Judi Sohn

Judi Sohn

Judi Sohn  //  Nonprofit tech. Knitting. Autism. Activism. And More.

Jul 23 / 9:07am

Facebook recommended pages are brain dead

I don't know exactly what they're called, but I hate those new Facebook auto-bot-stupid generated pages. No one creates them, they're just generated by Facebook around a term or idea and it auto--bot-stupid aggregates content around the topic or idea and it auto-bot-stupid suggests to folks (who are neither bots nor stupid) to like the page. 

Long ago I submitted the official page for the auto-bot-stupid page created for C3. But has it changed? No. And there are 5 people who like it who I'm not sure if they've found their way to our actual page

This shows just how auto-bot-stupid it is. 

I logged into Facebook and this is what's "Recommended" to me:

Hmmm... Judging by the images, there are 2 different pages on the same word. Curious, I click through to the first one (names intentionally blanked out). Which appears to be intentionally created by someone.

And then the second:

So a page is created for Knitting. and a separate auto-bot-stupid one for Knitting (notice no punctuation)? Great, tomorrow will Facebook suggest me to like Knitting? How about Knitting!

I love when I get a recommendation to a real page based on what I've already liked. Great idea. But these auto-bot-stupid things have got to go.
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Jul 23 / 4:21am

Looking for older momathome.com posts? (updated)

After my old self-hosted WordPress blog hosted by MediaTemple was compromised over the weekend (one of many)*, I exported the content (and removed the malicious injected link that started all the trouble) and redirected all traffic to judisohn.com and momathome.com to come here to my Posterous blog. It was a hasty decision that I don't regret, but I had some debris to clean up that I didn't get around to doing until today.

I tried to import all the old posts here. Just didn't work. With nearly 2,000 posts and over 5,000 comments the standard importer would not have worked. After 5 days of waiting for the uploaded file to import, I gave up and imported the file to a WordPress.com site instead. Took a grand total of maybe 15 minutes. Apples to apples makes things easier, I guess. I search my own blog from time to time to spark my memory or remember a tip I shared. Nice to have it all back.

All the posts and comments are there. Unfortunately, I didn't make sure that I had absolute paths to images and so any image hosted on old blog is now broken, and some much older posts that relied on text fomatting plug-ins I experimented with look funky now. I can live with that, at least for the time being. There's also a few miscellaneous pages I have to find a new home. My hosting account with MediaTemple isn't gone for good until the end of the year.

* MediaTemple makes it sound like folks who had their sites attacked hadn't updated WordPress in years. In fact, I was running whatever was the previous version released in December 2009. Would I have been more secure with 3.0? Probably, but that had only been released a month earlier. A month! If you can't wait even a month to decide whether you want to go to the latest and greatest then something is seriously wrong somewhere. That's what I like about Posterous and even WordPress.com now...keeping my site free of malware and vulnerabilities is their problem which they seem to take seriously, not mine.

Update: I chose wisely. After 5 days, I tried a 2nd upload using the same file that went to WordPress.com. I just got an email that my blog finished importing. Great news! the email shown below told me. But when I went to the page to see if it the import was better than what I already put in WordPress.com...not so much.
   
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Jul 23 / 3:30am

Wishful weather thinking

Weather widget in Chrome chuckle. Unfortunately, the numbers at the bottom are more accurate. Ugh.

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Jul 17 / 4:03pm

Malware link makes a decision easier (updated)

So I've been going back and forth about what I want to do with my personal domains. I have two, judisohn.com and momathome.com Momathome.com is legacy. It doesn't make a lot of sense now, given what I do for a living, but it was my first identity on the web and I know there's a lot of history out there tied to it. I primarily use it now for the kids' email and it redirects to judisohn.com.

I started transitioning the web side of things to judisohn.com but my heart wasn't in it. It came down to the fact that all the hassles of maintaining a domain just aren't worth it to me anymore. I'm no longer concerned with who can find me through a random Google search. I only care about the people in my network and extended network... nonprofit geeks, knitters, friends, family, techies etc. If anything, I can't stand when some stranger not connected to any community I care about emails me about an ancient post. I'm a totally different person now, with different perspective and goals. 

