I’m not sure where to go from here in my efforts to redesign and relaunch The Sky’s the Limit. As I mentioned before, I cut my blogging teeth on Yahoo! 360. I briefly tried Blogger, but couldn’t get along with it. I’ve used a handful of blogging platforms, but the two I like the most are Xanga and WordPress.com. (I hear Posterous is good; I haven’t tried it.)

When I came to WordPress the free version suited me fine for a start. I chose my URL without giving it too much thought. My name and a couple of other choices were already taken.

‘Adamtree’ is a throwback to a time nine or ten years ago when some friends and I discussed creating comic books. We needed a company name, and I made a list to choose from — including Adamtree. We never did make any comics, but I liked the name and began using it on the net.

Now I’ve outgrown it. Not only is it in my URL, but it also identifies me when I comment on other blogs based on the WordPress platform. I would rather be marked by my name.

So here is what I want:

• a registered domain name
• a new URL
• a new blog name
• a new username

It seems my best option is to start with a new account. I can transfer posts, images and even comments. I can’t transfer my site metrics, but I won’t cry over their loss either. The drawbacks to this approach are the amount of time it will consume and the care I will need to exercise in making sure old post addys point to the new locations.

Can you tell I don’t really know what I’m doing? There’s no way to learn quite like hands-on experience. If you have any advice, tips or wisdom, or know of any appropriate resources, please let me know. Thanks for your help. You make this blog worthwhile.

I’ve been neglecting The Sky’s the Limit partly due to my course load at school and partly due to laziness. Posts over the last couple of months have not been up to par, and you deserve better. For that I apologize.

But even though posts have been scarce and somewhat less than acceptable, the blog has never been far from my mind. You might say I’m a gestation thinker. I stick things in this brain of mine and let it work on them for a while. Given enough time (and good raw materials) it usually comes up with something decent.

I’ve been blogging for about three and a half years. I’m afraid my earliest posts were lost to the inconsistencies of Yahoo! 360. Those of you who were there (and I thank you for sticking with me thus far) will remember the many problems with that platform. The earliest post appearing on this blog — The 100 Most Common Words in English — I carried over from the blog I wrote for FictionAddiction.NET. The first post written for The Sky’s the Limit was Free Comic book Day 2008.

I’ve learned a lot since then — much from experience and much from good teachers. Michelle, Clary, Chris and Danny, you know who you are. And I can’t discount the wonderful feedback from so many readers over the years. Now I want to take all of that and move this blog to the next level.

Starting tomorrow — when I review my writing goals for 2009 and finalize my writing goals for the last quarter of this year — I’m embarking on a project to redesign and relaunch The Sky’s the Limit. I’ll be giving the blog a new name and a refined focus, making it a more pleasant read for you and a better platform for me.

I’ll need your help with this endeavour: your comments and feedback. And if you know anyone else who might be interested in the content of this blog or this project to improve it, please invite them to come along.

Thanks again for your participation, your friendship and your patience. You make this blog worthwhile.

Just lately my internet has started getting personal, but in a good way, and the blame lies firmly with Facebook, you see I have been using networking sites for quite some time now and blogging for almost as long, first I used Yahoo 360 for both networking and blogging, then I tried Multiply for both but never really settled properly with either of these services. And now I think I know what one of the problems was, why I didn’t settle properly with these services, the answer has come in the form of Facebook.

I think one of the main problems I had was that although I had plenty of online “virtual” friends I never really knew them in “real life”, I had two very separate existences. I had my real life, in other words my life offline, in this life of course I have friends, family and workmates, and at the same time I had my virtual life, my life online where I had only “virtual friends”, in other words folk I only knew online and had never actually met in real life.

