JonWestfall.Com

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!”, the brain of the author thought as he sat down to pen his Sunday night prose.

“4 Left! And so much more I could say”, the brain continued.

It was true. There was so much uncharted territory. Why not write a poem about polar bears, or a story about a traveling salesman named Martin who finds his one true love in a coffee shop in Nebraska? It’s easy to get into projects, the brain thought, but ending them is another thing completely.

Yet all things must end in some fashion. And while we expect things like a daily twitter notification of mediocre storytelling, eventually it shall end. Better to have traveled the road than to not have started the journey, staying safe and at home, warm from the cold light of an ending.

Some say endings are just new beginnings, but make no mistake, things do end as we know them. We’ll never be able to return to that exact routine ever again. Our job is to simply cherish the memory, and embrace the opportunity to make new and radically different experiences rank with those of our past.

So here

Automation still isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Case and point? The last post never made it to Twitter or anywhere else beyond this website. Perhaps this one will, but I’m not holding by breath.

Automation is pretty crazy. As I type this, I’m unsure what is actually going to happen when I hit Publish. You see, up until a week ago, I had a pretty jury rigged system where I posted something to a Joomla based CMS that was rather clunky, and then I twittered about it, and that twitter post went to my facebook status. Along the way a component for Joomla would download entries from my other blogs and Pocket PC Thoughts and dump them into the database. This seemed to work out pretty well, but I thought perhaps a more up-to-date system would be nice. Especially with all the changes coming up in the next few months, why not have a better site?
So I’m typing this in the backend of WordPress (Being on a Linux laptop I’m unable to use Windows Live Writer or Word right now), and I have a bunch of gizmos turned on to do various things. First of all, I’m tagging this with a Twitter tag, which I THINK is supposed to trigger some plugin I have to push this out to Twitter and a bunch of other websites (e.g. statuses on Facebook, Myspace, etc..). I’m not sure if it will work. At the same time, the same plugin should push this out as a note on Facebook, but who knows if it will (If you’re reading this there, then I guess it worked).

Now Twitter poses a bit of a problem for me because when this publishes out, I don’t want it sucked back in. Why would it do that? Well, my status updates need to be archived for glory on JonWestfall.Com, and if my status update advertises my blog item and then the status update actually upstages the blog item, it just creates a self-referential storm of junk on the homepage. So I hopefully found a solution using Yahoo! Pipes that should block from my twitter feed any items with [JonWestfall.Com] in them from EVER appearing back on the homepage. Ugh.

If this sounds confusing, that’s because it really is. All I want is everything I write to A) appear on JonWestfall.Com in some form and B) my friends to know I’ve posted something (in whatever medium they’re using or accessing). I guess those two are mutually exclusive to some extent. So what will happen when I press “Publish”? Who knows, but hopefully something good.

This is my 200th twitter update. 200 times I’ve shared something probably best left unshared

@DarrenHumphries I did, hence the follow up tweet from a worse location.

Now she takes me to Bath and Body Works. Why do we need so many smells meshed together? twitpic.com/328fi

At Michaels following the wife. Help!!

Lenovo x60 w/ 4 cell battery lasted 41 hours in ‘sleep’ while sitting in my bag since Monday afternoon. I am amazed.

So now that I am rocking a matrix pro, any tweaks or must have app suggestions (other than pocketwit!)