Entrepreneur, writer, and hockey official in the Philadelphia area.
Nobody's noticed yet, but I created a Tumblr blog for myself, at http://daveaiello.tumblr.com/. As I said over there, I'm hoping that I can use Tumblr to enhance the value of my other sites.
I'm also hoping to get a feel for how Tumblr differs from Movable Type, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.
We'll see how that works out.
The gorgeous panoramic photo of Houston Field House that is the cover photo for my site was shot by fellow RPI alumnus Jeff Wadsworth. I want everybody to know that this is his photo, I use it with his permission, and I thank him for sharing it with me.
Over the past couple of weeks, Kathleen and I have worked together on relaunching OperationGadget.com, which is my technology blog that I started in 2003. We also launched PedsApps.com which will be Kathleen's site that will focus on iPhone and iPad applications that are of interest to Pediatricians, nurse practitioners, and other care providers, as well as to the parents of their patients.
These sites are currently sharing a modified version of the Rainier Theme that ships with Movable Type 5.
I'm glad to bring Operation Gadget back at this point. The technologies that I've talked about and evangelized over the years are more relevant than ever. There is no end of ideas to talk about, ways to make ourselves more productive, and ways to use technology to follow sports and manage our personal fitness. All of this is in Operation Gadget's wheel house.
I think Kathleen's site will take off quickly. Although a number of people have staked out the medical apps niche, nobody is dominating the space. Kathleen has discovered that there is an audience for her writing, and there's no stopping her now.
Although these sites have different audiences, you'll see features from one site end up on the other, where it's appropriate. I hope you enjoy them.
The other day my son Jimmy broke this 30-inch polished chrome towel bar that had been holding up towels in our master bathroom for the last seven years. This was not a big deal, but it meant that I had to go out and find another towel bar to replace it.
The big issue with any task like this is that I have never looked that deeply into the inventory of the Ace Hardware or Newtown Hardware House, so I don't know if you can replace the towel bar without completely replacing the fixture.
The good news was that the Ace Hardware in Newtown Township is run by people who are fine with letting a customer walk out of their store without buying anything. So the salesman who was helping me said, "You know, we don't stock towel bars that size, but I bet somebody does." Which meant two things to me:
This will probably come as a shock to all of you who have DaveAiello.com as your browser home page, but I decided to choose a new theme for this site when I upgraded the CMS to Movable Type 5.2.2. I'm sure I'll customize it, at least a bit, sometime soon.
If you have any suggestions for design changes, please let me know.
It's time for people in North America and Europe who respect Movable Type to start supporting it again, and tell the web publishing community why it is still a great platform for creating and publishing all sorts of web content.
Since I left Six Apart and started After6 Services, I have watched people make all sorts of crazy statements about Movable Type. This is a product I have used since early in 2003 when I launched Operation Gadget.
Most of the negative things that people say about Movable Type-- that it is antiquated, poorly supported, inefficient, and expensive compared to its competitors-- simply aren't true. Anybody who thinks I'm wrong about this needs to sit down with me for a talk about which metrics you use when making your judgements.
I know Movable Type, and I am learning everything I can about the competition. Those competitors are not head-and-shoulders above Movable Type in any area except for the mindshare of web publishers. And that can be fixed by a concerted marketing effort from Six Apart and its third-party developer community.
Due to almost zero marketing since the original Six Apart merged with VideoEgg to form SAY Media, Movable Type usually isn't part of the conversation when talk turns to what publishing tools will be used to build the next great online property. Through this M&A activity, the new Six Apart-- which was the old Six Apart's Japanese subsidiary headquartered in Tokyo-- was reduced to a zero-employee presence in North America for over a year. So it shouldn't surprise anybody that the product hasn't been marketed outside of Japan in any meaningful way since January 2011.
This has to change, if only because WordPress has had a free ride for a long time against competitors that are marketed unsuccessfully (which is a worse problem than not being marketed at all). WordPress is a great product, but one with some weaknesses that make it a less solid choice than Movable Type for a number of online publishing tasks.
The other day I listened to Episode 49 of the podcast Back to Work, where Merlin Mann and his guest John Gruber from Daring Fireball spend about 8 to 10 minutes talking about why Movable Type is a fantastic platform for building websites. The thought crossed my mind that this is not simply a better refutation of what my good friend Byrne Reese said about Movable Type a year ago than I could write. The podcast made me wonder what it would take to get Merlin Mann and John Gruber to stand up in front of a group of people and say these things again?
