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To Blog on the Go: Acer AspireOne

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Bloggers who are addicted to blogging really need good equipment to help them get the job done. But what do you do when you’re away from home?

Presenting the AcerAspire One.

P1020221

This is my new on-the-go laptop: small, light, and running XP it provides almost all the stuff I need to blog with. The kit you see here is the AspireOne, the SanDisk Cruzer, and a simple Skype phone from Lobos. With the price of international calls, finding a wi-fi spot with open access or a hotel with wi-fi or broadband, and you’ll be able to call anywhere conveniently.

To find out more about this unit: Acer Aspire One 8.9-inch Mini Laptop (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, XP Home, 6 Cell Battery) White click on the link to visit Amazon.

Once I get back to Taiwan, I think that adding a couple of neat dongles would significantly improve this device: a USB GPS tracker, and a mobile wireless service. Travel anywhere would become significantly easier, and you’d be able to create a kind of SatNav system, too, courtesy of Google Maps.

I had thought about purchasing the Linux model, but LiveWriter and BlogDesk are my favorite blogging applications, so that made it an obvious choice. For the mobile blogger, this would mean that we could blog anywhere, anyhow. Perhaps even with a live broadcast!

Should I blog about my own finances?

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One of the reasons I set up my blog on DollarTravels was to encourage me to put more effort into my financial life. While I’ve been very succesful as a blogger, and earned not a small amount of money!, I haven’t really posted any personal financial details on any of the blogs I write before. I do share my credit card spending from month to month, but I don’t share my expenses, my cashflow or my investment holdings at all.

I’ve already settled part of this discussion in my mind: I’m resolved to start posting my investment holdings at some point, but my own financial situation: somehow that seems like a whole new ballgame.

Privacy: is it that important?

Unlike Flexo who writes fairly anonymously, a lot of people in Taiwan actually know me, and they know where I live and work. So this would be highly personal reporting and attributable to some they know. I’m not yet convinced that this is a good thing. An article in Business Week that featured another Money Blog actually has a source that is attributable, known and trackable. I don’t know if this is something I would like to be. Part of me urges caution, part of me wants to celebrate success and share failure with EVERYONE! I’m torn.

Breaking Taboos

Coming from Britain, where I grew up and with friends, personal financial details were rarely shared amongst even the closest relatives. We were brought up such that you didn’t talk about death, sex, politics, religion, health, and money! While some of these seem obviously inappropriate at certain times, such proscription seems so intolerable that it’s a wonder anyone was able to learn anything about any of these sensitive topics. So for me to discuss some aspects of our financial situation, it’s definitely running counter to my experience as a child or younger person.

The Power of the External

Having seen my blog help me focus my mind more on generation money through the number of routes that I choose, I can see how having an external pressure, a barometer, an audience, etc.. can help me keep on the straight and narrow. Perhaps it will stop me splurging on a third 28″ monitor or a brand new BMW when I can ill afford, perhaps not. Even the failures will provide a good lesson: I’m ever hopeful that our ‘shared experience’ online will help others develop their own self-discipline, goals and means, even when I have demonstrably failed.

So what should I do? Reveal ALL my personal financials, lift the veil on some of finances (e.g. Net Worth and Investments), or keep them away from prying eyes? Comment your answer if you dare. I’ll be making a decision by September 1st. I’d like to say that some from my audience helped me gain perspective whichever outcome I decide.

Switching to a New Platform: WordPress MU

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As some of you have been following the blog, InvestorBlogger is in the throes of becoming a multi-blog. This is a great thing for InvestorBlogger because I’ve always found that the blog had a fuzzy focus on topics: covering a wide range of topics from Taiwan to Making Money to Blogging Issues and much more.

I’d been thinking about it for quite some time before I made the jump. And jump it has been. On the surface, Wordpress MU looks surprisingly familiar to Wordpress 2.5 but once you scratch the surface you begin to realize that somethings that were surprising simply in WP 2.5 are surprisingly difficult in MU:

1). sitemaps – I can create sitemaps for readers but not for Google. All of the MU plugins that were touted to work just DON’T! So, I’ll be writing a sitemap by hand for the time being. This shouldn’t be hard to do as most of the posts are already in the sitemap for the old space. It is certainly going to be easier than the three hours I’ve spent trying to tweak plugins.

2). javascript – Javascript just doesn’t work in posts or sidebars meaning that if you want to include YouTube Videos and Ads, you have to find work arounds that will allow you to achieve the same result. Apparently, this is done because of security issues with Multi-User blogs as Javascript might render the entire site hackable. However on a single user install, this can be a pain.

3). Database – a lot of plugins are integrated with the database, therefore are unsuited to MU installs because they archive the data in the DB. Individual blog settings are typically overridden by each blog: so if you set up the data in the plugin for Blog 1, when you finish the same steps for Blog 2, you will typically find that the data for Blog 1 has been overwritten. I spent hours with several plugins trying to figure out the problem.

These are three issues that I’ve faced: I don’t have more than a partial solution for each.

A bigger issue, though, is the much smaller testing community for MU meaning that bugs are less likely to be found, plugins aren’t tested in as wide a range of settings, and the active community really is full of people with REAL computing skills. This means that I will likely have to spend a lot more time tweaking this install than I ever spent before. What’s worse: Wordpress Plugin Authors are increasingly frustrated with the speed of WP updates. We’ve already gone from version 2.3.2 in January to version 2.6.1 in August. Each of the versions has had niggles and issues that haven’t been dealt with properly, and yet new editions are still coming out!

But the options for a multi-site blog are quite limited anyway. b2Evolution, a couple of plugins for WP, one or two paid plugins, MU, or a life resigned to perpetually upgrading plugins, managing numerous installs, and fragmented sites. I guess that’s why I chose MU: I decided to live with the limitations of the system. I love the fact that I can set up a new blog in about 15 minutes, which if I were to do on a regular install would take closer to one hour. I also like the way I can control the over ‘look’ of the website, choosing either to retain the ‘corporate’ look (like this blog) or drop it in favor of a different one altogether: see Taiwan.

Until there’s another solution, I’ll be using MU. I just hope I don’t find a solution within a couple of months!