{bp} formerly known as WebBP :: Blog

Project 365: Capturing today everyday

Sometime in the past year I stumbled upon a Lifehacker post about Project 365. The idea is to document your life by taking a photo every day for a year. The author gives a few reason why you might want to do this. For me, it's a simple and fun way to ensure that I get to be creative for at least a few minutes every day. As life has gotten busier, being creative is something that increasingly seems to get pushed to the side and I desperately want to bring it back.

So I am. One photo at a time. Every day. I started on my birthday and intend to keep it up through the coming year.

I may need your help until it becomes second nature so I encourage you to follow along. I'm not making any promises -- to myself or anyone else -- about the quality of these pictures. Some will undoubtably be more inspired than others. That's okay. For me, this isn't about perfection nearly as much as it is about the creative challenge of coming up with something new every day for a year. And to simply delight in the little things that give every day so much texture and richness. I can't wait to look back at the year ahead this time next year. Won't you join me?

Good to be back

2007 has turned out to be a really busy year and a lot of things have conspired to keep me from blogging in a while. Last week, I did something I don't usually do: I took some time off.

I finally got to focus on a few projects that have been on my to do list for years. And it felt great.

One of those projects was rescuing the content of my original blog, byline: bryce, which has been offline since 2003 when Userland decided to pull the plug on hosting *.weblogs.com, and republishing an archive of it on WebBP. Like so many things, it took longer than it should have, but I'm very pleased to have it back online. Re-reading some of my old posts brought back memories and reawakened a part of me that has been missing for a while.

It feels good to be back.

Alive. Recentered. Thankful.

Hello, world

That was the output of my first computer program when I (and millions others) was a kid and seems a fitting title to this post. Why? Let me explain.

I started writing for the web in February 1995, having self-taught myself HTML and working in Notepad. As my familiarity with the medium grew, so did the content I contributed. I launched my college's student newspaper online in March 1996 and was hired to begin developing a web presence for the university's athletic programs (which was later outsourced). Studying abroad in the UK, I created a site covering the euro common currency, which featured dynamic headlines provided by Moreover and grew to become a leading resource in the year leading up to the currency's launch. When I went to graduate school, my focus shifted to architecting an alumni networking service and I started dabbling with blogs. That was fall 2000. By 2001, I was posting several times a day and falling in love with blogging. That summer, I authored some of my best travel writing online as I toured Europe. Two years ago, I switched from Manila to Typepad and started a new chapter. Unfortunately, the combination of privacy concerns, an increase in the number of employers who have fired bloggers, and an incresaingly lack of time to spend either writing or reading on the web have conspired to make this blog far less than it once was, in my opinion. The most obvious result of this has been the near-complete lack of fresh content of late. For that I apologize.

The simple truth, however, is that I would still like to blog again. And so I am. These first steps will be baby steps and there may be a step back for every two steps forward, but as I've said privately from time to time, "Bryce is Back."

Finding myself (after all these years)

When I was a kid, every time I found myself in one of those stores that sell tacky tourst stuff, I would look for something with my name on it. You know the sort of stuff I'm talking about: keychains, mugs, license plate holders, silly looking figurines with "Samuel" or "Alice" plastered across their bellies. It's not so much that I ever really wanted any of that stuff. Rather, it was that they never included my name in their inventory. As a little kid, it didn't seem fair. Why if they had "Bryan" and "Bruce" did they not have "Bryce"?

As I got older, I grew to like the fact that my name was both common-enough-sounding and yet relatively-rare. It suited me perfectly.

I was in college before I knew another "Bryce". But soon there will be many more "Bryces" out there. If you look at this this site which charts the popularity of names over time, the exploding popularity of my name among the younger generation closely resembles those hockey-stick growth charts that Gartner always put out during the tech boom.

So I guess it isn't too surprising to discover that I am now a "collection" at none other than that shrine to faux urban surburban shabby chic itself, Pottery Barn. I am a table, a cart, and a stool. Read about the Bryce project table:

With its sturdy wood construction and multifunctional design, this project table provides a comfortable venue for everything from sorting photos and reading mail to framing artwork. Its counter-height top provides a spacious work surface, while two dovetailed drawers and an open shelf below keep supplies in easy reach. Its roomy drawers are fitted with two oversized pulls. Use the wide open shelf to display larger items, or fill our Rustic Baskets (sold separately) with supplies and slide them into place. The table is built from pine and finished on all sides with a wheat stain that brings out the wood’s rich grain and pleasing knots. Antique-bronze-finished hardware.

"Multifunctional design", "wood construction", "sorting photos", "a comfortable venue", "artwork", "rich grain" ... it's as if someone knew the essence of "Bryce".

I always told myself as a kid that I would buy the first thing that I found with my name on it. Given all the tourist trinkets I've seen over the years, it could be a lot worse.

A little anniversary of sorts

Two years ago today, I started beta testing SixApart's TypePad blogging solution. The landscape has changed quite a bit since then. Dave Winer left Userland and my free Manila hosting evaporated. Bill Gates called blogs "legit" and Microsoft launched MSN Spaces soon after. Yahoo! finally joined the party, after much speculation it might buy SA and instead introduced Y! 360 (which I've wrote about here). More recently AOL has indicated it will open up its AOL Journals to non-AOL subscribers, and Google continues to refine Blogger (the result the WSJ effect?).

I've explored nearly all of these options (and many others) and, while TypePad isn't perfect, it continues to get better and I've happily renewed my support of SA's mission again this year.

To Ben, Mena, and everyone you've brought on board over the past two years: Thank you and keep up the great work.

