The Many Faces of Mike McBride » Blogging

And The World Keeps Turning….

Mike McBride — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 02:28:10 +0000

Apparently, while 2011 was a year of huge changes for me, the changes just keep coming in 2012. I won’t be relocating again, but I will be switching jobs, and that is going to also impact what I’m doing on this site. I’ve accepted a Litigation Support Trainer position with AccessData. I’ll be based out of my home office, doing online training and various other projects from there, while also traveling to do onsite training, working at some of the various trade shows, etc.

I’ll also be contributing to AD’s eDiscovery Insight Blog (http://ediscoveryinsight.com/). In the interest of not competing with myself, or with the company that pays my bills, I will not be writing about the legal industry or litigation support on this site any longer, short of pointing you to things I write over there.

What does that mean for mikemcbrideonline.com? I think it goes back to being the blog it started out as all those years ago. A little tech, some geeky stuff, some personal lessons learned about careers and travel, and, of course, photography. I’ll still be sharing interesting articles in the legal and litigation support fields, here and on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, along with links to various other things I find interesting. There won’t be a complete purge of all things legal, but it certainly won’t be the main focus the way it has been for the last few years.

If you’ve been coming here for the litigation support stuff, I hope you’ll join us over on eDiscovery Insight, and I hope to be able to continue to share information and insights with you in various ways. If you’ve been following along for years and trying your best to weed through the boring legal stuff, I hope you’ll enjoy the new turn on the site. Just bear with me as I go through an adjustment period and figure out exactly what I’m doing around here.

On a personal note, I’m excited by this new opportunity. I’ll be working with a great team, at a very exciting time in the history of the Summation product line. I’ll be getting a chance to teach others, and help them understand this crazy world of eDiscovery, on a regular basis. It will certainly make for a different 2012 than I was expecting, but a very interesting one too!

Hopefully, I’ll even get a chance to meet up with some of you in my travels, or at trade shows, so stay in touch!

Black Out Day

Mike McBride — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:00:22 +0000

Well today is the day many of your favorite websites may be going dark to protest against legislation that is under consideration in the US that would give the government the ability to remove websites from the internet based on complaints of violating copyright, without much in the way of an ability of any site to defend itself before it simply goes away.

Obviously, I have decided not to “black out” this site. Mostly because, really, who would really notice? However, I will link to a site where you can learn a lot more about this legislation, and contact your Senator and Representative.

http://sopastrike.com/strike/

Time Machine – The Plugins

Mike McBride — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:33:24 +0000

No this is not a blog post about Apple’s backup system. This is about a couple of pretty useful plugins for WordPress. One, which I’m pretty sure got it’s name from the Apple backup software, I’ve been using for quite a while. The other I just discovered the other day and thought would be kind of cool to have on the blog.

WP-Time Machine is a plugin that will create a backup of your WordPress install. It includes options to store your backup files offisite, with Amazon AW3 or Dropbox accounts. It’s a nice, easy way to create a backup of my site, files and database, and store it on my Dropbox account for easy access if I should ever need it.

Of course, I have to remember to go and make a backup, so it’s not foolproof. Let too much time go between backups and you’ll lose quite a few posts!

The new plugin I discovered is just plain Time Machine. It’s a little difficult to explain what Time Machine does, so if you’re reading this somehwere other than the site itself, you may want to click through and see it in action. On the right hand sidebar there’s a section titled “On this Day…” and then a list of posts that were published to the site on this day (within a day or two.) over the 10 plus years that I’ve been blogging here. I thought it would be a good way to highlight some of the old stuff, though I also admit to being a bit fearful of some rather poor writing from the time I was still figuring out this blogging thing will be resurrected. (Who am I kidding? There’s a possibility of poor writing, or statements that have been proven ridiculous, all through the history of this site!)

The lesson, as always, is that if there’s something you might want to do with your WordPress install, there’s probably a plugin that will help you.

Lack of Inspiration; Need New Sources

Mike McBride — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:56:09 +0000

This being the end of the year, I’ve been doing a long overdue cleanup of some of my various information sources, the first being Google Reader. After taking a look at the over 300 subscriptions I had there, and removing all of the ones who haven’t posted in 2011, and a number of ones I simply don’t care about any more, it occurs to me that a large part of why I’ve been struggling to find things to write about outside of eDiscovery and Litigation Support is due to an utter lack of good sources of information about Tech or Photography, for example.

