Category: Just Shelley

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Just Shelley

Planning your own EOL

This week I’m updating my will, which hasn’t been updated since I was married (I’m now divorced). Updating one’s will is never a fun task, but it is essential if you don’t want to leave a mess behind after you die. More importantly, you may not always want everything you own go to Nearest Next of Kin, or the courts, if you die intestate (without a will).

In my case, a will is simple since I don’t own a house or business, and don’t have kids. I’m including in my will my bank account number, and my car insurance policy account information, in addition to the online accounts I’ve set up for both. I do have royalty payments, but it’s a simple matter of just specifying who the royalties go to. Of course, I also have to leave instructions about what royalties I am expecting and who to contact to ensure they go to the right person.

Then there’s this web site, and therein lies a modern challenge when planning one’s own EOL (end of life): what do we do about our connected lives?

I currently have automatic payments set up to pay for phone and internet, as well as my web site. To ensure that these are managed property, I’ve included instructions and access information for both.

I’ve provided a list of people and their email addresses to be notified if I die, so I won’t suddenly disappear without a trace. However, I have no interest in my web site lingering much beyond my death, as some form of white cross along a virtual rather than real highway. I realize that my web site going away will leave holes where previous documents used to be, but whoever decided that the web must remain static and 404 free really didn’t think through the issues in their Utopian view of the internet.

As for my writing or pictures, whatever I do have online is free for the taking after my death. Oh, the copyright will still be there, but my “heirs” will not be going after anyone. I haven’t decided yet, but I may ask that my online material be turned over into the public domain after I die. I’ll have to explore the ramifications of this issue in more depth, as there are some pieces that some people may want.

The domains I own will, themselves, be allowed to expire unless my heirs decide they want to keep or sell them, early. I will include information about how to access my registrar account, as well as my web hosting account.

Speaking of domains, currently I have several email addresses dependent on burningbird.net. I’ve already started using my Gmail account as an intermediary for sign up accounts, and I have to start doing the same with other email addresses I maintain. My email server will be gone once my web site is gone, and I don’t want others to suddenly lose email access because I’m no longer around to maintain the email accounts.

My Kindle is set up under my account at Amazon, and I’m not sure how one goes about “leaving” my Kindle books to another. I would assume that since these are property, and since the actual physical device goes to someone, the books themselves do, also. I’ll have to ask Amazon what its recommendation is. My Netflix account must also be transferred, which means transferring the Netflix Roku box to another account.

Other than my web site and email addresses, as well as online accounts with service providers, I don’t have any investment in any other online social services that I have to worry about closing.

Online accounts are not the only issue, though. I’m the tech in my household, and the only one with knowledge of how all the pieces are fit together. This week I’m spending time writing out detailed instructions of how all the components of my various systems fit together: from how to access movies on my AppleTV (including which computer is synced to my AppleTV, and what my iTunes account information is); to how to access movies, Hulu, or other online account from both my Mac and my Dell laptop.

These latter activities may seem frivolous when compared to the event leading to the need for such documents, but it seems a shame to do a really nice job with a home intranet, only to have it fall apart if I’m not longer around. Plus if I’m not dead, but only incapacitated for a time, or even on a long trip, it would be pity if my roommate couldn’t access my rather spiffy video setup.

To summarize the tasks:

  • Do the usual: create will, assign executor, provide detailed bank account information, as well as information about car insurance, and other insurance policies. Make sure to note all sources of income, even sporadic ones. (Getting money from selling ads, or being an Amazon associate? Note these.)
  • Provide a contact list of who to contact if you’re dead or may be dying.
  • Sign up for and use a centralized email account for any accounts. Have the account forward email to your hosted email account.
  • Leave instructions about how to access your web hosting account, and what do with your online material if you die.
  • Leave detailed instructions for all other online accounts, including your domain registrar, Amazon, Paypal, iTunes, FaceBook, Twitter, and so on.
  • Leave detailed instructions to access all your accounts that are setup with automatic payments. These will need to be transferred or canceled.
  • Provide account information for all computers, too, unless you want the computers wiped clean. Don’t forget your iPhone or other cellphone or small devices.
  • If you participate in some committee, such as a W3C working group, or provide open source software, such as Drupal modules, Firefox patches, then provide information about who to contact and how to provide access to any work in progress, or ensure that someone in authority knows that a module or other work is now available for someone else to support, if they wish. The same goes for any conference or other event where you’ve made commitments. Notice of death may be sufficient.
  • If you’re responsible for the internet or intranet connectivity in your home, (or church, or other organization outside of work) document your connections and equipment, and make sure whoever needs access to this information has these documents, and understands these documents. I am assuming you’re already doing this for your job.
  • To ensure you’ve accounted for everything, keep a diary, and every time you access a new online account, work on a new project, make an adjustment to a new device, make a new work or event commitment, jot it down and make sure the diary is accessible to whomever is your executor.

