Human vs Machine

PestaBlogger 2007 is a lot like having sex for the first time. You’re excited but you don’t really know what the hell you’re doing. And some way, one way or another, it’s over too fast.

Photo courtesy of Um Ganteng

[Photo courtesy of Gapingvoid]

As far as I can remember, blogging didn’t really that hard back in old days. That was the time even before we coined “buzzmarketing”, “naked conversation”, “cluetrain manifesto”, and “citizen journalism” buzzwords.

I mean, I just wrote.

I didn’t care what’s you have for your breakfast but sure I did care about what you are. So write your “My Top 10 Breakfast Menu” if you’really feel you should despite the fact that no one will ever read about it. Okay, maybe someone will read that and creating a nice echo chamber effect. Probably you should also post your cat’s picture once in a while and maybe, just maybe, you won’t let your beloved readers down.

After couple of years of blogging my golden rule is shortened from “25 Do’s and Dont’s ala Problogger style” into just one simple rule:

“Writing manufactures lies, but it doesn’t lie about what you’re really passionate about”.

The rest is just detail then.

So go ahead. Write your breakfast menu and post your cat’s picture. I’m okay with that.

No one can take your passion. No one defines you. No one judges you. No membership, no submission, no invitation, nor even stupid mambo-jumbo nationality trolling can take your passion. Some people are just ends up being an arsehole. Some people are just that lame. That’s inevitable. But then again, who cares?

No one is listening while everyone is talking.

I’m still surprised witnessing some blogger’s effort trying that hard to distinguish their self from the whole packs, in effect, ends up with creating a big impenetrable status-quo fortresses. These fortresses, suffice it to say, producing different level of “existential crisis” that makes every newcomer blog found him/herself hard to blend in.

I’m not happy seeing what we’ve became into this big marketing vehicle.

Bullshit.

It’s open for 24 hours only.

And we have already 4 emails in less than 5 minutes!

Updates 6 AM : 20 emails.
Updates 12 PM : Over 40. 68 emails.
Updates 6.30 PM : 115 emails. Less than six hours left.
Update 12.00 AM : Closed. 132 133 emails!

Aggregator is a good idea: subscribe to a single feed and read multiple feeds in return. Not to mention, each aggregator was built with a shared-context in mind: topical, community, or whatever reason that may satisfy your liking.

Unfortunately, Yin cannot exist without Yang. Aggregator’s advantage is its main drawback. Subscribe to a aggregator is like “all or nothing” relationship. You cannot filter-out blog you really don’t like. Living in a world that we can freely buy singles and not the album, blog aggregator is a blasphemy to the Long Tail religion. Thanks to Yahoo Pipes, we can nuke blogs we don’t like, thus bring balance back to the Force.

It should be easy and intuitive.

First, we set a feed source. I set values to Planet Terasi and Merdeka. Remember, type (or copy paste) only feed value. So in this example I type:

1. http://planet.terasi.net/rss20.xml on first text input.
2. http://feeds.feedburner.com/Merdeka on second text input.

Second, filter those feeds based on our criteria. Let’s say that you had enough reading my blog. You found that I become more egocentric than ever and at certain point reading my blog eventually escorts your mind to a painful torture that you never know of before. That’s okay. I don’t wanna be everything for everyone either.

To skip my feed out of two aggregators, you only need to add a filter, set Rules value item.link to ‘andry’. Every item that has permalink containing the word “andry” will be out of your radar from now on.

Save your pipes. Browse to My Yahoo Pipes pages, and subscribe to the pipes’ feed that you just created. Now you have your own customized aggregator. Welcome to the Long Tail club.

ps. You can also filter it again based on uniqueness (so blog that included in both aggregators won’t appear twice) and/or any other operators. I leave it as an exercise.

Rather than blatantly join blind-leading-the-blind SEO sect by making more web pollutant, why don’t we take a lot more challenging “contest” such as CSSReboot.

What is CSSReboot?
The CSS Reboot is a community event for web professionals and enthusiasts. Every November 1st and May 1st at 18:00 GMT, Rebooters from all over the world launch their standards based website redesigns simultaneously; bringing traffic, interest and a little respect to their sites. There are no prizes or arbitrary winners, just great exposure and the knowledge that we all participated in something great.

All we have to do is redesign our current website into somewhat beautiful website and adhering to webstandard.

If you have no idea what the heck web standard is, let me explain it to you in SEO manner.

• Put XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript into separate files. Not only you took advantages of browser’s cache capability (thus, load faster). Structured websites are easy to read by human. And eventually, by your beloved Google Robot.
• Imagine your killer resume. You only have one title, that is, your name, on it. You represent several relevant context in subheading such as “Educational Background” or “Professional Experiences”. The same thing happens when we build a readable website. We use HTML tag in respective uses. We address this matter as semantic web.
• Semantic URL a.k.a pretty permalink. Pretty permalink is a good thing because :
  • It is easy to remember by us, human beings.
  • It is the future. To RESTified your website, you need semantic URL. Imagine such snippet:

So what it’s gonna be?

I see Deny Sri, Gage Sevenova, and Arif Widi are already in. It’s clearly that I don’t make beautiful web sites as they do. But heck, I’ll overcome my fear to be a brave soul and tag along.

Here’s my design preview. It’s done from scratch in just about 4 hours using Gimp. Bear with me.

Building website that readable, and hopefully lovable, by any human being is far more challenging rather than build a website so satisfy Google Robot.

So what are you waiting for?
Don’t be such a chicken sissy. Pick the right fight contest.