These two lives existed quite separately from each other, ok I had one or two friends or family join and connect with me online but it was only ever one or two, every one else was purely on these services and not real to me in many ways. I enjoyed these services to a certain extent but ultimately found them unsatisfying and unfulfilling and eventually left. The networking side of things seemed so distant and unreal, not really relevant to me and my life, I had a lot of contacts with whom I had nothing in common with, we had no common ground between us and our lives, our existences, were completely separated

The blogging side of things was no better either, my blog was only being read by the same folk, people who didn’t know me properly, people with whom I had little or nothing in common with, again it was unsatisfying. Also I found that as these services were designed to be both blogging and networking services the actual blogging side of things didn’t really suit me too well. Don’t get me wrong, both 360 and Multiply were good but they were, for me anyway, just too virtual and not relevant to my life.

I moved my blog to over here on WordPress, a dedicated blogging platform and found it much better and more suited to my purposes, as far as blogging is concerned anyway, but I was still missing the networking side of things, one that I could feel was relevant to me. Then I decided to give Facebook a try, the fact that Facebook is separate to my blog doesn’t bother me, in fact to a certain extent I like it this way, it means I have a certain amount of freedom between the two, I can post what I want from my blog to my Facebook page but stuff I’m not too fussed about having on Facebook I just don’t bother cross posting, if avid readers want to see it they only have to pop over to my blog to check if there’s something new that hasn’t been posted to Facebook, as if I have any avid readers

What I swiftly discovered about Facebook, apart from the fact that I actually quite like it, is that there are plenty of folk on it who I already know, yes I have luckily found a few of the good friends I made on those other services there on Facebook so I still have these good virtual friends as contacts, and I am making a few new virtual friends here on Facebook. I am though trying to keep it all relevant, I don’t want a friends list full of people who I don’t know and have absolutely nothing in common with, been there, done that, instead I’m mainly trying to fill my friends list with folk I do actually know, I will accept some people who I only know on Facebook but only if we have something in common, an interest, hobby or life experience.

But I have discovered much more than that. I found there are a lot of my workmates, my friends and family on as well, folk from my real life who have now become my contacts on Facebook. I love this, I can chat or make comments to folk on Facebook who I really know and really know me, I can keep in contact online with family and friends

I find Facebook far more relevant to my life and me, it means more in the context of my real life, its more personal, it also means that the folk I really know on Facebook, my work mates, friends and family are far more likely to pop over here to my blog and have a little read, meaning of course that my blog is also being read much more by people I really know now, I like this as well

My real life and my virtual life are now much more in synch, they do still exist separately but they also co-exist together, they are linked in a real way like they never have been before, I do still have some friends, some of them very good ones, who are purely online virtual friends, but I also have plenty of friends online who are friends in the flesh as well.

My internet life has indeed become much more personal now and my life in the real world now has much more of a link with my internet existence and its mainly due to Facebook, thanks Facebook

1

برای پنجاه نفر اس ام اس فرستادم که

“میلاد حسین(ع) کسی که ظلم حکام را تاب نیاورد؛ گرامی”

یکی جواب داد: میلاد حسین(ع) کسی که ظلم حکام جور را تاب نیاورد؛ گرامی

جواب دادم: نوشتم ظلم دیگه. ظلم ظلمه پدر جان!

و بعد گفت: بعضی از ظالمان حاکمند و بعضی از حاکمان ظالم

و یکی دیگه: میلاد امام حسین، او که قیامش به خاطر تحریف دین جدش و جلوگیری از شکل گیری انحرافات بود، مبارک

جواب دادم: به هر شکلی؟! این روزا هدف وسیله رو توجیه میکنه. اون روزا اینطور نبود…

تازه تا هدف چی باشه!

2

فرمانده کل سپاه گفته:

…دفاع از انقلاب اسلامی هیچ محدودیتی ندارد…سپاه پاسداران برای مقابله با تهدیدات از هر نوع که باشد، موظف است هرکاری را که لازم باشد انجام دهد…

(بخشی از حرفهایی که تو روزنامه ی جام جم روز یکشنبه بود)

3

نامه 62 نهج البلاغه

ولکن از این اندوهناک و هراسانم که مبادا بی خردان و تبهکاران این امت حکومت را بدست گیرند! آنگاه ثمره حکومت جاهلان و فاسقان این باشد که اموال الهی و ثروتهای عمومی را دست بدست کرده و بین خودشان بگردانند و بندگان خدا را به بردگی و بیگاری کشند و با نیکوکاران و صالحان جامعه از در جنگ درآمده و از فاسقان و دنیاپرستان حزب و گروه تشکیل دهند

در آخرالزمان، احمق ها بر مردم حکومت می کنند

در هر صورت به ما ربطی نداره!!

