Nimble Code: Category Meta

On Returning To Blogging Here After A Long Time Away

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:30:00 -0700

In which the author continues to use a title formulation—one that seems right out of the 19th century, but these days denotes a certain overweening preciousness well suited to be published by McSweeney’s—to explain his long absence from-,

Ah, screw it. The question on the minds of my remaining readers (all 10 of you) might be where the heck have I been (sorry for the sad invective, but I’ve been trying to cut down on my cursing for reasons that should soon be clear) and why am I blogging again now? 250-some days is a long day to be quiet, and it’s not like the blog was that awesome before it went on hiatus. What happened?

Good question. To be honest, the main reason is I’ve been rather busy. For starters, I have still been blogging all this while, but for the New York Times’ open source initiatives at our blog Open. The main reason though is that I am a proud father of the most amazing kid in thr world. It’s not that the baby keeps me from blogging, rather it’s just that blogging doesn’t really compare at all to spending time with him (my personal coding productivity has similarly been very low). Especially since, to be bluntly honest, the writing on this blog had become as boring as listening to a Garrison Keillor marathon. Better not to do it.

So, why restart now? Because it just feels fun again. And because I actually feel like it might also be interesting as well to continue my musings on the future of newspapers (and my experiences and experiments along those lines) in a forum that is not as official and fraught with consequences for misplayed snark like the official New York Times blog would be.

This is not to say I will be dishing dirt and spilling secrets. I like my job enough to not want to lose it, and that’s not really my style. But I think it would be fun (at least to me) to post my occasional rants with perspective from inside the New York Times, and perhaps, if I’m lucky, fun for some random people on the Interwebs to read it. Sound like a plan?

If worse comes to worse, I’ll just stop again. It wouldn’t be the first time…

Blogging? Me?

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:37:00 -0800

Sometimes, it’s best to just come out and say it, so here we go: I suck at blogging these days. This is not me beating myself – I don’t feel bad in the slightest – I just am acknowledging the truth of the matter. Sorry for any of my readers who haven’t consigned me to the dustbins of their feed readers yet, but it’s unlikely I will be producing any riveting content anytime in the near future. I have a lot of changes in my life coming up – new coop! baby! projects here at the Times! – that I’m spent when I get home to blog (of course, thanks to Time-Warner Cable I haven’t had Internet at home anyway) and don’t produce any writing that meets my high standards for Original Blogging Content (TM).

However, I do still have time to feed content into a few other places, for those that need to get their Jake fix. For starters, you can follow the minutiae of my random thoughts (all less then 140 characters) at Twitter. In addition, I have started what’s known as a tumbleblog over on Tumblr, which is where I will post content that’s the opposite of Nimble Code: pithy, snarky, non-technical, and varied. Feel free to check both out and one day I will get back to writing here as well.

Finally, if you were interested in some of the topics from my Future of Newspapers posts but want to see a professional journalist’s perspective, I strongly suggest Frontline’s News War series, being broadcast now on PBS and also viewable on the Web.

My Best Blogging Excuse Yet

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:39:00 -0800

So, if you’ve been checking on my blog lately, you might have noticed I’ve been rather lame about blogging lately (as opposed to before when I was somewhat lame). Sorry about that, I can promise I’ll try to change, but I have a lot of stuff going on in my life that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a computer. Mainly, this:

Yes, that’s right. I’m going to be a father for the first time (expected due date: May 9th). Now that we’ve passed beyond the first trimester superstitiousness and jitters, I want to tell the whole world. Thanks for reading, and hopefully I’ll write something else for you one of these days.

Lying Fallow

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 10:26:57 -0700

I’d like to apologize for the silence on this blog. Way back in the days before MeasureMap I used to feel like I had to keep writing for my many regular readers (all 12 of you as I now know), but the inspiration has just not been there recently. It hasn’t helped that I have been out of town on 2 separate occasions and with enough work to keep me busy and focused. But I also have been purposefully staying away from my blog. It’s not that I can’t find things to post about, it’s just that I haven’t felt they’re really interesting enough to say (I like to do more than belabor the obvious).

I hope to return with more content in the future, but this period of lying fallow has been immensely inspirational and productive in so many other ways; in short, it might be a while. Thanks again for your continued patronage.

Keep It Original

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 12:18:00 -0800

I am aware there is something so deeply ironic about this, but I wanted to share a great link about the practice of blogging titled A Great CD Is Not A Failed Radio Station. If you’re a blogger, you should read it. You can go there now, I’ll wait.

Most blogs suck. They don’t really say anything new. This is largely because search engines, aggregators, and advertising models all encourage quantity over quality – many short and quick observations over long analysis. Search engines love freshness in content, and fresh posts mean more clicks means more advertising revenue. And so, many people labor strenuously to post daily to their blogs, even if this makes their writing suffer.

The problem is that like any writing, blogging takes time and mental energy, and if you find yourself having to write daily or more, your blog postings will usually become little more than “me too” or “check this out” declarations – filler content with no real additional thought or analysis. This reductive trend is accelerated by the desire to want to be the first post to comment or link to something new on the web. This leads to initial kneejerk appraisals on big stories instead of more thoughtful analysis days later when the story is “old.” And so, the reckless pursuit of freshness in blog content only encourages staleness in the ideas on those pages. And the Internet begins to resemble Sunday political talk shows with their empty talking-points and flip-reactions.

