Engineered Thoughts

Welcome to my new blog! Its the same web address but I’ve moved over to WordPress and spiffied up the place.  It’s much easier to comment, track pingbacks, add tags, and most importantly, write posts!

I’ve moved all the content from the other blog over.  Unfortunately I was unable to keep the same urls as the last blog, but it’s all here and searchable.  If you notice something not working, please let me know.

I also added a Feedburner RSS feed at the top if you’d like to read that way.

Thanks again for reading!

I finally had a chance to sit down and catch up on reading all the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. This past week and a half has been filled with dealing with a very frustrating publication, some of which was through a blackberry in another time zone because I was traveling from work. We’re still dealing with the aftermath though things have calmed down some. They are very demanding and have asked for many changes to their newly redesigned website over the past week. As the requests grew (many for changing things that we just changed), I really wanted to just tell them no (I have recently been given almost complete control over what goes up on all our websites in an effort to improve them and let the publishers focus on running their publications instead of being web designers). Each time, I took a deep breath and told myself that as long as this change didn’t mess up anything design-wise, it would make them happy if we put it in and soon they would be satisfied.

While I was reading my RSS feeds, I came across the following snippet of Tantek’s blog on Nice people:

• Give more time and attention to nice people: For now here is my summary advice: focus most of your time on the people that are nice (or overall clear net positives), some of your time on people who are neutral (or unclear if they are net positive or negative), and no more than 1% of your time on people who are mean (or net negatives). This explicit distribution of time will likely take considerable proactive effort on your part, as once you start analyzing how much time you spend on whom, you’ll likely realize that the net negatives end up soaking up most of your time (and emotional energy / attention span for that matter) by default. You will almost certainly need to take firm steps to reduce the time you spend both with such individuals, and even thinking about them, and then be sure to fill that time by both thinking about and spending time with nice people.

Unfortunately this particular publication happens to be the largest money maker for the company (although they are #3 currently for Internet revenue due to larger expenses). However, I do think that this method has some merit and I think people tend to do more for nice people anyway.

I decided to use WordPress for my Sazbean site, and I have been very happy with it. The interface is easy to use and so is installation. Customization can be done through open-source widgets and plug-ins, although these can be a bit of a challenge to get to work properly. It is written in php and uses a mysql database on the backend. The php is accessible so you can tweak and edit whatever you want – although anything you probably want to tweak is in the theme php instead of having to touch the base software. It doesn’t have quite the flexibility as Mambo, which is what I’m using for this blog – but Mambo is a full blown Content Management System (CMS) with blogging as an afterthought. WordPress is written specifically for blogging, with the ability to do some static pages as well.

For the purposes of Sazbean, WordPress has worked very well and I think I will be switching both this site and the Dynalink websites to it. I will lose some PageRank from switching over Engineered Thoughts and my feed address will change (I’ll have that go through FeedBurner so I don’t have to worry about that in the future), but I believe it will give a better experience for my visitors and will be easier to manage for me. I’m going to try to work on that today, but might not get done until next weekend. I’ll try to give a headsup here so it isn’t too much of a surprise.

Technorati tags: WordPress, blogging, CMS, Content Management Systems