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One More Thing…

What’s the word for that moment when you realise that the work you do is appreciated by many, many people all across Australia?

Yeah, that.

This weekend was nothing short of amazing, all thanks to a little site called MacTalk.

Back in 2007, I joined a little site called MacTalk. Fast forward a couple of years, a few thousand posts, and many internet arguments later, and I come across a little post by then-overseer and hater of pants, decryption, asking for volunteer writers for some news posts. I put my hand up.

The rest is turtles all the way down.

This weekend was basically the culmination of all that; a dinner with most of the people who have contributed to MacTalk in some way, those who have silently decimated the not-so-silent spam, those who have kept things ticking over behind the scenes, and those who have written articles, reviewed products, or gotten on their perennial soapbox and given a few thousand listeners an earful about how non-developers shouldn’t be using beta releases on the podcast, past and present.

There were a few people missing, but by and large, most of the big players where there and a fantastic time was had by all. Putting faces to online personas is always good fun, even if it can be a little daunting at first. Once you get over that initial awkwardness of “hey, do I follow you on Twitter? What’s your name on the forums?”, then it’s apples, ladies and gentlemen, apples — which is lucky, because that’s pretty much what MacTalk is about (Apple, Inc).

At some point during the night, there was a thing where had to go around the table and tell everyone about ourselves — our Twitter or MacTalk usernames, what we did, and so on.

Some people were known simply by name or by reputation, others had to describe their role in MacTalk a little more. When it came around to me, I simply said “I’m Benny, and I write the news”.

Cue thunderous applause.

In all seriousness, I was kind of taken aback. Stunned, that people recognised me, just from what I had done. Little did I realise how far my daily news posts reached. Little did I know that people actually recognised —nay, applauded — my work.

This isn’t just me being naive, it’s a genuine realisation of the culmination of hours of early morning (and some not-so-early) news posts over last two years. It’s me realising that podcast topics which were formed off the words I had written, it’s about me realising that “whoa, people actually read this stuff — and they like it!” Me realising that the words I type into one of those new-fangled computers actually has some sort of impact.

One comment (from Chrome, I believe): “everyone sets their clock from Greenwich Mean Time, but Greenwich set their time from [me]”.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being appreciated and recognised for your work, which, I guess, was really the whole point of that night; everyone in that room had contributed in some way, shape, or form to MacTalk over the past few years.

This morning I considered writing a piece on Steve Jobs (you know, seeing as he stepped down as CEO) as a sort of editorial on MacTalk (like all the cool kids are doing), but as I thought about what I would write about, I couldn’t think of anything. Seriously, not a thing — not because there wasn’t anything to say, but because anything I wrote about would be so, so, insubstantial compared to the big picture.

And yet it’s times like the above, when I was applauded for simply saying my name and what I do, that make it all worth it.

Thanks guys 🙂

1000 Posts!


good idea

via Buttersafe – Updated Tuesdays and Thursdays » Archive » Lightning Safety.

Have you ever had an idea that made total, complete sense at the time, but looking back you see that that couldn’t have been further from the truth? Hindsight, after all, is 20/20.

That’s pretty much what the above comic illustrates.

1000 posts, huh? This doesn’t have anything to do with hindsight, apart from the fact that I’ve never regretted a moment of it. Seriously, I’ve had a blast — when this little blog started up at the end of July 2008 with a massively profound video from Steve Jobs, I had no idea what to expect.

Hopefully this blog has been a little slice of the internet as experienced by myself — from the notorious “is awesome!” posts to every post that contained a part that (usually) didn’t have a “Part I”. From all the posts that were posted via email from Posterous (that I’ve now stopped using), to the post that explained why social networking is hugely overrated (oh, wow). Through all the good times, the bad, and all the cute girls inbetween, it’s been awesome.

So, dear reader, it’s late and I have work tomorrow — here’s to the next 1000. Perhaps if I feel like it I’ll post up something a little more meaningful a little later on, but that’s it for now.

Oh, you said you wanted a pic for proof?

Where To From Here?

You may have noticed that things around here are a little funky.

They have been from the start, actually – the very first post was about how Steve Jobs thinks that computers are like a bicycle for our minds, and I said that that was the direction that this blog was going to take.

From there, we meandered though the plains of “infrequent and random posts”, the introuduction of the “is/are AWESOME!” semi-meme (pronounced meem, as in meeem, Martin P and co), and then on to what we now call the “Press This” infatuation – where I cross-post a random article that I find interesting from the World Wide Web.

Yeah, that’s all good and well, but I don’t want to be yet another one of those carbon-copy bloggers that post random crap all over their blog.

So, I’ve come up with a few ideas as to where this blog is heading next:

  • Press This will still be used.
    I’ll still cross post things occasionally – things from obscure corners of the web, things from obscure websites that the people reading my blog won’t necessarily be familiar with.
  • I’ll continue to post posts with links. Lots of links.
    Live I’ve been doing, posts will lots of links will stay. They’ll somewhat replace those Press This posts that were littering the blog… Sure, pictures are nice, but sometimes you just have to share it all, you know?
  • From the Book of Face
    A new section will be introduced, where I post things from Facebook. This will contain mostly explanations of my Facebook status updates, as well as a bunch of other stuff.
  • Fun@Work, Fun@Uni
    So, Uni 2009 looms ahead. Just like the currently single-post Fun@Work, Fun@Uni will endeavour to bring you the best moments from Uni life. From the stresses of assignments, to the joys of meeting new people (/sarcasm), every “lulz moment” will be recorded for your pleasure, right here.

As for the “infrequent and random posts”, as well as the “is/are AWESOME!” posts, don’t worry – they’ll stay.

Got suggestions for what else this blog needs? Shout out in comments below, and I’ll endeavour to hear you out.

Images in Press This posts?!

Well, I’ll be.

Maybe I want WordPress to be more like Tumblr, with it’s different kind of posts (videos, images, quotes, links), and all that jazz.

So anyway, in WordPress 2.7, they’ve added a QuickPress option. That covers just the text posts that tumblr offers.

The rest? What about quotes, links, music and videos?

Well, that’s where Press This comes into play. From any website, I can select some text, and hit the “Press This” bookmarklet on my bookmarks toolbar. The text that I had selected is now quoted, the title of the page between the tags of the post, and the URL of the webpage is now stuck as a “smart link”, i.e. <a href=”webpage URL”>title of webpage here</a> like so.

But until then, I haven’t been able to insert any images from blog posts, or anything. It was the one thing that really annoyed me about Press This. My first two gripes I had already dealt with – the links from Press This posts now open in a new window, and the text that I’ve selected is now stuck in <blockquote> tags.

Images had me stumped – even though the PHP file had the actual code for images, I didn’t have the faintest clue about what it did. I managed to figure out what the code for flash videos (like YouTube) did through pure experimentation, but the images? I had no idea.

Until today.

Today, I posted the story about Senator Conroy’s plan to filter the Australian Internet. I really, really, wanted to include the image from that post in my post – but I had no idea how to do that via Press This. So, I screenshotted the image using Skitch, intending to insert the image as a normal image in the post.

But, no. Press This automatically showed me a list of all the images that it could find on the page – I found the image that I wanted, clicked on it, and that was that – the image was now inserted in my post.

I <3 WordPress.