What you are seeing on my blog today is a temporary placeholder until I can officially “relaunch.”

I’ve recently moved to the East Coast (Somerville, MA) and have been doing some Big Thinking about where I’m going with my work, life, etc. Part of this is a renewed emphasis on ego-building online. It’s easier now than ever, and I’m really exhausted by seeing uninteresting people have all the fun.

However, as an antidote to my bad habits of taking on too many low-value projects and passive aggressively making the last 20% of ongoing projects drag on and on, I have been trying to implement Cal Newport’s idea of a completion-centric productivity. In a nutshell:

• Make a list of the areas of your life (ex. Professional, Relationships, Physical)
• Under each category, brainstorm on all the projects you have going on for that “sphere” of your existence.
• Identify the top 1 or 2 in each category that, if you finished them w/in 2 weeks, would make the most positive impact (however you’d like to measure that). Break down large projects into mini-projects that will take around 2 weeks to finish. I aimed for 8 or so projects.
• Create a worksheet listing of these projects. (Excel worked well for this) Next to each project, identify a completion criteria. This is a narrative that describes what your world will look like when that project is finished and out of your hair forever. (hint: write this in the past test. ex: “I submitted the article proposal to the editor.”)
• Print this out and carry it with you everywhere. This is your script for the next 2 weeks. You have to adopt a mentality that no matter what happens, you will make as much forward progress towards completion on these projects as you can every single day. At the end of 2 weeks, you should have completed every single project on that list.
• If other project ideas come up (and they will tempt you over and over), you need to put them in a holding bin. Nothing new can come on your list. If you are in the thick of it and don’t have your act together, trust me, new stuff can wait a couple weeks. Just write it on the back of your worksheet.
• Here is the key that make it work for me: I only work on one project at a time in 4 hour chunks. I also have been blocking in “me time” for things like sleep, hanging out w/ the SO, and exercise (a la The Now Habit)/ All of these are scheduled into iCal and are treated with the seriousness of meetings and appointments.

For me, this means I’ve been pulling late nighters to just get festering projects off my plate so.

It also means “Relaunch the blog” is a project that’s currently sitting in the holding bin until 8/17. So you should see a relaunch w/in 2 weeks after that (i.e. around the end of the month).

I am staring at my holding bin (and backlog of other projects) and see lots of extremely valuable, lucrative, exciting, and downright fun ideas. It is so tempting to drop the current list and just start working on those.

But that kind of action got me into lots of trouble before Hence, rigor.

• Fixed odd format on permalink pages
• Fixed double “Tag: Tag:”

Not done converting, yet. Relax.

I’ve been hacking away at a little app to post/share what I’m going to call “sketchstreams”

I learned a lot about how I enjoy working while getting ready for maker faire.

I’ll be adding features and tweaking the design on the blog in iterations over time rather in fell swoops.

Collect, Wonder, Tinker, Build, Repeat — that should apply here too.

1. adjust controllers/feed_controller so that the article limit is greater than number of articles
2. clear cached feed in settings
3. in CLI, execute “curl http://yoururl.com/feed/ > feed.xml” (atom)
4. use an xml / xsl editor on feed.xml to apply the Atom2RSS xsl sheet found here http://atom.geekhood.net/
5. Use RSS import on wordpress

Issues: Tags / Categories get all mixed up. Pages and comments do not import

I’ve come to better understand what I find interesting in other blogs and what I find dreadfully boring.

I think a lot of what I have put in my blog in the past falls into the terribly yawnspirational.

You can categorize blog posts along an axis of “interestingness” or “value” or “quality.” I would roughly scale the types of blog posts like this (with the understanding that most blog articles will not fall cleanly under just one of these categories):

• Quick Posts, links, observations – these are blog posts that might simply point to research found elsewhere (ex. links to an interesting post on another blog) with some commentary. It might also be a picture I took on the way to work. These are usually fast, come often, and very likely do not have much meaningful content content.

• Posts that propose ideas or questions and posts that that show attempts at solving those questions

• “Final” articles that are fully baked – they tend to be longer, come along very rarely and have been edited and publicized, often over multiple versions. My SxSW article is a good example.

There is an element of mental doodling that happens on blogs, but I recognize that most people don’t care about the draft versions of most of the author’s thoughts.

So my intent is to reengineer the blogging and blog reading experience here to account for readers who may only want to read fully built articles.

Here are some assumptions:

• EVERY nugget of content (links, articles, photos, personal journal entries, questions) can potentially spawn other bits of content (or at least have a directed graph relationship with other bits).

• Certain content pieces can be tagged as “questions” or points of “wonder.” These might look like blog posts posing a single thesis.

• Certain other content pieces can be tagged as “research” or “experiments” to answer those questions.

• Certain bits of content can be tagged as “built” or “versions” of an answer to a specific “wonder.”

This requires that I, as an author, can “riff” off of anything I put in my blog. I should build into the authoring software simple buttons that say “riff” which spawn child nodes.

Alternatively, I may be able to build custom tags into the software which allow me to divide articles into specific areas.

As a reader, you should have the option to see what research, questions, and tinkering led to whatever you are currently reading. Furthermore, you should be able to filter away everything but the final “built” articles.

Questions: Can a node have multiple parents? Can a parent have multiple children?

I modified .htaccess redirects (should probably become mod_rewrites) and created a custom handler for a php GET case.

These helped:

• Typosphere Wiki
• DreamHost Wiki
• Alex Young’s Advice

Ultimately, I needed to flush caches and kill ruby processes

I decided to migrate my blogging platform after I saw Katie using the admin interface.

Reasons

• Just for giggles, mostly.
• Drupal was fun, but it was way too bloated to allow me to do the kind of exploration I was hoping to accomplish with my blog.
• Also wanted to force myself to bone up on Ruby.
• There seems to be a more wide open opportunity to contribute to the project vs. Drupal which already has a pretty mature community.
• Wanted to see if switching mediums is a way to spark your creative productivity.

TODO (no implied priority on the list):

• Still need to import / migrate the comments.
• Migrate tags => keywords field properly
• Do redirects for named pages in Drupal
  • Lazytown
  • sxsw
  • contact
  • about
  • Other(?)
• <strike>Do feed redirects</strike> completed 2006.04.24
• GoogleAds on Lazy Town entries
• Scour drupal installation to find any additional migration points
• migrate drupal types besides “page” and “story”
• Create and Upload Guide to Drupal – Typo migration
• Better Theming
• <strike>Upload to Server</strike>
• Think about backup / maintenance plan
• Think about update schedule
• Implement Parent – Child features
• Implement Del.icio.us and flickr feed to article features
• Implement creativity framework features
• BUG: Switching textfilters on article does not apply textfilter on save unless you touch the body of the content
• BUG(?): Is there an issue with the inject method implemented by archive sidebar component
• Make sure post pings work correctly

I did some pretty hacky / kludgey things to get the old articles to migrate over. I’ll try to document them (see the above todo list for that action item), but my focus was to get this up and functional before Maker Faire so I could blog about that. Thus I have to make the following caveat:

Warning: Everything before this article (or for the entire blog, for that matter, has the potential for being massively screwed up and potentially massively screwing up your own computer / content / newsreader, etc. I’ll keep an eye on it. But please email me (david at davidnunez.com) if you notice massive problems not addressed in this post.

Updated: Tuesday; April 25, 2006 – 12:32 PM