Gaurav Vaidya

Blogging elsewhere, because I can

While I have been letting this blog fall asleep in the run-up to the ever-so-busy final weeks of school, I have been busily blogging, writing and scheming elsewhere! Here are some updates:

October 11

Co-wrote What’s new, October edition on the Map of Life blog.

November 18

Kicked off a WikiMedia Commons project for the Biodiversity Heritage Library. So far, we've tagged 16 files from BHL, fixing their copyright status and linking back to the BHL website in the process. Jean-Frédéric created this gorgeous template to use as a source template on BHL images. The plan (my plan) is to keep tagging images into the New Year, and see where we are after that.

November 29

Kicked off a project with Robert Guralnick and Andrea Thomer, working closely with the CU Museum of Natural History and with help from the NSIDC (don't you love big-team projects?), to digitize the field notebooks of Junius Henderson, the CU Museum's first curator. We were all surprised at how amazing WikiSource is for managing transcriptions and displaying the results.

December 5

Co-wrote Field Note Challenge Part 2: Veni, Vidi, Wiki on the So You Think You Can Digitize blog.

December 6

Excited by all the taxonomically interesting information already in WikiSource, I created a portal to try to coordinate efforts to annotate, organize and connect these resources with counterparts on WikiSpecies, Wikipedia and (especially) the WikiMedia Commons.

Fun times! I brazenly anticipate even. more. fun as I get a week to push ahead on the Map of Life after Tuesday, followed by a week of fun with sister and cousins in East Brunswick, NJ, followed by another week to code, ruminate and discuss, followed by another two weeks (back in Boulder, now) to work on things before the next semester smashed into my life like a grammarian smashing into someone misusing a simile.

SAY Media and Typepad

So I hear Typepad's parent company is merging with an advertising firm, and many people are nervous about what that means for Typepad, the web host this blog/site is hosted on.

Does that mean another move? Man, I hope not. I've just got settled in, still like the interface and features, and love not having to maintain a server myself to keep my website up. I hoped that TypePad actually charging for hosting meant that they'd be incentivized to keep their nose to the grindstone with new features, good uptime and decent customer support. The feature spread is so-so, and I haven't had to use their customer support yet, but on the whole I've been fairly satisfied with it so far. But if they decide to start focusing on advertising instead, where does that leave a low traffic website like this one? Brinstar, Dick and Cyn share similar worries.

Just the threat of having to migrate everything away (which is easy for me, as I haven't had time to accumulate much on this blog yet) and to create, design and prepare a new blog (the much, much harder job, as far as I'm concerned) is an unwelcome addition to my list of worries. And part of the reason I tried out Typepad at all is because of the Perl/open source connection via Movable Type: if that goes, would Typepad still be a place I'd like to associate with?

Well, best not to jump the gun, I guess. Open source probably has benefits for the company that they'd be even more eager to work with if they're focusing efforts elsewhere. Typepad is a semi-captive platform for content creation; if they're making enough money off us in aggregate, the might want to work at keeping us low-traffic bloggers around in hope of better expectations.

Probably a good idea to keep an eye out for alternate blog hosts, though. Just in case.

Welcome to my blog!

Hi there, and thanks for stopping by! If you'd like to know more about me, see my curriculum vitae, read about software I've worked on, or just head straight for my Twitter feed. There's many ways of contacting me if necessary. Cheers!