Of course, this seems odd. The tech blogosphere is where I first learned about blogging, and where I used to find a ton of inspiration. However, I realize now that I’ve really lost touch with it. It seems the only tech news sources I’ve been following have mostly been consumed with iPhone/Android comparisons, and Google +/Facebook/Twitter comparisons. What happened to all the folks working in IT sharing their learning experiences? Where have the tech support folks gone?

So, now that my subscription list has gone from over 300, to just about 180, I’m looking for suggestions. What are your favorite blogs? What are the best sources of information about technology, photography, and yes, litigation support and legal technology, as well?

My RSS reader needs some new content!

Update on Google Currents

Mike McBride — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 01:20:44 +0000

Added as an update to this post:

As of Dec 20, the new version of the Currents app does work on my iPhone 3GS, so I can actually see that the published edition of the site is working correctly. The published edition of my other site, however, seems to be pulling a months old version of the RSS feed, so maybe not all the bugs are worked out just yet.

Making a Change with Posts to Facebook

Mike McBride — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 01:14:50 +0000

I’ve decided to go ahead and turn off the automatic posting of new blog posts to my personal Facebook profile. If you’re using Facebook to follow the blog, you can still do so from the blog’s page. If you’ve only been “friends” with me on Facebook to keep up with the blog, I won’t be offended if you unfriend me and only “Like” the page instead.

BTW, my Child Abuse Survivor site also has a Facebook page, and the same rules apply.

I will share posts on my personal profile from time to time, I just don’t want to share all of them when they are already on Facebook elsewhere.

Of course, this is subject to change.

Google Currents

Mike McBride — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:01:29 +0000

As many of you mat be aware, Google recently announced their new reading app, Currents, for tablet and smartphones. It seems to be a bit like Flipboard, or other apps that make a nice, magazine-style layout for reading your favorite online content.

Being the curious techie that I am, I wanted to both check it out, and see how I could work with my own sites to “produce” editions for Google Currents. If you’re interested in adding this site to Currents, I think you can at this link.

The reason that I say that I think you can add it there, is that my attempts at actually using Currents on my iPhone were largely unsuccessful. I haven’t seen any official statement from Google that an iPhone 4 is required. (The system requirements mention needing at least iOS4, and my iPhone 3GS has the latest OS, just not the latest hardware.) However, I’ve seen some unofficial reviews mention it not working on a 3GS, and it most assuredly did not work on mine. It runs, and I can get into the program and add editions to my library, however when I go back to the home screen to read them, the library is still empty, asking me to add items.

So, if you have an Android device, newer iPhone or iPad, have you used Currents yet? What do you think of it? Are you able to add the edition at the link I gave earlier? I’d love to know if it actually works.

Update: As of Dec 20, the new version of the Currents app does work on my iPhone 3GS, so I can actually see that the published edition of the site is working correctly. The published edition of my other site, however, seems to be pulling a months old version of the RSS feed, so maybe not all the bugs are worked out just yet.

Update on Website Experiments

Mike McBride — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 02:08:57 +0000

You’ve probably noticed the weekly “links” post that gets dropped into the feed and picked up in other places like Facebook and Twitter on Sundays. If you’re interested in seeing those same links, only in real time when I add them individually instead of in the weekly wrap up, you have myriad choices to do that as well. They start out on my Diigo account, then through the magic of If This Then That, they go out on both my Twitter, and the Facebook page for this site.

If you’re following either of those, you’ll see the links as they get added, give or take 10-15 minutes. You’ll also see various other things I share as I come across them in those channels, that aren’t necessarily showing up here on the blog.

Speaking of the Facebook page, for what seems like years now, I’ve been feeding the blog posts to both the Facebook page, and my own Facebook profile. I’m toying with the idea of stopping that, and only linking to select posts on my own profile, letting the page be the place to follow the blog in it’s entirety on Facebook. This way my friends and family don’t have to see every new post. Any thoughts on that type of change? Would you “like” the page to see the blog posts on Facebook, or are you already getting them elsewhere and don’t care where I post them on Facebook?

I’m also toying with a few other ideas, but not ready to commit to them just yet, and trying to figure out how a Google+ page fits in here as well. I’m trying to use it more, both my own profile and the pages, but that lack of automated import is hard to get over!

I’ll be sure to keep ya’ll posted!

