rob’s place

I haven’t been posting as much lately, but I have been sharing a lot of items.

Recently:

• Credit Card Myths
• Guy legally changes his name to “In God We Trust”
• Two poachers in Kenya arrested
• Kudzu is a potential biofuel

I’m finding it so much easier to share an item and make a quick comment on it on my share blog.  Hop on over or subscribe!

My share blog got the hiccups and things got messed up.  It’s been emptied and moved around a bit.  Starting all over.  No biggie but I suggest if you were subscribed to unsubscribe and start over:

Subscribe to orangejack shares by RSS

Subscribe to orangejack shares by Email

Visit orangejack shares blog (share.orangejack.com)

Maybe I’ll explore and dive into this later, but I think I have finally got a hold of my online presence. I mean, I can’t call myself an Internet Strategist if I can’t even figure out how to explain my strategy, can I?

What I finally realized is a not-so-brilliant observation but one that made an impact on how I consume the internets: the internet is divided into content I create and content I don’t create. More specifically, of the content I don’t create only some of it I find (and find interesting for that matter).

I use various tools to create and find content, then filter it all into one place, Google Reader. From gReader, I filter out everything I consume and decide if I want to share it with you. gReader has changed the way it shares and now allows me to skip the gReader filtering process and share pages or snippets of pages straight to my shared items blog. And now that FriendFeed is around and I’m starting to get a handle on it, I see one of its roles to be an aggregator of all the content I create plus the filtered content I find and want to share.

So as you can see in the graph above (would you believe I actually spent time making this?) I have content I create on the left through my blogs, twitter, flickr, and youtube. On the right side is content I find through sites I subscribe to, delicious, digg, and stumbleupon. All of that comes into my gReader. From there I decide what I want to share and it all ends up on my shared items blog (which is now being redirected from share.orangejack.com). You can get my share RSS feed or email if you like.

Geeze, I hope this makes sense to someone. It does to me.

Some of you may notice that tumblr is not on the list. That’s because I think I’m moving on from it. gReader makes it too easy. However, tumblr is getting my gReader RSS and republishing it.

I just realized that gReader is now offered for gApps. What does this mean to me? Much. To you? Probably nothing.

Except that I think I’ve finally settled on how I’m going to manage all of my online stuff all over the place. More on that later.

I like clean RSS feeds.  No more mixing stuff up for me.  Mostly.

I’ve decided that the RSS feed for rob’s place will just be of whatever shows up here.  Nothing else.

However, I find a lot of stuff online and I save it in all sorts of places.  Sometimes it’s on my Amazon wishlist.  Sometimes I bookmark it in del.icio.us.  Or digg.  Or I save it in StumbleUpon.  Or whatever.

So, here’s what I’m doing now:  no longer am I syndidicating feeds straight into anywhere…except one place: my FriendFeed.  It’s got everything and it’s sitting over there in my sidebar.

But I’m not going to stop sharing on Orangejack Shares.  In fact, it’s where I’m going to link to everything I want to share.  It’s a lot more active with fun, random stuff than this blog is now.

Not every Digg or del.icio.us or twitter or whatever will automatically show up on Tumblr.  I’ll push to that site what I want to share there.  Nothing automated.

So, you can now subscribe freely to whatever you want.  I’ll aggregate my Internet finds and share them in one place, blog in other places, and allow FriendFeed to catch it all.

For a list of all my blogs and RSS feeds, see my profile page.

I guess I’m on a clean streak.  Even wiped down rob’s place so you can’t even recognize it.  Take a look feed readers.

All of this is effectively immediately and is subject to change.  And probably will.

I asked the question last night on Twitter: which sharing is better?

It’s between the new Google Reader share stuff they have vs using tumblr (it’s what is feeding the “orangejack shares” box in the left column of the blog),

I think I’ve decided to stay with tumblr for a few reasons:

1. Tumblr allows me to customize the blog
2. Tumblr gives you a better URL
3. Tumblr allows me to syndicate automatically a few feeds in
4. Tumblr is more versatile for sharing stuff

Google has some things going for it though:

1. Google allows you to add notes
2. Google does a great job consolidating everything

So, though I know you weren’t worried, I’ve decided to stick with tumblr as my share blog: Orangejack Shares (subscribe via RSS or email — it’s worth it!)

Pssssssssst.  Did you know I have an Amazon.com store called Rob’s Recommendations?

Right now I have 4 categories of stuff: books, DVDs, Extras, and Disney DVDs.  The category listing is on the right.

Each page has a navigation at the bottom to see more.

Happy shopping! 

I’m having fun playing with my tumblr.com account. I may be having more fun posting there because it’s quick and easy. And I don’t comment on it. That’s why I call it orangejack shares.

If you are or were subscribed to the orangejack shares RSS feed via Tumblr, I’d like to ask you to switch to this RSS feed instead.

If you are not subscribed to orangejack shares, you can subscribe to orangejack shares by email or via RSS.

Everything on there is sweet like candy and I like to share — and I always bring enough for the entire class.

I like the new WordPress 2.5 but the media upload section doesn’t work. Can’t upload photos (gets a HTTP error and stops). Try to add a video and it just stares at me.

Any ideas?

UPDATE: Looks like it was the plugin Bad Behavior that blocked it. Thanks Paul!

Do you remember that I’ve been saying I have a lot of things going on and more announcements to make? Well today I have a big one that we’re very excited about. Any yes, today is April 1, but this isn’t a joke.

Patricia and I have opened up our own small business called Orangejack LLC. Today is Orangejack LLC’s Grand Opening.

Right now we are focusing our service to Internet Strategy, Internet Consulting, Internet Marketing, and Internet Training.

So stop by the newly redesigned (and continually tweaked) orangejack.com today!

We are open for business.

Did you know that I share items from time to time that were not authored by me? Shocking but true.

Well, I now have all my shared items all in one place at orangejack shares.

I’m sharing favorite blog posts from around the blogowebs from Google Shared items, my status updates/announcements from Twitter, some great articles from Digg, my photos from Flickr, and saved websites from del.icio.us — all in one place!

Or get the RSS feed.

What do you share?

Well that was a fun first day! I launched 170spoons.com yesterday (Feb 29!) as a web community for the best tips, tools, and tutorials for using technology well in every day life.

I checked the stats this morning and found that about 500 people showed up yesterday!

But less than 20 are subscribed.

If you think you might find this site useful now, in the future for yourself, please consider subscribing!

If you think it could be useful for others, would you consider sharing it? One way is to digg it if you’re a member. Add it to your SubmbleUpon account if you have one. Share it with your Facebook friends. There are plenty of sites you can use to share it. Hop back over to 170spoons and click on the “Save & Share” button. Or on the “Share this” button for individual posts.

Thanks so much! And remember, visit 170spoons.com for the best tools, tips, and tutorials for technology!