April 2010 – everwas

A couple of days ago I had one of those “uh-oh” moments when you’re not quite paying attention and do something you really shouldn’t have but don’t realize it until it’s already done. This was a doozy. My web hosting provider, Laughing Squid Web Hosting, jumped in and saved me. It’s times like these when you appreciate the value of a good hosting provider.

laughingsquid — Best Hosting Provider Around!

For every WordPress upgrade for the past couple of years or so I have used the excellent WordPress Automatic Upgrade plug-in to handle my upgrades. Problem is, it was so good it lulled me into auto-pilot so I didn’t really pay too close attention during this most recent upgrade and certainly didn’t check to see that WPAU is no longer being supported.

After timing out during one of the steps and gettting sporatic errors afterwards, things got progressively worse until I totally botched things and was left with the dreaded white screen of death. I submitted a ticket to the Laughing Squid guys explaining what happened and attached an error log but basically said not to worry too much about it if they could just restore the files back to the way it was last week.

Instead, Frank, over at Laughing Squid central, offered to look into things for me and not only un-borked my install but also upgraded me to the latest version. Thanks Frank!

I signed up for Laughing Squid Hosting because I’m a fan of Scott Beale’s quirky blog about SF (lately NYC) culture, and have turned many people on to the Bay Area to the SquidList as a source of things cool and extraordinary. Hosting my blog with LS was my way of supporting Scott. Not only do these guys support cool and interesting art, they also run a great hosting shop.

(this post was, as all my posts, totally unsolicited and straight from the heart)

Long post by Tim O’Reilly on the current state of the Internet as an Operating System. Many key developments that see this idea coming together and Tim connects the dots in a compelling way to complete the picture. The key piece for me is Social. The Internet OS still does not usefully recognize that we have multiple social graphs that depend upon application and context. Current solutions such as Facebook Connect currently assume a universal “friend’s list” which doesn’t address this subtlety.

Whoever cracks this code, providing frameworks that make it possible for applications to be functionally social without being socially promiscuous, will win. Platform providers are in a good position to solve this problem once, so that users don’t have to give credentials to a larger and larger pool of application providers, with little assurance that the data they provide won’t be misused. (Emphasis mine).

This is a key problem that needs to be solved. Location-based services and mobile devices are pieces of the puzzle but more synapses are needed to make it work effortlessly.