Every conference I attend I am amazed at how bad many of the slide decks are. It's not as if people are rushing them or creating them at the last minute. They have been created with a lot of time and care they just suck.
I have a few rules when I create a slide deck. If you follow them then you won't upset me, you will ensure your audience remembers the key points and you will save yourself time.
If you are anything like me then you are regularly taking screenshots to share online. There are many different ways to do this but they all have their limitations. I don't like limits and I do like speed and to be in control of my own data.
In my last post I explained that I have purchased a funky domain name http://tee.mn and set it up with YOURLS so that I can create and manage my own short url service.
My next task was to find a way to use this domain to quickly and easily share my screenshots.
I like short urls (shurls). I like being able to create memorable links to anything on the internet. I like being able to see statistics on who else has followed the link.
There are many online services that offer this but when you are not in control of your own data you can get burned and I got burned badly when a short url service stopped working a while back and I lost all those saved urls. So I stopped creating shurls and I missed it.
So you've seen this blog and others like it and think you can do it yourself? Well it's not that easy and I regularly fail but I thought in the spirit of openness and transparency that I should share my top ten tips to creating a successful blog.
If you follow these ten tips you are well on the way to creating a blog as successful as many others that you see online.
I like fonts. I like to use different fonts. I have downloaded lots of fonts for different projects. Each time I start a new project I waste lots of time looking for the "perfect" font.
The problem is that I have forgotten what all of the fonts I already have look like so finding the right font is a slow and frustrating process. On my Mac I have fontbook which catalogs all my fonts and lets me quickly see the alphabet in that font but that is just not good enough.
Every year I attend more tech events than I care to count and every year at this time (just before my birthday) I go through my closet, collect all the "souvenir" t-shirts and donate them to a local homeless shelter.
Official event t-shirts are a pretty cool reminder of the events that you've attended and some of them are even designed well enough that you are happy (and even proud) to wear them again in the future.
But what about all those t-shirts given away by event sponsors that are nothing but adverts. Do you really need them? The photo above was posted on twitter by one person of their personal SWAG collection from just one day at a tech event.
Yesterday was the Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a day of remembrance, repentance, confession and fasting. It is unique in that it is almost universally observed, even by the most secular of Jews for whom it might be the only day of the year that they attend a service.
Central to Yom Kippur is the Al Chet prayer where we are asked to consider the sins we have committed intentionally or unintentionally, what are our sins of commission and our sins of omission and what have we done inadvertently by doing nothing at all.
There is nothing new about Open Source. We might like to think that it is a concept introduced in the last 50 years but in fact the origins of sharing knowledge date back to some of the oldest recordings of written works.
Doing some reading recently I came across the following text translated from a compilation of the ethical teachings and maxims (Pirkei Avot) of the Rabbis (jewish teachers) written down almost 2000 years ago.
We live in a blame culture. We are always looking for someone to blame whenever a situation occurs. We are in control of so much of our lives and yet instead of taking control and changing what we can change we expect someone else to do it for us. The reality is that it isn't someone else's fault - it is mine. And when I say mine I mean yours.
Every time we face an issue instead of looking at someone else to blame we should be looking at ourselves and saying - it's all my fault.
