The Lewis Show

So I've gone a couple weeks back into the grind after my mini vacation earlier this month. The weather started to get warm and then right when spring hit, back to winter. That's okay though, warm weather will prevail and my struggle against the yard will continue again. In my free time though, I have been focusing some of my attention to a new gig. I decided a long time ago that putting Android stuff in my blog is great, but making it a regular habit makes this less a journal and more of some kind of semi tech blog that's not a tech blog. So to keep things cohesive, I'm starting to write now at a small blog called Android Activist. I'm writing with a great bunch of writers and pundits. I just hope I can keep up. I feel this will help get me out of several ruts and I can go back to being creative. Android Activist was started by an evangelist to the platform, Scott Brown, host at the Radio Android network that he started. I feel I can fit into place with his bl...

I mulled for years moving my blog to platforms such as Wordpress. After some testing, I decided to stay with Blogger. Part of it is laziness, yes, but it's the features that keep me here. I could always make things simpler with a Tumblr blog or stick with my Posterous, but this is too rich and full of a blogging platform to leave. Another reason I stick around is their recent addition for mobile support.  Blogger in Draft  posted last month the addition for mobile templates. Now when looking at my blog online, it has a snazzy new look. I'm sure it will become more customizable with time, but the default template looks great. Do check it out and let me know how it looks. This is original by no means, but it helps complete this experience for me. I feel all high tech. There's even a QR code for my site which I still find utterly fascinating.

I really did purposefully forget to post yesterday being the last day of the month. I figured I had my 31 posts, I'd just post today and recap my month of blogging. It's very hard to do this on a daily basis. My brain is fried in such a great way. I also realized some things that should help me out considerably. I've been trying to produce content. I am no content producer. My creative capabilities are slim. I've always been that person in the room that can carry a conversation, but very rarely am I able to start a conversation. I guess that makes me a pundit or a commentator. I need to own my skill sets. I figure I'll give my take on things I see, things I read, and appreciate the people that to like to read my insane ramblings. And I am thankful for my readers. I can see the people who visit the site and even those who read my feed and I am eternally grateful. I hope to live up to my own hype some day. And now, since I didn't do it all month, it's...

I will have to admit this daily blogging venture all month has been fun. Granted it does not look like I've spent a great amount of time in pushing original content, most of it has been videos or pictures, but I have taken a lot more time this month into my blog than any other month. It's good and I feel at home again because before the dawning of these myriads of social networks, if I saw anything worth sharing, I'd share it right here. Once I started posting regularly on places like Twitter or Tumblr this became more and more difficult because those little ha ha sharing posts were pushed out there, instead of in here. I wanted to list those other services in this post, and hopefully in the passage of time, I'll figure out how and what to post here and when, but here's primarily how I post, where I get my information from, and how it all flows together. I'll start my internet day going through my now well refined Google Reader items. In fact, you can see ...

Since there were no posts yesterday, this one puts me back on track for the month. It's obvious I've been stalling by posting videos and some pictures, but creating content is a talent that few have. I am not one of those people. The purpose of posting every day this month is to get me out of a comfort zone of web consumption and transfer the few brain cells I have left and use them for web creation. I'm reminded that I still need to work on getting my other sites up and running and then need to figure out how to let things flow. At the end of the day people do not have time to read about other people's lives unless there is some serious interest. I know I had lost interest over the past few months. I think the popularity of social media, news, and networking sites is proof that we've all become more of a consumer class and less of a creative one on the intewebs. There is a place for all of that and goodness knows I'm involved with it all, but there really i...

I'm going to post every day during the month of July. I cannot promise anything good, but it's time I get back into the habit of posting. So I figured this hard disciplinary action will help get me back into the posting flow. So if anyone has any ideas or even wants to post something to help, email me. That information is on top of my page. Find it...and wish me luck!