Posterous is a good fit for me, and I love that I only focus on content and they do the rest. Posting by email means I have a backup. It's by no means perfect, but good enough.

This morning I went to log in to my old WordPress blog for some reason I can't remember right now and saw this:

Oh that's just grand.

I logged into Webmaster tools, found what the offending code was and managed to remove it, no easy feat since my browsers weren't thrilled with even letting me in to the WP admin page. It was a line of script on the most recent post pointing to some malware site I obviously won't say here. I found the exact issue on the WordPress support site if anyone is interested. Looks like an issue with a MediaTemple (gs) database, although they'd probably deny it.

That was the final straw. I'm done with personal website hosting and I'll save $125 a year to boot. 

I've requested through the Webmasters tool that Google re-review my site so browsers won't complain, and then I'm redirecting judisohn.com and momathome.com here once and for all. I have no idea how long it will take for Google to clear the domain. 

I have an up-to-date export of all the old blog's content which I've been trying to get imported. If the import doesn't work, maybe I'll set it up on a WordPress.com site to have as an archive. Then I can ask Google (once again through the Webmasters tool) to re-index the domain and call it a day.

Apologies in advance for all those old URLs that will break. It's going to happen, can't lose sleep over it. Time for a fresh start.

And I'm sorry if anyone gets malware from me.

Update: I've found more information about what got into my site. I found this post, and sure enough there were multiple "JohnnyA" administrators in my site. I've deleted them all, and hopefully my site will be re-cleared by Google and redirected to Posterous before whatever happened happens again. Seems like MediaTemple has a problem on their hands, soon enough it won't be my problem too.

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Jun 11 / 3:50am

Sun rises in the east, sets in the west...and Google's home page is white

dale_chihuly_google-highres.jpg

It probably seemed like such a good idea at the time. Google added the ability to make the Google home page more Bing-like with background images, and showed it off by adding their own images to everyone's home page for a day. Big deal. 

Apparently it was. They stopped the promotion a bit early and now Google is plain vanilla white again (reason why in the blog post linked above). I barely noticed since I "Google" using Chrome's address bar. I rarely go to Google's home page directly.

Yesterday, Eric and I went out for lunch. I happened to overhear two women at the next table talk about the change and how unsettling it was. "Can you believe it about Google this morning?" was the quip that initially got my attention. I thought I missed something really important so my ears perked up. Then they went on about it. How they couldn't figure out how to turn it off. How finally a colleague showed them how to upload a big blank white image to get the old Google back. This wasn't a fleeting moment. This stopped productivity in some business while employees dealt with the crisis. I know it was rude of me to listen to their conversation. I'm sorry. Couldn't help myself. 

Sometimes those of us in the if-it's-five-minutes-ago-it's-old tech cocoon forget just how jarring change like this can be to normal people.

As my friend Peter Campbell of Techcafeteria so wisely said at NTC earlier this year, people don't hate change...they hate disruption.
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May 29 / 6:50am

Thinking tech for a 14 year old with autism

In a few weeks, my oldest daughter will be graduating from middle school. High school begins in the fall. I'm starting to get a picture of who my baby may be as an adult. Scary, but in a good way because she's an amazing young lady. She's intelligent, sweet, compassionate, has a wicked sense of humor and has thankfully has spared us from most of the average 14 year-old angst. She also has high-functioning autism. Looking at her now you'd never know I was once told that she might never speak in full sentences. 

Like many kids with autism, she needs a lot of structure in her life. She always has to know what's happening next or she gets very stressed out. She also has fine motor issues. She can write, but it's barely legible. She's very comfortable on the computer. She never had much interest in email, but does communicate with classmates from time to time on gaming social networks that are kid-appropriate. I just turned off her cell phone account because she was never using it. Only recently has she mastered answering and using the telephone at home. She also has an internal filter that's better than any parental control software. She refused to see a PG-13 movie until she was actually 13. She doesn't like to hear bad words. If she stumbles across something she shouldn't see on YouTube, she'll switch it off faster than I could react. She loves to read and write, but needs help making sure her stories have a beginning, middle and end.

We've decided to get her an iPad this summer. This isn't a toy or entertainment device, although we certainly expect her to use it for that when appropriate.

