Jeroen Sangers

Lately, especially since I use Twitter, I receive a lot of URLs in TinyURL format. That made me think: if TinyURL gives out a unique URL each time it is used, when will they run out of URLs?

On their site they state that they have more than 42 million of them, which doesn’t sound like an awful lot. All TinyURLs I receive have a six character identifier, such as 3bso2z. A little calculation (six positions with 36 options per position) gives me 2.238.976.116 unique identifiers. More than two billion, that sounds already better. And if they run out of Ids, they can simply use seven or eight characters, which I still consider tiny. Eight positions give 2.984.555.162.628 (2 trillion!) unique identifiers!

It is clear: TinyURL is here to stay.

Now that Movable Type 4 has been released and leaped ahead of WordPress, the old discussion of static publishing versus dynamic publishing shows up again. Movable Type by default uses static publishing (it generates static HTML files with are served to the visitor) while WordPress uses dynamic publishing (all content is served directly from the database). What method is better?

As usual, the answer is: it depends…

Static publishing requires less server resources per visit, but it takes longer before updates (entries, comments and template changes) are visible. With dynamical publishing, your changes are immediately visible to your visitors, but you’ll need more power to serve those pages.

For most bloggers it won’t make any difference, as they hardly tweak their templates and receive few comments and visitors. However, if you like tweaking your templates, you might want to go dynamic, and popular blogs are better off going static.

But wait, I can hear you think: there are some very popular blogs using WordPress… That’s right, and without exception they use some kind of caching method to lower the server stress. On the other side, Movable Type can also run in dynamic mode (which is what I use for this blog), and you can specify for each template whether it should be served statically or dynamically, allowing you to optimize your site’s performance.

Conclusion: for low-traffic sites, it doesn’t matter whether you publish static or dynamic. If you have many visitors you probable want to use static or hybrid publishing.

I just remembered that a little more than a year ago I took off my watch. The main reason was that my skin was irritated by the leather in the hot weather. And I knew that I didn't really need a watch, as I spend most of my days behind the PC with a little clock in the corner, and usually wear both my mobile phone and my Palm with me.

Now, after more than one year without wearing a watch, I don't miss it at all. Not only because I have clocks in other places, but most of all as time is not that important. While wearing a watch I found myself checking the time several times a day, while actually I only have four moments on the day on which I really need to know the time: the moment I have to wake up (taken care of by the alarm clock), the moment I leave the office for my lunch break (I will notice as my colleagues will leave too), the moment I go back to my office after lunch (which is after the weather forecast on TV finished) and the moment to go home after work (once again, I only have to follow my colleagues). For none of these moments I need a watch.

The more I think about it, the more useless watches appear. In fact, nowadays they only serve as a fashion accessory or in case you are out without a mobile phone. The watch has become a relic from the past.

Most of you know that I also write in Spanish on my other weblog El Canasto, and you might even have visited it to see what it looks like.

I just remembered that two months ago I published an entry in both Spanish and English, participating in a meme about my ‘killer’ GTD set-up. Basically I describe how I work and what productivity tools I use. If you’re interested, just head over to My Killer GTD Setup, which might also help you learn a little bit of Spanish as the translation is right next to it.

In the coming years I would like to see politicians wear maintenance uniforms instead of business suits, because when they wear business suits they represent business. When they wear maintenance uniforms they are the servants that they are supposed to be.

— Danny Hoch

The productivity guru of the moment, Tim Ferriss, writes in his book how he was able to reduce the amount of e-mail received by setting up an autoresponder to tell that he only reads his e-mail once a day and that it is better to phone him for urgent matters.

I believe him, when he tells that this technique has reduced his e-mail load significantly. But what he doesn’t tell is what happened to the number of telephone conversations he received. In my case, I notice a clear increase in telephone calls when I am very busy and cannot answer e-mails within the usual 12 hours. And guess what, when I am very busy, the last thing I am waiting for are telephone calls! When somebody phones me, that person decides what I will be doing for the next two minutes and when I will give attention to him (now!), while with e-mail I am the one deciding who should get my attention and when.

Tim’s trick only works because his workload is very low. When you’re workload is higher and you need to spend more time in the zone, it makes more sense to change your voice mail message to tell people that you can only be reached by phone during one hour a day and that they get faster response when they send their inquiry by e-mail.

30 minutes after updating this site to Movable Type 4.0 RC2, I read this. Back to work…

For quite some time I have been happily using coComment. For those who don’t know this service: coComment basically keeps track of the comments you leave on web sites. If you’re like me, reading and commenting on many sites, it can be difficult to track the replies to your comments. coComment captures your comment and tracks the conversations started by those comments on a single page instead of having to revisit all sites you’ve commented on.

Yesterday coComment released a new version, bringing more social features. By doing that, they threw out the real value of their service: tracking conversations. The new page reserves 75% of screen real estate for groups, friends, favourites and neighbours, leaving just enough space for only five conversations:

Furthermore, all my conversations have been marked as unread, and I could not find an option to mark them all as read. This is not an upgrade, this is a downgrade!

For quite some time, my old domain jeroensangers.com had been in monkey mode. That is to say, there was nothing interesting at all, except for a photo of me in my younger days.

For a long time I wanted to put up something more useful, but never started.

And you know how it goes: the moment you start, you can’t finish anymore, and within a small period of time my new site was finished. I installed Joomla!, chose one of the default themes, removed a whole bunch of clutter and wrote a few simple texts. And there it is, my new personal hub, where you can read all about me:

Whenever I had an idea for a blog post, I used to create a new entry on that particular blog, jot down my idea, and save the post as a draft. As soon as I had more time, I checked the list with draft posts, chose a draft, and finished the post.

What had worked perfectly for a long time, lately became a burden. The problem is that over the time I have collected a great number of interesting themes to write about, resulting in a big amount of drafts. Some of those drafts only contain an URL, while other are more elaborated. In short, it became too difficult to find out quickly what was what.

So now I have changed my blogging workflow. I transferred all my ideas to Google Notebook, where they are nicely ordered per blog. On that page I can see all ideas with their actual content at a single page. One glance on my Notebook, and I can quickly decide what to write. Furthermore, with the Google Notebook Firefox extension I am able to select a text on a random web page and copy it together with the address of the page to my Notebook.

From now on, drafts in my blogging software are actually pieces I already have started to write, which usually are only a few. This set-up keeps things clear, and speeds up my blogging workflow.