I would dare say after 1,000 posts, I should be earning some page rank by now, Google. Especially after my last few posts have been so Goog heavy as seen in a Wordle diagram of my blog. As I mentioned in the last post, I wanted to announce the changes I'm making to the blog and the network on my one thousandth post. Trying to put such a post together is hard work when one such as myself is as lazy as I am, so the best way to do this is classic random style. Ready? Go! I have 4 Lewis Show domains, I'm going to use all of them seperately feeding everything here into the com.  I have an org which I will highlight local, national, and international charities, because I can and I think that's what I'm supposed to do with a dot org site. Well, I don't have to, but I want to. I have the dot net site which now feeds my tweets, what I've Dugg, and my Reader submissions. I'm going to move that to the dot info site. Or I may use my flavors.me account to hold my...

This is my 999th blog post. I don't think to this point I've ever really established a stable identity. The blog itself has been a tech blog, a personal blog, a music blog, and an items of interest blog now from its inception. Not giving a clear identity can make things confusing and hard to follow. That's why this hasn't taken off the way I would like. So for my 1000th post, I will be announcing the new blog lineup which will include a lot of surprises, but I figured I can do more with this space. I might actually make a difference. We'll see, but stayed tuned, next week I'll be making a major announcement here. It will be all in great fun, and things will become more enjoyable here and hopefully, more of a destination. A big thanks to those that have stuck around and subscribed to my blog, your patience will be rewarded big time.

pmv3xhwbfd is a code of righteousness required by Technorati. I've had my blog since 2004. I never really cared to see how it fared in the bloggersphere, but I figured now is just as good a time as any. That's all, nothing else to see here, unless you want to entertain me by leaving a funny comment or anecdote. Or send money. I like money. Who doesn't like money?

So as you saw in my last post, I'm trying to get blogs together. I'm trying to rebuild a community that has gone the way of social networks not by sticking to the old system, but by embracing the new. I make no qualms about my subscriber list, it's not huge, at least it isn't yet. At the time of writing, I have 25 people that read my blog anytime I post. First, I want to thank each and every one of you readers for doing so. I am flattered that anyone wants to read my posts, and it encourages me to do better, and I will. I also know a lot of my friends on the social nets do not have a large group of readers. We all strive to have that readership that a lot of big time bloggers enjoy and take for granted. I want to bring readers together. I want to create a network for the rest of us. I want to put good, real content out there for more people to see. I see a lot of friends that have good content and no readers, and it's tough. I want to help get your brand out t...

I don't do this very often. About twice a year, I clean out my blog roll and try to add in some new reads. I'm also trying to get reacquainted with Delicious , the social bookmarking site, in one fell swoop. I want to expand what I know in many areas including cooking, technology, and heck, even some financial planning. It doesn't hurt to take a few minutes every day to try to learn something! So I'd like for anyone who has a delicious account to tag their blogs to me. You just have to add the tag 'for:mlewis106x' and I'll be able to sort through them and subscribe. I sense that blogging this year is going to face a crossroads between the traditional post and reply method to the newer more social aspect. That step forward intertwines social news, social media, and social networks. I don't want to see blogging become old media and I fear it's already on the fast track, so help me take this first step. The worst that can happen is you get one add...

I noticed that there are a ton of new terms that are no longer exclusive to geek circles. They're used in modern, daily web usage and networking. I figured I'd give a quick vocabulary lesson in my own words. For further research, Wikipedia is a great source for keeping up with this new language. Syncing - Now that most everyone has digital music and an mp3 player of some sort, there's now a need to move that music from that local machine to that mobile device. Syncing is the process in which that media is updated from the source to the device while simultaneously updating the media from the device back to the source. This now has other uses which we'll all start seeing soon including photos, videos, and mobile applications. As phones get "smart" and as mobile devices do more and more, this is going to be a central part of anyone's day. Cloud Computing - A lot of companies, including Google and Microsoft see this as the wave of the future in computing....

For those that spend a lot of their time reading blogs (you know who you are), or even reading news I strongly suggest Google Reader to make that experience easy, organized, and fun to share. And, don't forget to subscribe to my mountain of feeds starting with this one! This video takes a minute or two to explain exactly how it works and shows how simple it is to set up.

