A few months ago I was riding the subway out to Coney Island during a visit to New York and I had an idea. It wasn’t necessarily a new idea, but it stuck. I wanted to incorporate my life online. Sure, I’ve had ideas like this in the past. I’ve even tried using tools built on web development frameworks to make it happen, but this time I had some help. After a few conversations over ping pong with my good friend and co-worker Jeff Croft I realized how I could make it a reality. He was working on a framework in Django that sounded perfect, and I was willing to be a bug tester and spend some long nights learning some Django templates. The forces of geek were in full swing.
IncorporatedThe concepts had been rolling around in my head for a while, so I started in on some initial designs, worked out some basic templates and have been iterating and implementing on what’s here now since. It’s me, or as some friends call me, T, and almost all my online publishing “incorporated” onto one site. Hence the name, T Incorporated.
Consolidation to the extreme
At this point I’m pulling in my photos from Flickr, my status updates from Twitter, my events from Upcoming and my links from Del.icio.us but in time it will likely do more. The framework offers me the choice to decide what web services I want to bring in, but more importantly a lot of flexibility on how I use that data once I have it. It also allows me to combine and use the data in fun, new and unexpected ways. If you click on a tag you not only see all the photos tagged with that, but you can also all my links, posts, photos I’ve favorited and even the events I’ve attended.
It also allows me to not always have to write a post to keep the content updated. I can just post a photo or link to something and T Inc. gets updated. I still plan on writing here even more, but it’s nice to know everything is being updated here without many changes to my behavior.
Saying goodbye to an old friend
I’ve been publishing online, on what started out as only a personal site, since 2001 and really started full swing in 2003 when I wanted a way to keep in contact with family and friends. That’s roughly 7 years on my old site, 110am.com, and so it’s a little strange to be here in my new digs. 110am will exist in it’s current form for a while, but eventually I plan on bringing all the content over here and shutting it down. I wanted a place where I felt like I could write both about my personal and professional life and so all new was in order.
It’s taken me a few months to get this far and I never would have come close if it wasn’t for all the help Jeff has given me. There are plenty of things that are still a bit buggy, but just refresh the page and things usually straighten themselves out. I’ve still got a long list of minor fixes and features to get completed in the coming months but I just wanted to get it up and start writing.
I plan on following up this post with a few about the design and some thoughts on what I consider personal publishing frameworks but that’s for another post. For now, just take a look around and at the new digs and let me know what you think.
Comments
Sara Flemming
Very. Cool!
Love the letter overlay in the Stream, especially. (:
Mark
Fantastic Tom! Love the consolidation. Congrats.
Kevin
Very very nice.
Garrett Murray
Nice work. My favorite part is the stream… love it!
Peter Flaschner
Wow, very impressive! Well done
Brian Warren
Well done Mr. Watson! Lots of really nice details and finish.
Tom Watson
Thanks everyone. There’s definitely a caching issue with some of the comments that I’m looking into. If you get to the comment posted screen then your comment is there, it just might take a little while to show up.
Hopefully I can get all the bugs worked out here soon.
Jeff Croft
Lookin’ great, man! :)
Keith
Looking good man, looking real good.
Garrett Dimon
Nice work. I’m really digging the way the stream is done.
Lisa
Looks beeeautiful :) nice one.
Trammell
Absolutely gorgeous, Tom!
Daniel Schutzsmith
Really slick design and it sounds like your journey to these new digs was exciting! Long live T Incorporated!
Bronwyn
Nice work, mister! Updating my feed now…
-b.
Lisa Noteboom
I love it, Tom! After the sneak peek at Christmas, it is fantastic to see it up and running.
M. Jackson Wilkinson
Nice work, Tom!
Katie Greff
This is really nice. It’s inspiring me to clean up my own portfolio site, though it still wouldn’t be as well done.
Andy Ciordia
Good job Tom, beautiful style.
