One thing that occurred to me today is that we really don't have a good place to put projects on deninet. For a while, I had planned on implementing project management features on the site. I did manage to start some of that by adding events and tasks. The further I got, however, the more it became obvious that "wasn't us". Other sites do project management far better and if anything, we should leverage those.

Project management, however, isn't the same as project -- is it? The former implies task lists, schedules, events, Gantt Charts... These aren't the features I wish to develop or maintain on the site. Again, other sites dedicated to that purpose do it far, far better. What I'm thinking about is a place to showcase our projects. 

Let me give you a little history: Years and years ago I came to the realization late one night that what we seemed to have in abundance was ideas. What we needed was a mechanism by which to store and categorize them. This was the beginning of a project called Net*man*a*ger. It was a Java based client for entering and storing ideas to a remote website running a Perl backend. Hey, it was the early 2000s, thick clients were all the rage! I spent most of my holiday vacation that year happily steeped in Java code.

As I began to put together the interface, I created a data topology. Ideas were made of Versions, Versions had Thoughts contributed to them, Comments and Votes were applied to Thoughts. Soon, however, I began to realize that Ideas needed a top level container. Naturally, the first one I thought of was "Project". The more I thought about it, however, the term seemed limiting. Not all Ideas could be grouped into projects, some were just....ideas. So, I instead decided to use the word "Net".

Eventually as client matured, I began to realize that it would be far simpler to develop a website that was both the backend and the front end. This was a couple before "Web 2.0" became a popular buzzword. Add more than a dash of ambition, and the "Internet Idea Database" was born. The term "nets" were dropped and replaced with "Channels".

I worked for years on IIDB, but there were a lot of problems with how it was put together. The code was too constrained and not easily expandable. I no longer wanted to work on the project, and as the system powering our website, I was stuck. I chucked it all and switched to Drupal. My thought was I could eventually reimplement IIDB on Drupal, but that never quite materialized. 

This is why deninet has channels today. First there were projects, then nets, and now channels. I had assumed that any project we wish to implement today on deninet could have a channel associated with it. These project-central channels would be the hubs by which visitors could find and follow project developments. This is why we have a Springboard, and why you can subscribe to channels to follow posts.

The biggest problem with this system is just how monolithic it is. How can we tell a "project-centric" channel from one that just is for general blog posts? There are a few ways to go about this. A field could be added that would identify the type of channel it is. This seems inadaquate however, as projects would have special fields attached to them like what users are working in what roles on the project, or the current status, or expected release date. Doesn't that imply that these should not be a channel but something unique?

I'm still figuring that one out...

The last two weeks have been more than a little draining. I've been pushing to complete a major update for a web-based class at work. While I have been working with the product for several months now, it was only a few weeks ago that I saw it in actual use. That made a huge difference to me and cemented a lot of what I was working on. I've been digging through the course material, rewriting relevant sections and discarding outdated ones. Friday I finished most of the slides, leaving only a few to complete tomorrow morning. I'll have until Wednesday to complete all the voice recording.

Meanwhile, something strange has happened to my sense of taste. For years my beverage of choice has been soda. I relied on the caffeine to keep me going and the taste for comfort at tough consulting assignments. On particularly bad days, I could lay waste to liters of the stuff. Two weeks ago on Monday, however, I cracked open a can of the stuff and actually winced. 

Like most Americans, I have a sweet tooth. Very few things have ever been too sweet for me to eat or drink. For seemingly the first time I was utterly bamboozeled by what my tongue was telling me: "Eew! Too Sweet! Yuck!" I took another sip and promptly curled my face into a scowl. What the hell? Too sweet? Since when is anything too sweet for me!?

I set the soda aside and had some coffee instead. Black it was not, but the Raspberry Latte was subtle and creamy. I found myself less jittery and tense at the end of that day then I have in a year.

I tried it again the next day, and the next. Some days I'd polish off a can, but mostly I set them aside to warm and go flat. I found diet soda inflicted far more of a penalty than regular. Soda made with cane sugar was by far the most satisfying. If I had need of carbonation, there was sparkling water.

Oddly, I blame Germany for my two new beverage addictions. Even the cheapest coffee in Germany was delicious in a way that I rarely found in the states. As I was on business, I was able to expense it all and seek out my tastes. One particular weekend I was invited to a BBQ at a coworker's near Berlin. We were served sparkling water with fresh lemon all day, and soon I found myself with yet another addiction. 

While sparkling water was provided at work, coffee was a bit of a pain. Like most offices, the coffee that's available, in a word, stinks. I'm not suggesting that we should have a barista on staff 5/40; it's difficult to provide high quality in an economy of scale. Unfortunately, this means I would have to plunk down $3-5 for a proper cup each and every time. (Oh, the woe of the salarywoman! Woe!) I have been investigating how to make a proper cup myself without too much of a cost. I fear, however, that the savings achieved will be minimal. 

