Still building my web skills

Jul 22, 2012

If you’ve been following my tweets this weekend, you may have caught on that I’m learning some new Web skills.

Mostly I’ve been getting a new server up to run the World Outline, Radio2 and River2. I owe Dave Winer a huge shout of thanks for his continued inspiration and the tools he’s creating for anyone who wants to control their own content. Dave’s being patient with me as I fumble my way along, learning about EC2 and S3, how to manage DNS, and remembering to read the howtos slowly and closely.

Little by little, I’m getting there. My linkblog is here and will grow, and eventually become the Sugarcubes here on mistersugar.com. My river (the RSS feeds I read each day) is working, though not public for some reason. My new URL shortener will use stor.im, but I’ve done something wrong and now my Radio2 bookmarklet is borked. But, hey, this is great fun to me, because I’m learning and getting ideas along the way about how to use these tools.

In the next few days, when I get this all working, I’ll have a place for the storyblogging and Talk Story and other narrative projects (background: Talk story: Reviewing my decade of narrative so far, and what’s next.

I’ll try to chronicle my experiments and explorations here. And by the time we host the Back to the Blog conference at Duke in late September (announcement later this week, with luck), I’m hoping we’ll be able to gather others who are using Dave’s OPML suite of tools for a discussion about what comes next (gotta keep Dave busy!).

Oh, I’m also steaming along on a redesign of the Coconut Wireless (this blog on mistersugar.com, which had its start back in July 2000 because I wanted to learn about HTML and knew I needed a place to express myself online). Malia gave me her two cents on a key design block that was holding me up. And, I decided to use Foundation instead of Bootstrap (which I’ll get to master once I’m in the World Outline). So, more learning and building.

Anton Zuiker ☄