Endurance and Perseverance Required

My Pathfinder Club returned from the Under Oath Camporee a week ago.

When the Camporee quickly deteriorates from a brilliantly sunny opening parade to torrential rain that turned the camping area into a mud-pit, it takes a special willingness from the members of the club to endure and persevere.

Willingness to eat breakfast while standing in a 30 ml river flowing through our cooking tent.

Willingness to slosh through 60 ml of mud every step you take outside your tent.

Willingness to carefully sit at the entrance to your tent, remove a mud-encrusted boot, carefully wash the leg from the knee to the foot, then dry it, and carefully retract it inside the tent; then repeat the performance for the other leg. And be willing to do this every time you re-enter the tent. (This procedure becomes particularly painful when you’re forced into a midnight excursion to the portable toilets.)

The good news is that my Pathfinders proved that they indeed have the mettle to endure and persevere in difficult conditions. We belonged to the minority of clubs who managed to feed, clothe and sleep their Pathfinders on the hill.

The Under Oath Blog does a good job of documenting Camporee conditions.

View from my window

View from a farmhouse west of Murwillumbah, NSW, Australia.

For some reason, SquareSpace’s iPhone posting tool didn’t publish my text along with the image when I first published this photograph. What follows is my recollection of what I wrote.

Today I drove from Sydney to west of Murwillumbah. I’m staying at a farmhouse this evening. Tomorrow I’ll travel to Toowoomba, Queensland.

I’m leading ten teenagers on a Pathfinder Camporee, where 2,500 teenagers from around Australia are gathering for a six-day program full of physical challenges and spiritual nourishment.

2010 Article Review

What I write on this blog has been largely determined by several focii I set it when I began writing the blog in mid 2009:

• Improving the world through use of knowledge tools
• Reviewing knowledge tools
• Designing and Creating new knowledge tools
• Analysing the way the world works (analytical tools in action)
• Software design trends
• Software criticism
• Professional practise notes

These are the topic focuses set in the left-hand pane of my Career Daybook article planning system. (The Noguchi shelf sits on the right, providing a time-ordered representation as to what I’ve touched most recently.)

I have not at all been disciplined about which of these topics I write about. Rather, I’ve written whatever has most demanded my attention. So, having written primarily for myself, I find it interesting to see what articles have been most read.

Top Ten Most Read Articles on Loryn.me in 2010 

1. Tacking Noguchi Shelving onto Tinderbox 
2. iPad’s iBook page turn is kitschy 
3. How Livescribe created a reliable control interface 
4. Help Me Help You
5. Extending Tinderbox for Textual Analysis 
6. Fact-checking Nick Carr’s ass 
7. How Livescribe Pulse changed my career 
8. What to do about information scarcity 
9. Noguchi Bonus Pack 
10. The Cline from Image to Text 

Also, given the fact that I posted nothing on this blog since May 2010, I also find it interesting seeing the articles that keep getting read. The articles that have woven themselves into the fabric of the internet, and the ones that continue receiving direct hits from search engines.

The two articles that continue to be most read, by a run-away margin, are  Tacking Noguchi Shelving onto Tinderbox and Beyond GTD—Why Creatives are Revolting. I suspect this is because both articles tap into something pre-existing (Noguchi shelving, GTD) and add something novel (Tinderbox implementation, differentiating the Creative mindset from a Managerial mindset).

Top Ten Articles that Keep Getting Read on Loryn.me

1. Tacking Noguchi Shelving onto Tinderbox
2. Beyond GTD—Why Creatives are Revolting
3. What to do about information scarcity 
4. Slicing through the Knowledge Café 
5. Affordance Critique 
6. Mogeneration goes social for price comparison 
7. The Cline from Image to Text 
8. Why consumers will flock to iPads 
9. iPad’s iBook page turn is kitschy 
10. Extending Tinderbox for Textual Analysis

Goal Review

In looking at the articles published since 2009, I find that I haven’t been publishing on the full range of topics on which I set out to write about. Moreover, my Noguchi shelf contains stubs for 117 articles that I thought about writing, but haven’t found the time to actually write. 

So that leads me to publish some New Year’s resolutions.

New Year’s Resolutions

1. Exercise more.
2. Blog more.
3. Blog more regularly.
4. Blog on topics that better represent my underlying interests.

Every Ending Represents a New Beginning

Today I had the unfortunate task of closing down the last internet services provided by Future House. The website editing and hosting services known as iiab and Sitely have had their services switched off.

Over the course of the last few months I became the final employee of Future House, the company once known as Geekdom. When I joined in Geekdom in 2009, there were 86 employees. As of today, Future House now has no employees.

During the first part of 2010, I was so focused on building Sitely that I omitted blogging. In the second half of 2010, I didn’t feel able to blog about what was happening within the Photon-owned that employed me, due to the level of uncertainty surrounding what was happening within my company, and that level of uncertainty surrounding Photon’s recapitalisation.

Later in January, I’ll publish my account of the challenges and achievements of the team I had the privilege of leading during my employment with Geekdom / Future House.

Happy New Year to you and your loved ones.

The Sitely Story

“A website for every business,” is the rallying cry that drove the vision and development of Sitely. Here in Australia, only 56% of businesses have a website. Our vision is for every business to have a website.

So we set about creating a service to eliminate every barrier between businesses and the websites they need:

Cost - Sitely is free. (An optional paid version is coming.)

Technical skill - Sitely requires no knowledge of tags or HTML. It is completely WYSIWYG. And requires only that you know how to drag things around a screen, and click to edit.

Design skill - Sitely comes with a (growing) range of industry-specific designs.

Writing skill - Sitely generates a site complete with industry-specific text that is customised for the business.

Time - Sitely builds a website instantly. 

In less than five minutes, any business owner can sign up for a Sitely site and have a website generated specifically for them. They can select from a range of designs, or set about customising their own. They can tweak the content, add or remove pages, and publish when they’re ready.

And while we’ve focused heavily on the first five minutes of use, we’ve spent even more effort thinking through the lifecycle of creating, modifying, editing and the on-going maintenance of websites. Sitely is a website development tool you can use on a long-term basis.

Sitely is now in beta. We’ve aimed really high, but we know we’ve more work to do. We’d welcome you giving Sitely a try, and are keen to receive your comments on how we can better nail this vision.