بعد نوشت! : خوب شد اون دوتا علامت تعجب رو آخر ِ “در هر صورت به ما ربطی نداره” گذاشته بودم!

بعد تر نوشت: بابا به پیر به پیغمبر آخر اون جمله ” !! ” داره!

WordPress just announced a method to import my old Yahoo360 content, so for anyone who wants to see it……it’s all there in the archives  of my WordPress blog

Lucy

I chanced upon Networked Blogs in an attempt to recapture one great features of the defunct Yahoo 360 – that is, ease of being seen and hopefully ‘favorited’. To cut to the chase, I followed the really easy instructions  (for dummies level) and ended up identifying and following blogs I like including mine (positivesocialbusiness.wordpress.com). I migrated this one from my Soulspeak blog on the late, lamented (?) Yahoo 360 just a few weeks ago. Memories are precious and we are wont to treat blogs like an online depository or our angst, victories, loves and even our most wicked secret thoughts when hiding behind aliases and avatars were in vogue. The most convenient thing about this app is that I can go to my WordPress blog, create a new entry or  post changes without missing a heartbeat on FB.  Great timesaver!

gak ada yang pengen ngedit Yahoo profile kalian kah? hoho…gak penting yah? hikhik.

ternyata kalo masuk account email yahoo kita, otomatis update annya muncul. Dan yang jelas (dari dulu) kalo kalian nge klik “view profile” di ID seseorang di YM ..langsung ke sambung dengan yahoo profile nya. Tapi kalo Yahoo Profile nya belum di edit yah munculnya cuma umur sama lokasi.

Yeppers, in about 15 hours or so, Yahoo! 360 and all its unreliable, unpredictable, unfair glory will be tits-up. Good riddance.

I was a 360 user beginning in the summer of ‘05 and continuing (with only two tantrums and one full delete of all posts and friends) until today.  It was a good/bad experience all the way around, I guess.

On the good side, I learned to blog. Or learned to like writing in an attempt to  entertain, and found myself thriving on comments, shock value, the attention, etc. The need grew steadily day by day and before I knew it, I was hooked, locked in and addicted.

The 360 blog in addition to a regional Yahoo! chatroom (Oklahoma #7) proved to be the beginning of wonderful friendships that still survive today.  For those relationships, I am grateful to Yahoo! for bringing us together. (Yahoo! does not deserve ALL the credit, however. In our chatroom and two other Oklahoma chatroom, was a trivia bot who would throw out questions which we would race to answer and in the process rack up some hella points and weed out the double digit IQers. Sorry.)

Yahoo! Messenger: In my opinion, Yahoo! messenger was greatest in  Version 5.6 and I hung on to it until Yahoo! no longer supported it. Now, I use Trillian as a chat client and Yahoo! messenger can kiss my ass.

Yahoo! Photos was awesome as well, and although the acquisition of that other outfit was good for Yahoo! I carried a grudge for a long time and will probably never forgive for that.

And now, geocities is getting the axe. The free version, that is. If you want to pay five bucks a month for webhosting, you can keep your geocities intact. But, OMG, what can I say about geocities? This is where I first started learning about html and all the wonderful things you can do with it. My first webpage (1998) at geocities actually won a couple of webring awards and I received accolades from a well-respected peer. That puffed me up for months.

So, goodbye 360, ta-ta geocities and a belated au revoir to photos and old, reliable messenger that didn’t drag my machine down and rarely crashed, I will miss you for as long as it take to finish this post.