I figure since I'm always talking about her, I'll let her get a few words in edgewise too. Janine has been the best thing that could ever happen to me. One of those reasons that I love her so much is  that I can talk to her and she's right on my level...well she's way over my level, but she comes down to mine. She isn't a big time blogger or anything, but I've always encouraged her to share her thoughts, and why not let her use my forum to do just that. So you're going to see some content from her over the next several days and weeks, and I think it will add a nice element to The Lewis Show. I think she'll have a lot of good stuff to offer and I hope my readers enjoy and comment on her posts. I am debating adding one or two more writers, it all just depends on where I feel lead to go. As I posted earlier, if anyone wants to contribute, I'll gladly let them in. I think it's time to make my blog a place for community, be it local or worldwide. ...

When you sit back and evaluate your life and you try to reign in the past four years, you may come up with the same conclusion I did. That sounds like a long time, and it kind of feels like an eternity, but at the same time, it's become more and more of a drop in the bucket. I feel that way about my blog. I started this adventure 4 years ago this month and thinking back, I remember not being serious about keeping a blog, but then it became a part of my self expression, so today, more than at any point, this blog is a pure extension of where my focus lies. So at this point, I can only look back and thank any and everyone who's endured this journey with me and I hope I can continue to entertain and inform. I just know that I'm in brainstorming mode and with the changes to how we surf our interwebs, I'm going to try to be on that cutting edge, so stay tuned, it's going to be a lot of fun. I promise.

..are very hard to write. Just looking at my blog alone, the themes, the message, the content of the blog has changed consistently every couple months since it began in 2004. Originally, I just posted thoughts, then I posted about my music, then I blogged more about the geeky side of Mike, then I did a hodgepodge, then I tried to put things in categories. Despite the pains, however, this has all been worth it all. I've learned so much. I have learned to really think things out. It's made me a more careful person. It's broadened my horizons. I've even learned to spell better, which I never thought would happen. So there is no point to this post other than really recommending that everyone work on their blogs, join Twitter or any number of social networks, and have fun with it. The worst thing that could happen is that more horizons are broadened...with the help of a vehicle to carry my thoughts from my mind to my hands and then to the world.

I preformed a small experiment today on my micro services, if you will, (Twitter and Pownce). I posted a message on Twitter asking for suggestions for a blog post. I then realized I should ask everyone on Pownce as well. I figured someone would have a suggestion for me, and I would see which was more responsive. As I predicted, I am yet to get a single response on Twitter. Now let me give some background: I pretty much exclusively signed up for Twitter to use as a sidebar micro blogging service to supplement my main blog. The purpose was to fill in some blanks, especially when trying to do a weekly recap when I can only remember 12 hours of my recent past. I started adding people, specifically from my podcast subscriptions . So 99% of my Twitter friends are part of the geek elite and have thousands of followers and have no clue who I am, much less what to ask me to write about. To follow me on Twitter is to really, really care about what I eat, what I watch on TV, and my daily plans. I...

I am a stern minamalist. A minamalist defined as: " movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features and core self expression." I also look good in a suit, who knew? But I'm posting after spending some time cleaning out the sidebars of my blog. I took a lot of things out and only kept the really important stuff as it involves The Lewis Show. I had figured at one point with the extra sidebars that I should try to fill them from top to bottom with material that I like. That seemed like a good idea at the time until I applied that and lost readers. Two things were happening that people tend to not appreciate when reading blogs: The site was taking a long time to load because of the content. This meant that people who either found my site by searching or wanted to get that link to someone else's blog had to wait. I know from experience that if I wait more than three seconds, I...

I have gotten a lot of good advice lately on the new social web and blogging, and the main theme is creating and owning a niche. I looked up niche in the dictionary and it's defined as "a position particularly well suited to the person who occupies it". The question is, what on earth is my niche? Everyone has some sort of talent. Most of us go a long way in life without even knowing what that niche is. Some of us expect or hope for something glamourous such as great acting ability, or being good with nunchucks, but for most of us average, everyday people, we have very simple niches such as being a great family administrator, a good cook, or just someone with a smile that can heal the world. In the web world, how does that translate on a virtual scale? I can honestly say, that it dosen't in all cases. I may have a keen ear and am a good listener, but that dosen't translate to the internet community well outside of some sort of online therapy or support group, but I...

My site is sending some code that Internet Explorer is not happy with. The site does however work fine with a different browser, say, Firefox. I apologize for the crashing though. I've been sifting through a lot of code and I don't see anything that is causing the site to crash. I will work on it as I can.