Connecting the Dots:

IF YOU GET AN RSS FEED FROM THIS BLOG, HEADS UP.

After significant and careful consideration, I've decided to migrate this blog, started in December of 2004, to a Wordpress installation on a server I control.

While Typepad has made many changes that are good for the blogging community, the platform is too limiting. Argue with me all you want (and many have already) but Wordpress is giving me what I want, how I want it, and the limitations on growing with Typepad are too constrictive.

The sad part is that exporting from Typepad is a God-awful mess of code. From URL's that were short, then not short, and underscores ("_") that turned into dashes ("-"), I've had to invest dozens of hours into changing the blog over.

The other sad part is that getting MY images from THEIR servers is a nightmare. While importing into Wordpress kinda, sorta works (but permalinks are all hosed up), all images are left on the Typepad server. I used a caching plugin to capture them, but it's a band-aid and not a comfortable, long term solution.

After waiting days and days for a response from Anil Dash, he finally responded with a connection to a guy named Mark Simmons, but by that time I was already down the road with the migration.

While I understand that Six Apart (Typepad parent) has zero incentive to help me get MY data out of THEIR system (data *I* own by the way), they've made it work juuuuust barely enough that they can stand on a box of righteousness and argue the finer points of ATOM and migration.

I'm paid up through December but just set the domain to transfer and will clean up loose ends if necessary, especially the RSS feeds so I don't lose you, my subscribers.

Appalled that one of the top apps on the Apple iPhone app store was a $.99 app called "Bunny Farts" (iTunes link), I did the tweet you see in the image at left.

Is it just me, or does that tweet not come across as satirical?

Much to my amusement, I received this email today from a company that makes a competing "fart app" for the iPhone hoping I'd go look at their app and do a review:

Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 12:55 AM
pam@modstylez.com <pam@modstylez.com>
To: steve (at) iconnectdots.com

Hello,

I'd appreciate if you can give me some feedback on our iphone app iLightFarts

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=317429824&mt=8

I realize that you are iphone app guru :) It'd be swell if you can place an honest review of our app.

Thank you,
Pam

<Satire> Besides being incredibly flattered to be seen as an "iphone app guru", I realized that I'd have to buy this app, try it out, and then do a review. Or perhaps do a review without buying the app and do a positive one since ModStylez actually reached out to me and sees me as a farting expert. </Satire>

No question I'm a big fan of comedy and even of flashlight apps for the iPhone, but how many does the world need? Do we also need competitive social media strategies when it comes to better farting capability with our mobile devices?

This sort of random Twitter harvesting (and subsequent emailing) is spam...plain-n-simple. ModStylez (a company who hosts with a Melbourne, Australia ISP so I assume they speak English and further assume they appreciate the satirical) is undoubtedly harvesting any-and-all tweets that mention "fart" apps, but if they'd actually read mine -- and had any sense of the ironic -- "Pam" would've understood that I think these sorts of apps are a complete waste of time.

These and other fart app creators need to do something useful or at least get better at authentically using social media when they reach out to people.