The last few days I've been thinking about my current involvement in the Technology news industry, and I've come to a few conclusions:

1. I'm not a journalist. I know, shocker, huh? The fact is that I've never had any formal training in journalism. The closest I've come was the series of cultural anthropology classes I had taken in college, but it's not the same. I'm not even entirely sure if professional journalism training is required in today's blogosphere-centric world.  Nevertheless I bring my own preconceptions and preferences to the table whenever I write an article or open my mouth in the OSNews podcast. This is a given.
   
   
2. When and how we record the podcast has an effect. As myself and others have stated several times before, we don't have a script when recording the podcast. If I'm particularly lucky, I'll have some lead time as to what we'll be discussing and I will be fortunate enough to have the time and wherewithal to research the topic. Most of the time, however, it's just what recently happens. With a vacuum of knowledge, point 1 comes into play again. I seem to do my best when the topic is purely technical -- which reflects my interests and education.
   
   
3. Comments, read them? Don't? I really don't know what to do with comments. While the conversations on OSnews are certainly above par, the law of averages is still in effect. Many comments are either malicious or in the least, not helpful. Often I find myself stuck on what one or two people had said from behind a username for days or weeks at a time. I had at one point considered quitting the podcast altogether for that reason. A lot of the fallout from that made me realize just how much point 1 and 2 govern my opinions on the podcast. 
   
   
4. Surprise! Being a woman in technology is difficult. While in my professional life I've only run into this problem a handful of times, the podcast does tend to make this all the more apparent. Strong opinions aren't expected from a woman even in 2010. Once given, a woman may be characterized as a "know it all" or in the least "annoying". If you reserve or delicately present your opinions or thoughts, you may be inundated with "help". A good example of this was when I posted about finding the perfect KDE Linux Distro -- in which I was deluged with suggestions several of which I had already dealt with in the post itself.  Many simply assumed I didn't know any better -- despite the fact that I had already tried CentOS, SuSE, Gentoo, Kubuntu, Mandriva, and a dozen others. 

The weekend is just getting started here. Pazi and I had a quiet breakfast of soy chirzo and toast. There was a call with Trice, most of which I had to duck out to take a shower. I would have waited, but something is making me profoundly uncomfortable in a rather sensitive spot. Infection? Inflammation? Something.

Pazi and I are plan on walking to a nearby coffee shop for a creative session. I've come to enjoy these a great deal. It's a nice excuse to get out of the house, splurge on some coffee and/or pastry, and chat about story ideas. I may bring a book or two just in case I'm in the mood to read rather than create. My German book and Pazi's copy of CthuluTech strike me as a particularly good idea.

This evening we'll be heading over to Grant's for a night of friends, riffing, and poorly acted and written sparkly vampires. If Grant's tweets are any indication, New Moon sounds to be, ehem, quite a howler.

*ducks*

Somewhere in there, I hope to hit the gym. We skipped last night due to exhaustion. 

The first social network I joined was LiveJournal back in 2001. At the time, I thought of it purely as an online journaling system. I didn't understand how the friending mechanism worked, nor the deceptive name applied to the feature (something that has thankfully been replaced with "following" on other sites). I often wrote entries there expecting no one to ever read them. It often felt like writing letters to no one in particular, then casting them upon the will of the four winds to whomever would find them.

The anonymity emboldened me. I wrote about things that were actually on my mind, instead of bottling them up as I had been raised. Frustration, fear, worry, depression, quixotism, fascination, and humor. Many say that the internet is where people put on masks; to me, it was the first place I was able to take mine off.

Things changed of course. LiveJournal became all the rage, creating a sprawling online community of people. I continued to write, but often with growing apprehension. I slowly began closing the loop and locking things down. No longer was it a wide open vista, but a room. The door was often open and the windows could be easily seen through, but there was a clearer separation between the Internet at large, and my little section.

Events occurred that forced me to close those openings completely. The windows were shuttered, the door was closed and locked. Little did I realize that the supply of fresh air was now also depleting. I ventured out rarely, and often only to lock things down all the more. Bars were installed. Boards nailed to the wall, cartoon-fashion.

Social networking often works the best for outgoing and open individuals that feel they have little to hide, or no one worth hiding from. My pessimism can't help but see that attitude as naive.

Today, the social networking scene has exploded across the entire world. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, and the new contender, Google Buzz. It's hard not to feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of information one is required to read every day in order to say current. And lately, I often feel much like this: