OneMind

A few weeks ago, my good friend David Gewirtz responded to a question I’d sent him about improving my visibility on the Net with a fairly direct message that contradicted all I thought I knew about using the Web for promotion. In essence, he advised me not to attempt to pigeon-hole myself as “just” a spiritual teacher (my new calling) but to take full advantage of my background as what was once characterized as being a “Renaissance Technoid.” Rather than try to disengage from my lifelong passions for sports, technology, politics and books in favor of a sort of “clean slate” approach to my reinvention, he suggested, I should instead try to leverage my breadth and depth of background in these areas to find effective ways to attract a portion of my existing audience to follow me into the deeper, calmer waters of spirituality.

A decade or more ago, I was preaching the notion that we had entered what I dubbed “The Age of the Generalist” in which those with such broad backgrounds as I had would be found to be more valuable by society than those with narrow specialties. I guess that when that message seemed to fall on deaf ears, I abandoned the effort and went about trying to figure out what (one thing) I wanted to be when (if) I grew up.

I have spent many, many hours since David’s last email pondering his advice. And I’ve concluded he’s right. I had begun to reflect that notion already to some extent when I redesigned my personal Web presence to reflect the six aspects of Dan Shafer. Though David was considerably less than complimentary about the design of that site (an issue I am now considering), he was almost certainly right that the multi-dimensional approach to the design that I took was instinctively right.

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Well, it appears that Posterous is the solution to the problem of multi-network posting that I’ve been seeking. I’m posting this note via my gMail account and it promises to appear on  Facebook,  Twitter,  FriendFeed and my brand-new WordPress blog. Posting Nirvana!
I’ll want to experiment with things like embedding images and media in an email to see how it handles that more complex stuff, but for now it’s cool to have a single way to post to all of those services when I have something I’d like to say on all of them.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

Welcome! You are looking at my brand-spanking-new release of the four-year-old OneMind blog. I hope you like the new look and feel.

A couple of weeks ago I decided that I wanted to switch my old blog, which was served on Drupal, to WordPress. There were a number of reasons for this. First, I’m finding more clients who are interested in having sites built in WordPress (and not just blogs either) and little or no demand for Drupal work. Second, I had to do an in-depth evaluation of WordPress for my biggest client and was blown away by how far the technology has come in the two years since I last visited it. Third, I really liked the way themes are designed and built in WordPress; I felt I could master them fairly easily and then be able to move on and create my own theme or take more control of the theme I chose. So far, that’s been the case.

There are so many available plug-ins for WP and they are in general so much easier to install, configure and use than those in Drupal (from which WP’s creators clearly learned) that I’m looking forward to a lot more enjoyable times experimenting with various features and enhancements.

Moving over from Drupal turned out to be fairly painless with some available tools and the help of my brother-in-law and sysadmin guru Jeff Soule.

So here we are. New digs. New navigation. Take a look around. Hope you like the place.

I’m wondering if anyone knows of a tool that would let me do this crazy thing I have been thinking about this morning.

When I post a new entry to my blog, I’d like a link to that entry to show up in Facebook (I think that already works, but I’m not sure), Twitter, and perhaps in other places I’m not thinking about.

I checked out Meebo, but it looks like it’s really about IMing across platforms rather than blog posting. I checked out FriendFeed briefly and it shows some promise but so far it doesn’t look like it does everything either.

Thoughts? If you don’t want to join my blog to post here, you can email me: dan at danshafer dot com.

I just posted a blog entry about a spiritual healer and a book idea that I’d like your thoughts about if you’re interested in the subject. The post is on my spiritual blog on Gaia.com.