"At Daring Fireball I have complete control. And that's why I use MT {Movable Type}. There's, you know, other systems I could use that would be-- more modern. But I've got a system set up there so I can control everything," John Gruber at 1 minute.
"I miss MT so much. That was my introduction to the command line.... I mean you've got to give Ben {Trott} props for coming up with that-- what would you call it? Like... inside of the less than greater thans, the ability to have that meta language for what posts should do on the page. {That} was how I learned so much stuff that I later kind of did with programming...." Merlin Mann.
"I think the credit that Ben should get is, to me it was the first system that, and I was looking before I launched Daring Fireball for at least a year, and... staying on top of anything that called itself a weblog system, a CMS, or anything like that. It was really, really good at not being constrained to the author of the system's idea of what a blog or a CMS should be....
And there were other systems before MT but you could use them to make a site like the site that it came with out of the box. Whereas Movable Type was like LEGO. It came with instructions to get a default blog that looked like an MT 1.0 blog. But you could just take all of the pieces apart and put them together any way you want. And I think that's really, really hard to do. And in hindsight, it's easy to overlook," John Gruber at 2:41.
"... Here's the one distinction that can get lost in all that. Also you have to give props to Mena {Trott}... once you had that thing installed,... you had a pretty blog that worked. You never had to touch anything. But there was still all that stuff under the hood, and some people to this day, like you or like {Matt} Haughey did for a long time, really put that to great use.
And here's the distinction, this is nothing against Open Source software.... but if you think the way the developers think, and let's be honest most people in some form or fashion do, you're good to go. And so, when you put up Plone {sic, Merlin means Slashcode}, you are implicitly making a clone of Slashdot....
But what Movable Type did, if you were savvy with it, was, I had on the original Kung Fu Grippe, I did so much stuff that was cool and hacky. So, for example, I did something that I think maybe {Jason} Kottke did the first time I saw it, which was, at the top of the page there's... your one most recent post at the top of the page. Looked really cool and clean. And then you said 'click for more'.... That looked so awesome compared to every blog out there." --Merlin Mann at 4:45
Let's face it: We could get a lot of people to take a serious look at Movable Type as a WordPress alternative if we had people with this level of street cred on the Internet saying these things from time-to-time.
I didn't agree with Steve politically or religiously, so what am I doing quoting him on the meaning of life?"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."
I officiated the Great Northeast Collegiate Hockey Conference championship game between New Jersey Institute of Technology and Muhlenberg College on February 27. That was my last game of the 2010-2011 hockey season.
I had the opportunity to officiate several other important games before and after that, but turned most of them down since the beginning of February because I was too busy at work to take the time off.
I hope to be able to officiate more games, more often next season than I did at the end of this season. But I have no way of knowing how After6's business will evolve, and what our staffing options will be at that time.
Kathleen and I had wanted an iPad for a long time. I hadn't purchased one at Christmas because I knew that the original iPad was late in its product life.
When the iPad 2 release was imminent, I was on a business trip to Western Canada. This was the first business trip I had taken for my full-time job since before Jimmy was born, so Kathleen and I did what we could to keep the family in touch with each other with daily Skype and FaceTime calls.
On a red-eye flight from Seattle the night before the iPad 2 was released, I considered what would happen if I bought an iPad and took it with me on another overnight business trip. Jimmy would be heartbroken and would want me to leave the iPad at home. At that point I knew that I would have to buy two iPads so that one would always be home no matter where I was.
Having two iPads feels extravagant to me, but the total cost of purchasing two iPads is less than what I would spend on a notebook computer for my business use. The value proposition of this version of the iPad made the decision to buy two a fairly easy one for me to make.
After two years working at Six Apart, I was offered the opportunity to take over Movable Type Pro support for the world outside of Japan if I created an independent company. So with a great deal of support and assistance from Kathleen, I started After6 Services LLC.
After6 was soft-launched in the softest way possible. For technical reasons associated with several contracts on which the business was initially based, I was unable to form the company until January 11, 2011. However, I began working on the business that became After6 on November 1, 2010 when I left Six Apart.
The business has really taken off in the past few months, and we are very optimistic that it will turn out to be a good investment of our time and resources.