Jeroen Sangers

The EBE is Europe's second largest blogging event (after Les Blogs in France) and will take place in November in Sevilla. And yes, on November 14 I will take the airplane to Sevilla to be present at this event.

When the event was first announced I doubted whether I should participate due to the high costs (plane ticket and accommodation; the EBE itself is free) and decided not to go.

What made me change my mind? Well, part of the program is the election of the best Spanish blogs, and my blog El Canasto makes a very good chance of being elected as the Best Business Blog! In the last partial rankings I held the first position, while previously I was number two.

Of course, the EBE is also a great place to meet some people in real life, people I have been working with for quite some time. I am also looking forward to meeting tons of new people, making new connections and new plans…

I am looking forward to participate at the Evento Blog España.

Today is Blog Action Day, a day on which thousands of bloggers write about the same topic to raise awareness, and this year's theme is Poverty.

Just like last year, I signed up to participate without thinking. But now that I start writing I realise that I am by far the right person for writing on this topic. Right now I am sitting in my own house behind my €1400 Macbook with a high speed broadband internet connection. What am I supposed to know about poverty? I (and all my readers as well) probably belong to the richest 1% of the world.

For me poverty is something they show on TV. Only once in a while I see poor people begging for money on the street, and I know that I can ignore them because I happen to live in a country with excellent social services that will take care of these people. For my own conscience, I make my contributions to some NGO's to pay of my guilt debt. When I read back these lines, it sounds very cold, which is not how I am, but there is a great deal of truth in it.

Only twice in my life I actually saw poverty with my own eyes, when I visited Lesotho and Thailand, and it greatly affected me. More than that, it made me realise how lucky I am. We dedicate about 2% of our income to charity, which is an amount we won't even miss, but which makes a great difference for the people depending on it.

I encourage everybody reading this to do the same: realise how lucky and incredibly rich you are, and donate 1-2% of your income. Together we can stop poverty.

I just found a very interesting plugin for Movable Type: TagSupplementals. As the name says, the plugin provides extra features for working with tags.

I am using the plugin on El Canasto to create a Related Entries list on each individual entry page. The related entries feature of this plugin has two weighing modes: constant gives each tag the same weight and simply sums up the number of tags the entries have in common, while idf gives each tag a weight of 1/freq, where freq is the number of entries tagged with that tag.

Other features of the plugin, which I currently don't use, are: a tag count, related tags, a listing of all tags used in an archive, tag last update date, etc.

I have been using Delicious for a long time, but lately I have started using Google Reader more and more, basically because I can share items without having to open the site.

But yesterday I found out that I can make my links in Delicious available in Quicksilver, which means that I have a ton of information available with just a few keyboard clics. Instantly I am very interested in Delicious again, and surely will start bookmarking more sites again.

I’m presenting myself as a candidate!

Today I launched the new design for Brain Tags. For a while I have been using the default theme provided by Movable Type, but after updating the blogging engine to version 4.2 I decided to make some changes to make fully use of the new features offered by this version.

The theme I used is called Mid-Century and is a good example of the possibilities of the latest version of Movable Type Pro. To improve speed and stability, I used a static publishing model, while using cached modules for some of the sidebar widgets. That way I can easily update for example my Latest Comments widget without having to rebuild all individual archive files.

With this redesign I also stopped using Google Adsense, as the income generated was simply too low to justify its use.

In the coming days I will probably be making some little adjustments to adapt the new design to my tastes and needs.

For a long time SmartFTP was my favourite FTP application for Windows, and I have recommended it to many friends. However, SmartFTP suddenly has changed their licensing structure and is now obliging me to purchase a license. Of course, I immediately uninstalled the software and installed FileZilla, which for sure is going to stay for free.

My macbook has been without backups for several months now, so I started looking for a backup solution. Time Machine is out of the question, as I don't want to hook up a USB hard disk while I'm working (and when I don't work I don't want to leave my macbook switched on) and the Time Capsule is out of my budget.

On my PC I happily use Carbonite, but they haven't released a version for mac yet. I have read some good things about Mozy though, so I decided to give it a try. I signed up for the MozyHome Free account to test the service, installed the software and selected some backup sets to start with. A few hours later the initial backup was ready (I only selected 250Mb).

Happy with the results, I changed user to do the same, but Mozy could not find any files because it was still looking for files in /home/Jeroen. This very much surprised me, as I was used to Carbonite running as a service and being able to backup files from all users. I assumed that Mozy would not work the same, but that I could configure the files to backup on a per user basis. I couldn't find how to do so... I checked the FAQs on the Mozy site, but most of the texts have been written for Windows users.

And today I received an e-mail from Mozy explaining me how to get started with Mozy… on Windows.

I am not sure what to do with the software. The initial backup went fine, but it is a real bummer that the backup is limited to only one user.

That is the question I have been asking myself a lot this year. In the past I always had a clear answer to this question, but lately I struggle with the aim of this site, which is why it has been very silent over here.

The first incarnation of Brain Tags was simply to inform my friends abroad about what was going on in my life, which was a very novel idea back in 1997. The second incarnation of Brain Tags in 2001 still had the same aim, but intense due to my emigration to Spain.

After some years the content started shifting to include web design and other technology topics. I got settled in Spain, and my daily life was not so interesting anymore…

And now that blogging has become very mainstream (my wifes mobile phone comes with a blogging client installed!) and there are a thousand blogs writing essentially the same, I wonder what the place of Brain Tags is.

For a while I thought about closing Brain Tags, but then I decided that I do have a very clear and sometimes unique opinion about many subjects. So I do want to continue writing here, but probably in a different format. I think that shorter articles with some original thinking (less copying/forwarding stuff from others) will be the way to go. I will also incorporate some other things such as Twitter steams etc. in the blog design.

Be prepared for changes, Brain Tags is alive!

For a while I have been using TwitterFeed to automatically announce new blog posts on Twitter, but I stopped using their services and am considering to stop following others who are announcing every single post on Twitter.

I love Twitter to follow what people are doing, and what they are thinking, but in most cases I am not interested in every blog post. And if I am, I simply add their blog to my feedreader. It is OK with me if you point out some of your excellent blog post in Twitter, but, please don't make it automatic. In my opinion, TwitterFeed only adds noise to Twitter.

By the way, if you are also on Twitter, my ID is JeroenSangers. I am also on FriendFeed, with he same ID.