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Apr 17 / 12:55pm

Frustrated with online project management tools

I am tearing my hair out. Or I will, as soon as I can figure out where the task is to do that and who's responsible.

 
We have a team of 7 staff members. Each of us works on different projects for different programs. From time to time, we work with consultants or outside vendors.
 
We are an efficient bunch, but what we lack is centralized project and task coordination. We need to be able to see how our projects are progressing over time. Where the bottlenecks are. What is falling behind. What the next year will look like for projects we know we're going to take on but haven't started yet.
 
Folks are comfortable in email and instant messenger. It's where most of the conversation happens between us and we get a lot accomplished. Yet working this way, we miss that "big picture" overview.
 
It seems obvious that there should be a tool we can use to help us here. We don't have a server so we don't want desktop software. We want something that works in the cloud. You would think that with so many choices we'd find exactly what we need.
 
I have spent the last week or two trying more of these online project management tools than I can count. Many of them are here. 
 
So frustrated that none are singing to me the way Salesforce or Google Apps did when I first tried them out.
 
Here's what I want:
  • Uncluttered interface - folks have to spend less time managing projects than doing them. It doesn't have to be simple or designed for idiots - I work with very smart, technically capable people. It needs to be streamlined and without features and distractions we don't need.
  • A task management system folks will actually use - When they finish a task, will they remember to go to this tool and check it off?
  • Centralized administration and management - Administrator can create/assign projects - only assigned managers can edit milestones and the phases of the project
  • Bird's eye view of all projects and where they stand ("What's the next step? Who's responsible?") - Dashboard shows status of active tasks - not just recent activity
  • Gantt and/or clear calendar view that includes milestones and multi-day phases - bonus if it syncs with Google Calendar
  • Integration with email (receive notification via email, bonus if you can reply to attach discussion to a task)
  • Files only as essential for project - not just to dump stuff
  • Invite outside users to projects as needed
  • Don't want tickets/case management, don't want wikis, don't want blogs, don't want "here's what I'm eating for lunch" status updates - need to be able to to tailor interface to only what we need/want. We have other tools, I want to avoid duplication as much as possible.
  • works across platforms and modern browsers - not so much an issue these days, but still needs to be considered
  • Cost: total of under $50 per month but can make a case for spending more if it's exceptional.
What follows is my impression of what I've tried so far and why it falls short.
 
The biggest problem with these tools is that they are designed for teams that work with clients. Or they are designed for teams that work on software development. Or they are designed for teams that work work with clients on software development. What about project management for teams that produce newsletters? For teams that are working on a conference or event? For teams that are tracking a year-long editorial and strategy calendar for fundraising campaigns? Not so much.
 
I've been whining about this in Twitter a bit. I've been asked to summarize my findings. 
 
These are the tools I've evaluated/looked at and why I like them/don't like them. 
 

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Filed under  //  applications   collaboration   online project management  

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Apr 14 / 8:28am

Everything

Now that Posterous has pages, I've moved this content to a static page.

 At the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference I attended a group discussion breakfast about personal vs. professional branding. Kara Carrell (aka @Karitas) pointed out that she has a "How I Roll" post that she links to and updates as her on and offline world evolves. I loved that idea. So much so that I'm stealing, I mean borrowing it. The title of this post is "Everything" because it will make a good catch-all URL. Sorry if you were expecting something else.

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Mar 29 / 11:29am

C3: Colorectal Cancer Coalition's 2010 Congressional Butt-In

Tomorrow is butt-in day! Even with health care reform, and no matter how you feel about that, we still need action. Please do me a big favor and call your Rep tomorrow.

We're looking for House co-sponsors for HR 1189, a bill that will extend Medicare benefits for colorectal cancer screening and treatment to those who are low income and/or under-insured.

This is modeled on a program that has been incredibly successful for breast and cervical cancer screenings.

Thanks!

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Mar 18 / 3:08pm

Google Voice funnies: Really now, did you?

Google Voice's attempts at transcribing voicemails never fail to entertain.

The actual message from my husband was: "Hi honey, it's me. Call me back please. Thank you."

And Google Voice thought he said:


tee hee.
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