On Friday morning, Andrea & I will be driving to Bangor, Maine to get on a plane bound for NYC. We will both be speaking at WordCamp NYC (WCNYC) on Saturday morning. (If you click through the link you’ll see our sessions are listed under the BuddyPress/MU track.) Most of our blogs and Homeschool Journal run on WordPress MU.

This will be our first overnight trip away together from all the children in about six years and it’s only the second time in 10 years. While it is technically a business trip we will get to have some time together.

Planning for WordCamps usually start a few months in advance. If I remember correctly, in the early planning, WCNYC was expecting 200-300 attendees. The registered list topped 500 over the weekend and is 530+ now. Many of the people attending are people that we know online. So, we are both excited to have the chance to get to meet them. It’s a bonus that no one will look at us strange when talk extensively about techy stuff

We each have 3 sessions/presentations to prepare for. It is going to be a busy week for us, but a good busy.

An online friend has set up a blog to ask people how they connect online. Andrea & I have known D’Arcy quite a while. He works with WordPress/WordPress MU at the University of Calgary. We’ve never met him IRL, so he qualifies as someone who we have connected with. So, the first way I connect with people is through working with and contributing to Open Source projects. The project I spend the most time on is WordPress MU.

Andrea & I have been accessing the Internet since the early 90’s. Over the years, we have used a wide variety of methods to connect to people. I remember doing things like connecting to a computer at a client’s site via the Internet with remote control software, firing up a text editor and using the text editor as a chat window.

Generally though, the way I’ve connected online with people over the last few years has been through writing in this blog, commenting in other blogs & posting in forums. Recently I’ve joined both facebook and twitter. For the most part, facebook provides an online connect to people that I know from somewhere else. I haven’t particularly seen it as a means to make new connections. On the other hand, I think that’s one of the main benefits of twitter.

One of the things that I don’t do is video & audio connecting. That’s because our Internet connection is via satellite and the latency is worse than dialup.

Anyway, thanks D’Arcy for giving me something to write about.

It seems that people are writing in their blogs less. It’s been a gradual decline which I think has made it somewhat less noticeable. Perhaps it’s more along the lines that we’re aware of it, but set the issue aside for another day. This blog is an example of one with a declining number of posts.

To a degree we can blame services like facebook & twitter. I use twitter quite a bit because it allows me to keep up with and interact with a large number of people with relative ease. Generally, interaction on twitter provides more immediate response which makes it more appealing. For the people who use facebook daily, I can see how having everyone’s content aggregated together makes it convenient/appealing as well. Since I’ve been using a feed reader for years it’s less of a convenience for me.

I expect there is another side of it as well. Until the advent of the web, most people had no place to talk/write that wasn’t shared by others. I think most of us had built up a large reservoir of thoughts and ideas that had had no outlet. Now that we’ve had a few years to write, most of the ideas and values we hold have had some form of airing. In a sense, we have less to talk about. Many of the things that are important to us have been read and responded to.

For the last long while I had been posting once or twice a month. On checking the date of my last post, I see it’s been almost 2 months. Today was Meaghan’s birthday and she turned 17. Wow, it’s been an amazing 17 years

Today is also the start of National Blog Writing Month. A note of thanks to the blogs I read that mentioned it. I won’t promise to write every day because I know that won’t happen. I will try to write though.

Most of our business revenue comes from or through the US and US currency. In March we were averaging about 25% exchange ($100US = $125CDN). The average over the last 6 months has been somewhere in the range of 5-7%. For most of our projects we’ve been quoting 2-3 months in advance which meant that we had a 3 month period with a 15-20% shortfall in revenue.

The only recourse was to take on more work. Other things had to be put on the back burner and this blog was one of them. I do have lots of things to talk about and I’ll see if I can cover some of that in small chunks over the next month.