It is actually quite a lot of work to prepare for one’s own end in in this era of subscribed services and internet accounts— not to mention long distance relationships, and plethora of connected devices. I think, though, it’s important to do so if we don’t want to leave behind a tangled mess.

We should do this type of planning no matter how old or fit we are— there’s nothing morbid about planning for one’s death, and age is no defense. After all, there could be a beer truck with our name on it, just around the corner.

Categories
Writing

Last of the book and attack of the women

I put the finishing touches to the draft for my current book, and now it begins the technical review process. I don’t want to say it’s my last book, but there is no other on the horizon, as I return to the world of software development and consulting.

First, though, I need to spend time upgrading my own skills. When you write books, you have to let so many new and interesting technologies slide by because you don’t have time to stop, and play. You also end up coding in small pieces, because you’re focusing primarily on book samples, with little time for larger applications. Or that playing, I just mentioned.

I want to spend more time with Drupal, because I’ve only scratched the surface of this application. I am extremely pleased, nay tickled to see Angela Byron from Lullabot win an award for Best Contributor at OSCON for her work with Drupal—affirming that my move to this software was the best move for me. In fact, in sounds like women made significant inroads in the open source community at OSCON this year, aided, in part, I think, because of software communities, such as Drupal, which are decidedly woman friendly environments.

In particular Emma Jane Hogbin’s Form an Orderly Queue, Ladies presentation at OSCON provides details of a dastardly plot to infiltrate women into the ranks of the tech through open source. I love evil plotters, like Dr. Horrible, and evil plots, like women invading open source through innocent seeming applications like Drupal. Drupal and Dojo.

Bwa-ha-ha.

Categories
Books

Kindle and book freebies

In between accounts of the smog over Beijing, James Fallows at The Atlantic has been writing about his new Kindle and being able to use the device overseas. He also mentions a couple of free ebook download sites. I wanted to add to that list that the science fiction book publisher, Tor, is making several books available for free downloads through today (including PDFs for online reading). Hopefully this isn’t too late a notice for most of you.

I am still enamored with my Kindle, so much so that I’ve filled it up with free and purchased books, as well as samples, research reports, and other documents. I recently added an 8GB SDHC card, and am now happily trying to fill it up, too.

I do agree with one criticism of the Kindle in that it would be nice if there were a way to categorize the writings, as well as organize them into folders. However, you can search on any term, as well as display them by author, title, and status, so that will have to do for now.

Returning to using the Kindle overseas, Amazon is still not selling the device or Kindle books overseas and this decision isn’t because of Whispernet, it’s because of distribution rights and issues of copyright. Most publishers sell rights to distribution in foreign countries, an old practice that doesn’t live well with new ways of delivering content.

However, if you have a US-based address (in order to receive the Kindle) and credit card that works with Amazon purchases in the States, you could get the Kindle delivered and buy books. It’s just that instead of having them download via Whispernet, you download them to your computer and copy over using the USB cable. You can also use the same approach for updating your Kindle’s software.

It’s not as convenient as Whispernet, but it is workable. Perhaps we in the States should “adopt” our friends overseas, though there are other ebook readers that can be purchased regardless of country.

It’s also important to note that you don’t have to purchase books with Amazon. Many companies, like Tor, O’Reilly, and others are also selling ebooks direct, in formats that should work with a Kindle, a Sony ebook reader, and so on. It’s not as convenient, but other approaches may not be so locked in.

