This is where I work almost 40% of my work hours, in my new home office. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned anywhere on the blog that particular change in my position. Basically, I spend about 5 hours at the office each day, drive home on my “lunch” hour and spend the evening hours (the hours where I’m supporting our West Coast offices until 5PM their time) working from home. The schedule allows me to have a quick dinner with my wife when I get home, at a somewhat normal dinner time, then retreat to the office to get back to work, and then already be home when my work day ends.

As with everything else involved with this schedule, this does provide some interesting challenges. First and foremost was creating a good work environment within our house. I think we’ve accomplished that.  It’s comfortable, but also in it’s own space within the house, away from the temptations of home. So far, it’s working out well.

I’m sure, as I go forward, I’ll be blogging about some of the other challenges, especially about how working in a centralized location, for a firm with offices all over the country, and then on top of that, not being in the office a significant portion of the day, presents challenges with building an internal network. I’d be interested in hearing any ideas for handling that challenge. If you’ve been in a similar situation, please leave a comment. Or, if you have any advice for a part time, first time, telecommuter, feel free to leave a comment too. I’m always open to suggestions!

I’ve been taking a look at various things, like auto posting weekly links from from Diigo, and playing with the various possibilities with the If This Than That site, which at this point is mostly just blowing my mind with all the ways you might use it to automatically do various things across the web.

In short, on the site, the Twitter feed, and even the Facebook page, you might see a few new, odd things showing up in the next couple of weeks while I’m experimenting to see what works, what doesn’t, what I like, and what I’m just not thrilled with. I plan to, eventually, end up with a nice, permanent, workflow, but I’m sure there will be some trial and error to get there.

So please, excuse the dust while I’m playing around.

If you subscribe to the RSS feed here you may have noticed that the daily “links” posts haven’t been happening. There’s actually a reason for that. A while back, when Yahoo announced they were dropping Delicious, I went in search of an alternative. I starting using Diigo to save my links as I was perusing Google Reader, or checking links shared on Twitter. Diigo, it turned out, had a nice feature that allowed me to bookmark something there, and it would sycn up with Delicious, allowing me to continue using the Feedburner feature that lets me drop those posts into the RSS feed without having them take up all the space on the homepage of the site.

So that’s what I did, while the future of Delicious was in doubt, it worked as a temporary situation and bought me time to figure something else out.

Then, of course, Delicious got purchased, and was saved from the scrap heap. Great! What I was doing now with Diigo was still working, so no reason to change anything.

Last week, the new Delicious website rolled out, and the API that allowed Diigo to share my bookmarks with Delicious, went away. I’ve been saving bookmarks in Diigo, but they aren’t getting to Delicious, and thus aren’t being pushed to the blog. So, starting today, I’m back to using Delicious, and we shall see how this all works with their new version of the service. Hopefully I won’t have to spend too long getting things back the way I had before!

Anyone else using the new Delicious? Have any opinions on it?

So you want to have your own website and play around with different tools and technologies? Great, just don’t leave a project sitting too long, bad things happen.

Case in point, over on the Child Abuse Survivor site, I had created a sub-domain with it’s own WordPress Multi-User install (back when that was a separate version of WP), running Buddypress to act as a sort of community site. Over time the site saw some traffic, but eventually the community involvement started to fall off, around about the same time that I was changing jobs and moving,  so I really sort of stopped dedicating a bunch of time to it. Oh I left the community up, in case anyone wanted to continue to use it and communicate with each other, but I stopped checking in regularly.

That also means I stopped updating the WordPress install. A big no-no.

Sure enough, late last week, I noticed an issue with the RSS feeds on the main blog getting malformed text and becoming invalid. I didn’t see anything wrong on that WordPress install, but somehow the feeds weren’t publishing properly. A quick re-install of WP in place corrected the feeds issue, but I made a note to keep a closer eye on the feeds.

Sure enough, Monday evening, I saw the same problem with the feeds again. This time I decided this wasn’t a random occurrence, something was wrong. So I dug in to the site and the WordPress database to see if I could see what was causing this. As I dug around I came across a strange class.php file that had been dropped into the wp-content folder, and an .htaccess file that hadn’t been at that level of the install before, pointing to a random numeric php document in another folder, on the community site. Further digging led me to discover Google search results, mostly for pharmaceuticals, pointing to oddly named pages on my site.

Now my blog’s WordPress install was up to date, and there wasn’t any SQL injection into the database, but as I rolled over to the community WordPress install, boy what a mess. There were a number of malicious PHP files over there, and some SQL injected into the database. Since I haven’t updated that install in months, I assume it was compromised thanks to a known exploit that has since been fixed.

