drop your shoulders
When Google announced a couple of months ago that they’d be updating Reader, I was initially upset over the loss of my sharebros — probably the only social network Google’s ever gotten right. Sharing and commenting on articles of interest with other Reader friends was simple, streamlined, and worked really well on both smartphones and browsers. The new Reader still allows you to share articles, but only via Google+, which is clunky at best, and requires far too many clickthroughs.
After a couple of months, I still miss my sharebros, but I am more upset over the new garbage-y Reader interface. I’ve stopped reading my RSS feeds almost completely; I’ll log into Reader once a week and “give it another go” but always end up reading 4-5 out of 1000 articles before I get frustrated, mark everything as read, and log back out. The mobile app’s UI remains relatively unchanged but is unreliable, routinely forgetting where you left off and marking dozens of articles as read when it shouldn’t.
I don’t watch televised news programs (aside from the occasional Daily Show / Colbert Nation / Rachel Maddow episode); Twitter and RSS feeds are how I keep track of what’s going on in the world, and I’ve definitely felt less informed in the last two months. I understand Google is trying to funnel traffic to Google+, but at least for me the end result of these changes has been zero increase in Google+ usage and several hours less of Reader usage every week.
Fortunately I’m not the only one who misses the old Reader interface.
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My domain registration dollars have gone to GoDaddy for several years; they were the cheapest registrar at the time, and transferring domain registration is a pain, as you’ll see in a moment. I could overlook the skeezy Super Bowl ads, shady business practices, and elephant-shooting torture-supporting CEO; after all I’m a lazy American and sometimes I go for what’s cheapest and easiest instead of most in line with my values. I’m not proud of that, I’m just saying.
GoDaddy really hit a nerve, though, when they filed a statement to the US House of Representatives in favor of SOPA. I won’t get into why SOPA is a really terrible thing; if you’re interested, check Wikipedia, this Reddit thread, or let Adam Savage from Mythbusters break it down for you. This was the very large straw that broken the inaction camel’s back, and this week I finally moved all 15 domains under my control away from GoDaddy.
Since this process is a pain, and because Jim Groom asked nicely, here’s a step by step tutorial for how to move your domains away from GoDaddy. I chose NameCheap as my new registrar; they publicly oppose SOPA, have a great reputation among the tech-knowledgable communities on both Reddit and Metafilter, offer a free year of WHOIS Guard (basically, a way to keep your contact information private) and are offering discounts on domain transfers. I completed my transfer before the discounts were announced, but there’s no reason YOU can’t take advantage of them. 
UPDATE: Also, take a look at this Lifehacker article with updates on the situation, including discounts on new webhosting accounts.
Alright, let’s get to it. If you notice something missing from these instructions, please let me know and I will update them!
over the last day or two i’ve been trying reeeeeeally hard to justify skipping the blog-bling assignment. “but i’ve been administering wordpress sites FOR FIVE YEARS,” i whine. “how much more exploration / playing around do i really need to do?” of course the overachiever in me does not take that for an answer, reminding my lazybones self that most of those five years have been spent attending to other people’s needs and desires, not my own. (nb: i’m not complaining, just observing; although i got started with server and web administration as part of a paid job, i sysadmin now only on a volunteer basis, and i do it because i enjoy it. so there.)
i hadn’t planned on writing quite so much about failure … i promise i’m not obsessed with it … but thanks to ds106 i keep finding all of this AWESOME STUFF. this video from the tedx series, via jen maddux, touches on the science of failure, improvisation, communication, language, jazz, freestyle rap — and how all these related forms of creativity function neurologically. Continue reading »
![how AWESOME would this be as a DS106 assignment? srsly. [click image for source]](http://ryanbrazell.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/sparks-150x112.jpg "sparks")
As I noted in a comment to Brad’s great response to Gardner Campbell’s personal cyberinfrastructure presentation, I’ve been really wrestling with the idea of digital landownership vs. sharecropping. My first instinct is to chafe at the idea of proscribing a process, of making it an assignment to purchasing both a domain and a personal webhosting account; the point of ds106, after all, is to learn about expressing oneself, and art is as much about the process as it is the final outcome. In the spirit of “many pieces loosely joined,” having accounts on many different platforms can provide greater prototyping and flexibility; if you try something and don’t like it, you can usually deactivate (or abandon) your account quickly and easily with needing to perform any uninstallations. It’s neither difficult nor expensive to set up a domain and a webhost, but not everyone is interested in being their own sysadmin, and although students often decorate their own lockers, we don’t send them to the smithy with a welding gun of their own. Continue reading »
