OpenOffice as (blog) writing tool

I’m a geek. So when it’s not a writer’s block keeping me from producing a blog post, I’ll dive into tools and techniques to “optimise” my writing experience before I start typing out sentences. Lets call it preventive productivity: getting a lot of related things done in order to be more efficient later. Like getting the tools and the work flow right. Perhaps I managed that, now that I can really use OpenOffice to write blog posts, with Zotero to manage my reference, and the Sun Weblog Publisher to push the result towards my website.

Curing “Data Hugging Disorder”

Last Friday, the 1%Club held their (first, probably not last) 1%EVENT, about “international development cooperation 2.0”. I facilitated a session on “connecting the platforms”, to pave the (technical) way towards a cure for what Ushahidi’s Juliana Rotich aptly referred to as “Data Hugging Disorder“. It resulted in a positive discussion with several people of organisations that build or host online platforms. Coming Monday, I hope the discussion continues at a meeting in The Hague about a possible Dutch IS-Hub.

Plumbing on the web

Social Media Plumbing: Flow chart to sketch how I use different tools and social media sites feeding into one FriendFeed room, and then use that as input for my websiteSocial Media Plumbing:

A post by Robert Scoble made me have another look at rooms in FriendFeed. I set things up over the weekend, and decided to document it, to maybe succeed in explaining what this is all about. Here’s my situation:

  • I post content on various social media sites through various tools
  • I want some of that content to appear on my own website
  • I switch platforms quite often, or start using them in a different way, so keeping it up to date should be easy

So I decided to start a FriendFeed room with content that I want to appear on my site1, and use their feed widget to then display it on my home page. It still took some effort (to get the styling how I wanted it), but it’s done, and here’s how.

Moving to Ubuntu

I’ve finally made to switch: my desktop now is open source! I’ve pushed back for quite some time, had too many programs that still required Windows, and generally just wasn’t ready. But now I did it. My laptop needed a fresh install, and I tried out the latest Ubuntu (going under names like 8.04 and Hardy and Hardy Heron). And decided to stay with it, after trying out things for several weeks. Why?

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