As for whether ebooks will replace the paper books, Fallows writes:

My theory: television didn’t eliminate radio, telephones didn’t eliminate personal conversations, eBooks won’t eliminate real books. People always find more ways to communicate, and this will be another way. Very good for some kinds of information, not so much for others. A welcome new addition to the mix.

Yes, but isn’t Twitter destroying our brains?

update A timely and interesting article on the internet’s impact on reading in the New York Times.

Categories
Writing

A scathing review is better than no review

Sarah Lacy doesn’t care for the recent New York Times review of her book, and is turning lose the hounds of blogging hell on the article author, Katie Hafner. Without, of course, linking to the article in question, which the egalitarian elite of Silicon Valley never do when peeved.

Lacy believes the review is overly personal, seemingly because to her, criticizing her book is somehow equivalent to criticizing her, as a person. However, the review is focused on the book, including issues of writing style, such as Lacy’s use of incomplete sentences.

The writing is, at best, informal. For instance, the last time I checked the American Heritage Dictionary, in spite of how computer trade journalists might choose to use the word, “architect” was not recognized as a verb, to say nothing of “rearchitect.” And Lacy’s fifth-grade teacher would no doubt wince at the profusion of incomplete sentences. (“Probably a good thing few women work there.” And “The time Jay and Marc were chatting when Sumner Redstone sauntered up.”) Then again, everything happens so quickly in Silicon Valley that perhaps there is no time to write a proper sentence.

Whatever anecdotal information is included in the review is all focused on the book, including the reference to the article that originally inspired the book, as well as Lacy’s seeming familiarity with the people she interviewed.

Though my books aren’t the Big Deal that books like Lacy’s are, negative reviews are just as painful, and I can understand Lacy’s unhappiness with the review. However, letting loose her fans on the review author is, to me, a tacky, rather childish action; especially since Lacy’s book has received primarily positive reviews. Did she seriously think everyone would like it? Lacy would do better to appreciate the fact that her book was reviewed in the New York Times—a negative review is better than no review at all, especially in a prestigious publication like the NY Times.

The worst thing that can happen to a book, and a book author, is no one caring about the book enough to write any review, positive or negative. Probably one of the most important points Randy Pausch made in his “Last Lecture”, linked in an earlier post, was the following:

when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a bad place to be. Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care.

Categories
Writing

My life. The book.

Virginia DeBolt writes at Blogher about the recent “open tutorial” session the Blogher conference had on Sunday. I’m not much on conferences, but I thought this was an excellent idea. What typically happens at tech conferences is that the experienced people connect up with the other experienced people and the newbies are forced either into a generic crowd around the well known folks, or into connecting with each other. This is no bad thing, but there’s no opportunity for dispersion, so to speak, other than in the formal conference sessions.

With the Blogher one-on-one tutorials, not only are experienced people helping inexperienced people, there’s a breakdown of barriers between the old guard and the new, and in such a way that it isn’t a “fangirl/fanboy” situation, either, which can only be healthy for all participants.

Returning to Blogher’s one-on-one, one person who Virginia helped was Frances Ellen who had an interesting challenge.

Frances is writing a book, Story of Nadia, two paragraphs at a time, published twice a week. She’s using WordPress, which means that the entries are displaying in reverse chronological order, and without any tie-in with each other. The solution Virginia and the others came up with was to create a TOC for the sidebar that pulls the entries together in proper order. An idea that came to my mind when reading the post was to create chapter “categories”, and have a category listing in the sidebar ordered alphabetically: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and so on. When publishing a new post, Frances would then pick which chapter “category” to place the posting. To ensure the publications display correctly, she can use chronological order for the postings in the chapter categories, when the chapter category pages are opened. This would effectively create a book without having to manually edit entries in a TOC.

As for the tag items Frances already has, these could be managed as “tags” rather than categories—though with a single purpose site, the meta information should be in the header as meta tags, rather than in individual post, since this information is repeated across all posts. However, these tags also tie Frances’ work into the WordPress.com tag cloud, so the repetition does serve a purpose.