As you can see from my posting schedule, I’m hardly a victim of this syndrome (I’ll call it Premature Blogification). But if you find yourself on a never-ending race to keep up posting to your blog, maybe you should try a change. Get the Blogging Monkey off your back and embrace quality and sanity again. Your readers will love it. And so will you.

Calculate Your NYTYIIH Score!

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 10:08:00 -0800

For the past 5 years, the New York Times has graced with an annual roundup article titled The Year In Ideas. The issue actually came out last week, but it’s a sign of my recent workload – and the excessive number of holiday parties I had to attend – that I only read it on the commute into work today.

It actually was rather boring. Not because of the ideas themselves, but because I had actually read many of them before on various blogs and other geeky websites (Sometimes, I long for a service like “del.icio.us” for feed subscriptions just so I can share how hip the feeds I read are). I am not an information omnivore by any means, but it was apparent that I was cued into some of the same idea sources as the editors of the New York Times. Which led to an idea of my own. Since the New York Times has declared its Year In Ideas issue to be an annual tradition, I’m going to start my own personal tradition of tabulating my personal New York Times Year In Ideas Hipness score (or NYTYIIH for short). The methodology is simple. Look at every idea listed and if you had heard of it before reading in the Times, give yourself a point. Okay, let’s get started then.

The following table lists the titles of the ideas in the 2005 Year in Ideas issue with bold ones being ideas I had encountered before. I know some of the titles are cryptic, but you can take that up with the New York Times editors and not me.

Accredited Bliss	Playoff Paradigm, The
The Anti-Paparazzi Flash	Pleistocene Rewilding
The Anti-Rape Condom	The Porn Suffix
Branding Nations	Preventing Suicide Bombing
Cartoon Empathy	The Readable Medicine Bottle
Celebrity Teeth	Republican Elitism
Cobblestones are Good for You	Robot Jockeys
Collapsing the Distribution Window	The Runaway Alarm Clock
Consensual Interruptions	Scientific Free-Throw Distraction
Conservative Blogs are More Effective	Seeing With Your Ears
Dialing Under the Influence	The Self-Fulfilling Trade Rumor
Do-It-Yourself Cartography	The Serialized Pop Song
Dolphin Culture	The Sitcom Loyalty Oath
Econophysics	Solar Sailing
Embryo Adoption	The Sonic Gunman Locator
Ergomorphic Footwear	Splogs
The Fair Employment Mark	The Stash Rocket
The False-Memory Diet	Stoic Redheads
The Fleeting Relationship	The Stream-of-Consciousness Newspaper
Folksonomy	Subadolescent Queen Bees
Forehead Billboards	The Suburban Loft
Gastronomic Reversals	The Synesthetic Cookbook
Genetic Theory of Harry Potter	Taxonomy Auctions
The Global Savings Glut	”The Crawl” Makes You Stupid
The His-and-Her TV	The Toothbrush That Sings
The Hollywood-Style Documentary	The Totally Religious, Absolutely Democratic Constitution
The Hypomanic American	Touch Screens That Touch Back
The Infrared Pet Dry Room	Trial-Transcript Dramaturgy
In Vitro Meat	Trust Spray
Juvenile Cynics	Two-Dimensional Food
The Laptop That Will Save the World	The Uneavesdroppable Phone Conversation
Localized Food Aid	The Urine-Powered Battery
Making Global Warming Work for You	Video Podcasts
Medical Maggots	Why Popcorn Doesn’t Pop
Microblindness	Worldwide Flat Taxes
Monkey Pay-Per-View	Yawn Contagion
National Smiles	The Yoo Presidency
Open-Source Reporting	The Zero-Emissions S.U.V.
Parking Meters That Don’t Give You a Break	Zombie Dogs

So, what is my final score? 51 out of 78, which gives me NYTYIIH score of 65.38%! I’m quite pleased with myself this year; since I have just started, I can unabashedly call this year’s score my personal best. Can you beat me?

Props to Planet Argon

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 10:09:49 -0700

Apologies again for the lack of posting. I’m in the midst of another long rut of writer’s block and working on a lot of outside projects. In the meantime, be sure to check out this blog’s hosting company Planet Argon for their lovely new site design, written in Ruby on Rails of course. Things have been running a lot more smoothly since I moved this blog over, and I highly recommend them for your hosting needs.

Going on Holiday

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 00:50:00 -0700

Posting will be light, my nonexistant readers for the next week. I am off to Cape Cod to enjoy the fine weather and calm beaches before September starts up. I hope to spend most of the time away from the computer too. So I will see you when I get back, and be sure to enjoy the last of summer and eat more ice cream.

Moved to Typo

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 02:50:00 -0700

Just wanted to note that I have moved this blog to Typo, an excellent blogging system written in Ruby on Rails . If you’re not reading this in an RSS reader, the change should be pretty apparent, although I must apologize for not having rethemed yet. Otherwise, I look forward to hopefully spending more time blogging and less time doing maintenance in the future.

We Now Resume Our Regularly Scheduled Broadcast

harrisj — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 00:01:36 -0700

Apologies for the silence recently (here I pretend I actually have readers), but I have been overwhelmed with work of late. Soon I shall be back with more posts and what I hope is insight into my little realm of computer science.