After nuking the community site completely, database included, and then cleaning the handful of PHP files running all over the rest of the site’s directories, it seems to be clean again, though Google hasn’t re-indexed things just yet so I’m still getting interesting search queries to say the least. (Sigh)

Those are two nights of my life I’m never getting back, thanks to leaving an old WP install laying around unused. Trust me, it’s not worth it.

Or, Why you want to come visit!

Thanks to friends pointing out these stories on Facebook and Twitter!(And people say they don’t learn anything important in social media?)

How A Park Helped One Town Weather The Recession
Southern U.S. distillery to legally sell moonshine

By the way, my favorite part from the latter story:

The area was settled, along with the nearby Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, by Scots, Irish and Welsh who migrated down through the Appalachian mountain chain from Pennsylvania in the 1700s.

“They thought it was their inalienable, God-given right to make whiskey,”

Yup, those are my people!

Learned an important lesson during this trip. It’s hot in the middle of the day around here.

Still, the zoo is relatively small, cheap, and a good way to get a little exercise and take some photos for an hour on an otherwise free Saturday. I enjoyed it, and like having a few new photos to share!

Aside from all of the professional reasons, my wife being from the South, and the warmer weather, there is one other reason why I think moving was worth it.

As a photographer, how could I not appreciate the fact that I can drive less than 30 minutes, and take photos of beautiful mountains?

Or how about the 10 minute drive to one of the loveliest campuses in the US?

Me and my camera are going to like it here in South Carolina just fine!

Last week. while my wife was visiting, she treated me to a night at the bed and breakfast where we spent our honeymoon in Asheville, NC. (Interestingly, just about an hour from where I am now.)

As we were hiking around the grounds of the Sourwood Inn, I couldn’t help but notice how the change in the canopy of the forests really changed the look of the light. As we went from a typical North Carolina mountain tree canopy, to a large area of Bamboo growth, the light change almost made it seem like we were going from clouds to sun.

Naturally, having some interesting light gave us a chance to play around with some interesting shots, and post-processing, to create some nice shots. I’m going to have to try and find some more interesting light changes as I explore some of the nearby mountains and lakes over the Summer.

With everything being brand new it’s been a little tough to develop any routine, let alone one that includes posting to the blog on a regular basis. After one week at the new job, I’m just starting to develop a bit of a routine there, but outside of work, life is really a work in progress.

In fact, I’d say that “work in progress” is a great description of my day-to-day life right now. Work is still overwhelming, but it’s getting there. I still feel clueless much of the time, but I have been able to tackle some tasks on my own, and contribute toward getting through the team’s workload, so I feel good about that. Plus, I’m learning a whole bunch of new Litigation Support tools, which is always fun.

I’ve just started searching for a furnished apartment to live in temporarily. The extended-stay hotel is ok for a short time, but I feel like a closet and a couch would be awesome additions. Hopefully something will work out on that front in the next couple of weeks.

As far as living in Greenville, I am enjoying that. As with any Southern town, the people are friendly, the weather’s been fantastic, and there’s plenty to explore in the area to keep me busy. Plus, I do think my camera is going to love it here, as evidenced by the photos I took while exploring downtown on a lovely Sunday afternoon.

Yes, there is a waterfall in the center of downtown, and it’s surrounded by quite a lovely park area, which is also a community WiFi zone, how cool is that?

So, while it’s still a struggle to adjust to all of this new stuff, including living apart from my wife for now, I’m excited about the future here, and looking forward to continuing to settle in.

Whenever I’m asked about using social networking tools, inevitably someone asks me if I could see it ever helping someone find a job. I’ve always had to answer that although I have never gotten a job offer due to my online connections, it has led to a number of other opportunities that I would not have been able to experience without those connections.

Now, I may have to change my answer. As I arrive in Greenville and settle into my new home town, I have to say that it was social networking that got me connected to this job, although not directly.

The story starts, actually, in 2009. I was approached by some folks who had read my blog about speaking at the ILTA Annual Meeting on Social Networking. That invitation was purely the result of being involved with online networking. That led to being invited back to do a couple of sessions at ILTA 2010, and it just so happens that the person who was working as a recruiter for this new firm saw me speak there and introduced himself. Late in 2010 he contacted me to ask whether I, or someone I knew, might be interested in relocating South.

So, while I have no evidence that anyone who ultimately made the hiring decision was influenced by my online activities, clearly even being put in front of them was an indirect result of online connections. Which just goes to show that you never know where some connections are going to lead, and that you never know what getting out there and doing something like speaking and sharing your knowledge will lead to. So take advantage of opportunities!