Editor's note

Apologies for the dearth of postings here of late. I've been traveling a lot, dealing with a deluge of new projects at work, and chasing every new house that comes on the market. In the last two weeks, we've also celebrated five birthdays, two Mother's Days and one wedding. In other words, it's sweeps month.

Life isn't getting any more sane, but I hope to starting posting again soon all the same.

Getting it

Sometimes I can be really dense. I met my sister for breakfast a few weeks ago and we had a wonderful and wide-ranging conversation about careers, family, health, money, choices and what's really important to us in life. I left the cafe very full and very energized.

The next day, I got up and lived my life like nothing had changed. Such a shame. We've been really busy, you see. I've been working hard on a new initiative at work and Hannah's been working long hours at her job as well as preparing for her next stage. After hours, we have been house hunting, a process which I've only recently come to realize closely resembles those other rituals of dating and job hunting.

We've gone on lots of bad "blind dates" -- you know, where the realtor or a friend or family member that is only trying to help, suggests a house that sounds just perfect. We agree, make plans to see it and soon discover that it has, well, umm, a nice personality?

So then two weeks ago, we fell in love with a house -- or nearly did. This house had the perfect floor plan, large rooms, plenty of closet space, an indoor laundry room and a patio to watch sunsets over an open field. Paradise, except it was across town and the commute patterns would have slowly driven us mad.

Then last weekend, we did fall in love. I saw the pictures online on Friday morning and it looked really cute inside and out. We called our realtor to see it first thing on Saturday morning. As the day wore on, I got increasingly excited and got the latest mortgage rates in case we made an offer the next day. Hannah was excited and even my mom was getting excited. This could be the one! We toured it, liked the curb appeal, loved the open entertaining kitchen, vaulted ceilings, large and private yard -- nearly everything was perfect. Except that someone else had just made an offer. We suddenly felt "dumped on" as my friend Emilie would say.

It's kinda embarrassing but true: we all felt shafted, let down somehow. I spent the better part of the afternoon rearranging my bookshelf to cope. My mom didn't sleep well that night.

And then it hit me. My sister and I had been having an email exchange while she was traveling on business and I'd expressed how frustrated I was getting with my life -- feeling like we were stuck in a holding pattern, never having enough time, not seeing friends, etc. Her response hit me like a ton of bricks: "Fix it." If you don't like your life, do something about it.

Exactly.

...

Thursday night, I met up with an old friend after work for drinks. Emilie and I have known each other since high school and it was really nice to reconnect.

Friday I did something I haven't done in a long time: I took a few minutes to read blogs. I only read three, but each really moved me. Reading about Jason Kottke's recent decision to blog full-time, Jennifer Rice's reflections on blogging and some very candid posts by Ali, as well a post on the power of words, reminded just why it was I started blogging in the first place so long ago. To connect. To share. To contribute. To learn. To write.

The combination of time constraints and heightened privacy concerns have conspired to rob me of an activity that has been integral to who I am since 1995. No more.

What does this mean exactly? I'm not sure, honestly. It doesn't mean that this will suddenly become a tell-all personal journal. What I do know is that I am going to make it more of a priority to write about things that matter to me.

I welcome you to join me in this conversation. Post a comment. Start your own blog. E-mail me. Connect.

Blogger Catches Up to TypePad

Google recently upgraded Blogger. A quick review of its
new features shows just how far SixApart's TypePad moved the bar when it launched last year. Blogger has finally caught up in several key areas: comments, single-post archives and support for mobile blogging.

When I first started blogging in 2000, I used Userland Manila. I completely fell in love with its "Edit This Page" buttons. I tried Blogger, but never found it quite as powerful. I also found its server to be really flaky in those early days (no hard feelings, Ev, I know it was a shoestring operation back then). I know some people who have been fiercely loyal to Blogger (even paying for the short-lived Blogger Pro offering). For me, I was content with Manila.

Then along came Moveable Type. It had all of these new, really cool features, but required a lot of heavy lifting. It wasn't that I couldn't do it, just that I didn't really want to. So I waited until Ben and Mena launched TypePad, which was basically a hosted MT with some new features. I beta tested it last summer, liked what I saw and finally made the switch full time on December 1. Later that month, PC Magazine named TypePad an Editor's Choice.

Since then, the team at SixApart has continued to roll out significant new features, refine the offering, enhance its reliability and take it global. It's not perfect (single biggest feature omission: WYSIWYG editing enviroment - which Blogger, Userland, et al all have had for a long time...) but it's good enough that I don't mind paying for it. It keeps me sane.

And Blogger? I just logged into my old account to check out the new features. They're not bad, but not sufficiently revolutionary to tempt me to switch authoring environments again. I'll be very interested to see who introduces the next big thing in authoring tools. Based on this update, it's not Google.

Yahoo! RSS Beta: First Impressions

A few folks (more) have experimented with Yahoo!'s new beta support for RSS feeds this week. Intrigued, I decided to spend a few minutes with Yahoo!'s implementation of RSS. Three things quickly became apparent: (1) The database their search queries isn't complete or up to date. I couldn't find WebBP and was able to add it only by providing the complete URL for the feed. (2) While the display format is consistent with Yahoo! News content, it does not appear to keep track of what you have read the way BlogLines and other RSS aggregators do. (3) If this takes off, it will motivate all of us to write better headlines. If I didn't know what I had written, I'd have little idea what each of these posts contained:

I've taken that to heart. So long, cute headlines (maybe).

Live from last week...

Checking my referrer logs just now, I discovered that somehow WebBP has out muscled the big guys and become the #1 search result on MSN for the Chase / BankOne merger announced last week. I never use MSN so I had no idea. Here's a screen capture: