My first experiment with WordPress began way back in 2004 in my attempts to run a Linux server farm from my apartment in Dalian, China. Despite navigating the murky waters of hosting an unlicensed blog and a FTP server in The People’s Republic, I got a real charge out of rummaging through the WordPress code and keeping all the balls in the air for both my blog and FTP server. Out of this chaos emerged my first blog – Potting Along. Dalian dust storms and apartment dust bunnies sounded the death knell for my blog server when my dust-clogged CPU fan seized and subsequently cooked my motherboard. Rather than move to round two of ‘Dances with DNS’ with the PRC, I decided to move Potting Along to a hosted service experimenting with WordPressMU. Potting Along continued with daily posts throughout 2005 and 2006 – chronicling all things passing through my life, headphones, and travels.

Much like the groundhog does this time of year, I poked my head up, took a look around, and decided that there should be an early spring. Birthdays also have a tendency to inspire reflection – today just so happens to be my 36th. I have taken a leave of absence from blogging for the past year for a whole host of reasons. Recent developments in both my personal and professional life have inspired me to get back in the ring – enter NetworkEffects.

Network effects are phenomenas wherein functionality or services become more valuable as more people use it. Although I haven’t been posting to my own blog, I have been following an ever increasing number of RSS feeds for the past year and have been inspired by the writing and ideas emerging. Many of these are featured in my blogroll and there are many more to be added. I encourage you to visit them.

What will you see here at NetworkEffects? Now that I am working as the e-Learning Coordinator at UNBC, expect to see my musings and machinations dealing with educational technologies. As this blog is now hosted with UNBC, I have SSH access to all aspects of the server. As such, expect to see strange widgets evolving (…and devolving…) at Network Effects. In keeping with the Potting Along of old, also expect to see my irreverent side emerge in music, videos, photography, and video games. I have been active with my SLoodle installation again in addition to OpenCroquet and have these projects underway at the university. I will be blogging these developments to NetworkEffects from within SL using the SLoodle HUD and am working on developing blogging methods with my OpenCroquet project.

Let’s wrap this post up with some music – here’s a track from Medeski, Martin & Wood’s new album for kids Let’s Go Everywhere. This has been playing in the family car for the last week and is Gabriel and Lydia’s favorite track.

 

 

Adblock