Year: 2013

One way to make sense of the change in the way we …

One way to make sense of the change in the way we live online is to consider how the language we use to talk about our digital selves has evolved. Take terms like cybercitizen and netizen, which each play on the metaphor that the Internet is a structured city or community. According to Google Ngrams, these words found their greatest use in the heydey of Geocities and have been in decline ever since. This happened as we began clicking friend buttons instead of writing in the guestbooks of neighborly strangers. It happened as we traded in our HTML editors for the sleek blue layouts and pre-set photo sizes of Facebook. In other words, we stopped being frontiersmen and started being consumers, conceding the role of maker in our Wild West to corporations. And build they did.

In short, we gave up our netizenship.

The death and life of great Internet cities

Monitor your WordPress site’s uptime with Jetpack Monitor

The latest version of Jetpack for WordPress plugin – which packs together several most used plugins and makes sure they all work nicely together – brings in a new one: Jetpack Monitor.  Here is a straight forward description from the plugin site:

Jetpack Monitor will keep tabs on your site, and alert you the moment that downtime is detected.

Once activated, one of our servers will start checking your site every five minutes.  If it looks like something’s gone awry, we’ll fire off an email notification to the WordPress.com account that Jetpack is connected under.

I think this is brilliant.  Every single WordPress site owner I know has at least once looked around for a simple monitoring service that would let him know when the site goes down.  There are a few of those around, but all of them are a bit of a hassle to setup – you’ll need to know the terminology and at least have an idea about systems monitoring.  With Jetpack Monitor all that is not needed anymore.  Simply click the ‘Activate‘ button in the Jetpack settings and you are all done.  Beautiful!