Angela Noteboom
I love it, looks awesome!
Ariel van Spronsen
I think this is protorevolutionary. Just as the iPhone quelled my fear that mobile devices would never integrate, I’m really happy folks are out there working on sensical integrations of all of our online bits and pieces. Nice work Tom!
Deanna
Nice Tom! Well thought out & beautifully executed.
Rob Goodlatte
Great job with the concept and design. I like the idea of expanding a personal site to encompass more than just a blog.
Tom Watson
Thanks everyone!
@Ariel van Spronsen Great compliment and almost exactly what I was going for. I’m planning a follow up post to talk about just those very things!
@Rob Goodlatte Thanks on both accounts. Yeah, the idea is to place a lot more emphasis on the other content, but not to totally ignore what I feel is still the most important thing I do on the site, post. It’s just great to have everything combined in one location.
Steve Ercolini
I was lucky to be able to see some of the concepts and ideas before you launched and now that it is live it looks absolutely spectacular. I know there are some of us out there that will miss 110am, but I am excited for the new era of T Inc. Excellent work Tom!
Sean Madden
I hate it.
Scott McCracken
Really clean and professional, a great implementation of an excellent idea. I’ve been trying to put together a similar system in Django for quite some time. One that can pull all the random bits of information I scatter across the interwebs together, but I keep finding myself getting stuck—especially with trying to pull data from other sites. I can’t wait for the day when it all becomes clear!
Maybe there will be a post or two about how you were able to get this to work? ;o) Regardless, really well done and congratulations on the launch.
Jeff Croft
Scott: I’m not at liberty to say too much at this point, but there’s a very good chance the code Tom’s using won’t be private forever. Stay tuned.
Matt Robin
Really clean, new site, a great effort Tom! :)
Powered by Django too eh? Sweet.
I must admit: I didn’t know about the old site, so this is all new to me too.
Michelle Foster
Yay! :)
Tom Watson
@Sean Madden Well, not to worry, I’ve banned your IP address since you obviously have nothing meaningful to say anyway ;).
@Scott McCracken I can’t confirm or deny anything that Jeff is alluding to. But yes, stay tuned.
Patrick Haney
Wow, Tom. I managed to stumble on your new site through a series of Twitter conversations (big surprise) and I have to say, it looks great. I love the Stream page, something I’ve been meaning to put together for my site. And for some reason, the way your current navigation item highlight extends out of the lines really got my attention. Nice effect.
Sarah
Nice work, Tom! Can’t wait to hear more about your personal publishing framework ideas. Especially after trying to learn Django this summer and getting pwned by my lack of programming skillz. You make it look SO easy :)
Faruk Ates
Yummy!
But boo with Markdown; hardcore man, come on! ;-)
Scott McCracken
@Jeff and Tom - thanks for the update, that’s so exciting! I’ll anxiously keep an eye out for that. Damn impressive work by the Blue Flavor team, once again.
Bryan Veloso
Awesome job. It feels like it just came fresh out of the laundry. Smells good, and looks clean. :D
Anne
I second Sean… but your work paid off ;)
Tom Watson
Thanks again everyone for all the compliments!
Forrest O.
I want… I’ve done this to a small extent with my drupal, but this is really what I was thinking…
april
really cool tom! the neatest thing about your sites is that they just keep getting better. you never just rearrange the data because you’re bored…there’s always an upgrade from outside the box that adds an element most sites don’t have. you always push the envelope and i admire you for it.
ps - i’ve been known to smack around a ping pong too.
Thomas Kiehn
Excellent design, but most of all I like the concept. Both you and Jeff have quite well pulled off ‘incorporating’ your content streams.
I’d really like to do something like this myself. Does anyone know if there are templates, plug-ins, or hacks to do this with a CMS like Wordpress, MT, or Drupal? Especially interesting is bringing in content from Flickr, unifying tagging and geocoding.
Best of luck with the site!