Yep, I am almost over you already. ~K.

mult mai trist decat pentru moartea lui MJ sunt din cauza disparititei Yahoo 360. e ca si cum mi-as fi pierdut certificatul de nastere. daca ati avea vocabularul necesar, m-ati acuza de paseism.

Chỉ vài giờ nữa, người sử dụng sẽ không thể truy cập trang blog mà họ đã gắn bó thời gian qua. Dù điều này đã được báo trước và cũng rất ít người còn vào 360, giờ phút chia ly đến gần vẫn khiến nhiều blogger ngậm ngùi.
>‘Giã từ dĩ vãng ngọt ngào’ Yahoo 360

“Ngày cuối cùng bên nhau, xin hãy để em viết những dòng cuối… Về blog 360, về bạn bè và về cả những thứ em được và đã mất”, blogger Em là Mưa chia sẻ trong entry cuối cùng “Em yêu 360″.

Người ta ví Yahoo 360 như mối tình đầu khó quên và khó dứt. Theo năm tháng, họ không còn đam mê với “cô nàng khó ưa” này nữa khi nàng dần bộc lộ vô số “thói hư tật xấu” vì lỡ yêu quá sâu đậm nên không khỏi bùi ngùi luyến tiếc khi biết nàng một ngày nữa sẽ đi xa.

Trong khi các mạng xã hội khác vất vả để có được tình yêu của người dùng trong nước như Yahoo 360 thì “ông chủ” của dịch vụ blog từng phổ biến nhất Việt Nam lại lạnh lùng chấm dứt sự tồn tại của nó mặc cho nhiều blogger năn nỉ “duy trì nền tảng dành riêng cho người Việt”. Bởi họ muốn mở rộng đường cho sự phát triển của 360 plus – “cô em” đang thừa hưởng tính cách sáng nắng chiều mưa gần giống cô chị những tháng cuối cùng (lúc truy cập được lúc không, thi thoảng không thể viết được entry mới…).

“Mình không mong Yahoo 360 sẽ ’sống’, lâu rồi mình đã chuyển sang Facebook. Nhưng mình ước, dù biết là không thể, rằng Yahoo sẽ không cho phép mọi người tiếp tục cập nhật blog nhưng vẫn giữ nó lại để thi thoảng mình và bạn bè vào xem lại những kỷ niệm cũ”, blogger Whitelie nói.

Nỗi lo sợ mất blog và bạn bè khiến người ta chuyển nội dung sang bất cứ mạng xã hội nào cung cấp công cụ sao chép dữ liệu, nên nhiều blogger hiện nay có đến 5-6 tài khoản trên các mạng xã hội trong và ngoài nước từ Facebook, Opera, Multiply đến 360 plus, 1280.com… Tuy nhiên, chỉ số ít đã xác định được họ sẽ “an cư” tại đâu, số khác không blog nữa, còn lại vẫn nháo nhác hỏi nhau “mọi người về đâu đông nhất để tớ chuyển sang đó?”.

Qua Yahoo 360, người ta không chỉ chứng kiến nhiều điều cảm động (nhật ký ung thư, phong trào Free Hugs…) và kỳ quặc (trào lưu “bóc tem”, trào lưu thành hot girl nhờ vài bức ảnh sexy đăng trên blog…) mà còn bởi sự gắn bó đến mức phi lý của người sử dụng dù nó đã được cảnh báo khai tử hơn một năm qua

Yahoo 360, dẫu bị chê là dịch vụ nghèo nàn, khô khan, vẫn có công lớn khi giúp trào lưu blog phổ biến ở Việt Nam. Bởi thế, nền tảng đang hấp hối này xứng đáng nhận được lời cảm ơn của người dùng. Tạm biệt nhé, Yahoo 360.

Lê Nguyên

Sàigòn, một chiều thu muộn tháng tám…
Mưa…
mưa tầm tã, giăng kín con đường
Panorama quán vắng, ngồi một mình, chìm trong những suy tư ký ức ngày xưa..
Chỗ ngồi xưa, bóng dáng xưa…
Đường về nhà, nhạt nhòa,
trống trải, bờ vai xưa..