Google Plus Rolls Out Pages, Still No RSS Import

Mike McBride — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 02:40:05 +0000

Before I made any comments about Google Plus’ new Pages feature, I wanted to take a look for myself. So I created a page for my website.Feel free to add it to your circles if you’re interested.

The first obvious lacking feature, much like the most obvious lacking feature of Plus in general, is the complete lack of any tool to bring in updated content from my website, into the Google Plus platform. As this has gone on, I am coming to the conclusion that this is not an oversight, or a technical glitch that Google hasn’t quite worked out yet. This is a company willingly ignoring the requests for that feature, because they do not want you posting content from outside the Google walled garden. So, instead of posting content here, and allowing the wonders of RSS to share that content on any social network you want to follow me on, be it Twitter, Facebook, or just in an RSS Reader, I will have to actually go over to Google Plus, and share this post manually.

What a waste when Google could save all of us that effort very easily, if they wanted to. Obviously, they don’t.

Google Plus is Not a Social Network?

Mike McBride — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:38:46 +0000

This has been a big week at Google, what with big changes to Gmail and Google Reader. Some folks are not thrilled with the new more Plus-friendly Google Reader. I can sort of see their point. I didn’t use Google Reader’s “Shared Items” feature, mostly because they never integrated it with Feedburner’s Link Splicer in the same way Delicious was integrated there. (Even after Google bought it, they never integrated the two, in fact, they’ve never done much of anything with Feedburner to be honest, leading to the current state of Delicious not working any more.)

However, I know lots of folks did use Google Reader’s shared items, both as a bit of a mini user community, and as a way to grab that feed and show it on their blogs, feed the RSS to Twitter, etc. Now those options are pretty much gone from Google Reader, but they did make it easy to share items in Google Plus, which has been sorely lacking up until now. It’s unfortunate that they decided to make Plus the replacement for the much more open format of Shared Items, but that’s their prerogative.

In fact, as we see from the horse’s mouth itself, forcing all your Google product usage to be tied into Google Plus is pretty much exactly the idea. Frankly, this interview is a little scary. My hope that Google Plus will eventually have an open API that allows me to post something on Twitter and have it picked up by Google Plus, the way I currently can with Facebook and LinkedIn, seems to be in direct opposition to where Google is actually going with Plus.

Too many pundits and tech bloggers have made the mistake of thinking of Google+ as a Facebook competitor, but it’s absolutely not — at least not as far as Google is concerned.

Of course, Google is still in the business of competing with Facebook for ad dollars. That boils down to compiling the best, most actionable data about consumers to sell to advertisers.

And if Plus catches on, Google stands a much better chance of accomplishing that goal, not by orchestrating a Great Migration of users from one social network to another, but by subtly linking all your Google-powered online activity and profiles so advertisers can see a more complete picture of you than Facebook could ever offer.

If Google’s goal, with Plus, is to truly tie you as an individual, across all of Google’s properties, I don’t see any reason for Google Plus to have an open API that shares data from outside of Plus. It’s as much, if not more, of a walled garden that Facebook or Twitter will ever be.

Of course, since they rolled out Plus as a “social network” and really allowed it to be portrayed as a direct competition to Facebook, it’s also possible that this is all revisionist history. It’s possible they thought they could kill Facebook and Twitter, and now that they realize that they can’t, and haven’t delivered anything close to the promise of Plus that was all the talk of the pundit world just a few month ago, they are moving the goal posts. Frankly, if they wanted a single sign-on account across all their properties, they could easily have created that, without all the fan fare of Google Plus. I don’t think that was it at all. Plus is more than single sign-on across Google properties, it’s Google’s way to not only track how you use their services, but also track the things you share with your friends, the things you say to your friends, who you email with, who you have in your circles, how you describe those circles, etc. Basically, an advertisers wet dream.

Also known as everything we always feared Facebook was trying to do, but with the same people who decried Facebook’s privacy applauding them, a pretty impressive feat.

For myself, after reading the interview, I’m even less likely to spend any time messing with Google Plus. If it is to be limited to bringing in information from Google’s other properties, I’m not interested. I’m not interested in moving years worth of work in Flickr to Picasa just to make it easier to share in Plus. I’m not interested in moving my websites back to Blogger just to make it easier to share in Plus. I can share those things just fine on Twitter and Facebook, and more importantly, my social networks are already there too.