Using chapter categories, with a sidebar entry, and chronological entries within the categories, not to mention, meta information in the header, should work at Frances’ site without having to move any page, or leave wordpress.com. In fact, I’m not sure if Frances isn’t doing this already, and if so, my apologies for a redundant suggestion. The only other recommendation I would make is that within the “Chapter” pages, to remove the sub-titles on the individual listings, as these disrupt the reading flow. This modification should be a theme change, and not impact on the existing site structure.

What Frances has works for her, but I can’t resist using this challenge to plug Drupal, because it is just this circumstance that made me move to Drupal.

At my personal site, Just Shelley, I don’t have a taxonomy or categories. Instead, I’m writing a series of “books”, on specific subjects, with each new writing being a new “chapter” in the book. I’ve started two, and I’ll probably end up with five or six “books” when finished. I don’t plan on writing the books in order, either. I’ll add a page to one, and the next time, a page to another.

I’ve made the first page of the books “sticky”, which means they will always be on the front page, and always at the top of the page. Currently I have the site set to show three postings on the front page, but I’ll eventually make it five or six: enough for the first pages of the “books”, and perhaps a couple of additional entries for photos or whatnot.

However, I’ve set the feed to ten items, and when I publish a new book page, I publish it to the front page. Though it may not actually, physically show in the front page of the item, it will show up in the feed, so my patient, long-suffering friends following my long, meandering stories can be notified when I’ve published a new page to one of my “books”.

Only the first page of each book will show on the front page of the site, but clicking through will open up not only the first page of the book, but a table of contents, as well as book navigation at the bottom of the page (as shown in my Drupal Live book, here at RealTech). You can then either use the book navigation or the TOC to click through to pages. You can print the whole book at once by selecting the Printer Friendly option at the bottom of the first page. This is particularly handy if you want to export the entire book in order to read on your Kindle or computer while offline. Pick Printer Friendly, and then Save As (single web page) from your browser. For Kindle users, use the free Kindle conversion email address for your account, or just pay the dime.

The tech to make this work:

  • Use Drupal, of course
  • I use clean URLs and the pathauto module in order to ensure friendly URLs for the book pages
  • Download the development version of the token Drupal Module, because this one supports book titles, as part of the book page URLs. I believe this will end up being version 2.0 when released.
  • In the Automated alias settings tab, in URL Aliases, I use the following setting for Node path settings, Book page paths: [book-raw]/[title-raw]. The only time I override the automated setting is for the first page, which I set to the URL for the book. Another option could be to add my own alias consisting only of the book title URL, pointing to the first page.
  • Set the Post Settings to how ever many entries you want to show on the front page. Also set the Length of Trimmed Posts to unlimited—you’ll want to manage your own book page excerpts, not let the system do it for you.
  • In the RSS publishing settings, I set the number of entries to ten, but you’ll want to use a number higher than your post setting count. In addition, I use title and teasers as content, but that’s my own preference.
  • This is also a personal preference, but I use the Atom feed module, and add a printer friendly link to the Atom feed by appending the following to the post using the Ad Insertion setting: <a href=”http://shelleypowers.com/print/%id/”>Printer friendly version</a>
  • Speaking of printer friendly, I use the printer friendly Drupal module to enable this functionality. By using this module, people will be able to download or print the entire book from the first page of the book. They can also read the book directly from their feed if my web site design proves too much of a challenge for whatever browser and device they’re using.
  • Finally, and only because I am not using categories, I created a Page entry that lists each “book” with an associated image, and connected it to my Primary links via the Writings menu item. It’s not necessary since all books will have their first page listed on the home page for the site. However, people are dependent on menus, so it’s better to be redundant than risk confusing the readers who reach your site other than through your feed, or who may not know that the front page also serves as navigation for the site. I also have exactly one image gallery, created using the image module, containing all images I upload. I won’t be uploading many, as they are mainly story illustrations or photos I think complement the site. In addition, I use the Lightbox2 module to provide slideshow and dynamic photo expansion capabilities.

I’m still relatively new to Drupal, so some of these steps may end up being unnecessary. However, the site works, the process works, and is relatively simple to maintain, so I’m happy with what I have.