve been doing it almost daily now and when I flip back, I does trigger certain memories and thoughts that otherwise would have been gone for good.

Being a pretty digital person, this kind of analog journaling2 still irks me in a weird way. Hell, I’m pushing so much data daily through Twitter and Tumblr and Flickr and the Google Shared Items and last.fm and through Foursquare and Gowalla – that’s all stuff that would be an awesome add-on to the written journal. Like the old Lifestream idea, just better.

So, in case you were wondering, what I’ve been pondering lately, web-wise, that’s it. Non web-wise? Well, that might not be something to put online, at least not yet.

Now Playing: JinnyOops! – TOKI

  1. Yeah, I almost did fail because of that. Which is more than you need to know about it. [↩]
  2. actually a word that my Firefox spellchecker doesn’t recognize – is it even real? Or am I, once again, making myself look like a fool by my incorrect use of english-sounding words? [↩]

NoseRub-DevCamps / WordPress-Plugin

By Dominik Schwind

Am Wochenende war ich ja auf dem NoseRub-DevCamp und wir waren sehr produktiv – generell war das Motto das Wochenendes ja “Schaffe, nit schwätze,”1 was wir wohl auch ziemlich gut umgesetzt haben.

Meine Hauptenergie ging in das WordPress-Plugin, das seit heute auch einen Platz auf wordpress.org gefunden hat. Die wichtigsten Features (aus meiner Sicht):

  • OpenID-Delegation – man kann jetzt seine Blog-URL als OpenID verwenden, die Technik dahinter liefert die NoseRub-Installation, die man benutzt.
  • Lifestream-Widget und Template-Tag – Hier auch benutzt, leider noch komplett ungestyled, mein CSS stellt da ganz wilde Sachen an.
  • Blogroll-Widget der NoseRub-Kontakte. Praktisch und super. Finde ich. :)
  1. Für alle, die nicht das Glück haben, aus dem allemannischen Sprachraum zu kommen: “Arbeiten, nicht reden.” [↩]

Microbloggingszukunftsgedanken

By Dominik Schwind

Todo: Blogpost zum Thema “Zukunft des Microbloggens und Livestreamens”, re: XMPP and Microblogging, xmpp and microblogging – let’s do it!, Die Zukunft des Microbloggings, Gordian Knot in my head: XMPP, RSS, Microblogging & Social Streams etc. pp. und überhaupt.

Lifestream

By Dominik Schwind

Ein Thema, das ich ja unglaublich spannend finde: Lifestreams, eine Abbildung der Onlinepersönlichkeit durch Aggregation der eigenen Feeds. Dazu gibt es jetzt ein Weblog – das Lifestreamblog von Mark Krynsky. [via Emily Chang] Für etwas ähnliches benutze ich im Moment Jaiku, überlege mir aber schon ständig, wie ich das netter bauen kann.