Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Sep 14
Celebrating One Year With Our New Website
It is hard for me to believe, but it was one year ago today that we launched this new website! On September 14, 2017, James Wood began our flow of news with a welcoming blog post – and just a few days later the site was heavily used as part of our massive 25th Anniversary celebration. It was the culmination of a rather insane several months in which a whole crew of people within the Internet Society, as well as at our partners Moving Brands and ATTCK, all burned countless hours to make this site a reality.
One year later, we’ve published over 500 news articles and blog posts; published over 120 new resources and tutorials; promoted many events, and maintained a consistent flow of content on the critical issues affecting the Internet.
We’ve built campaign pages, integrated video and graphics (ex. our GIR page), showcased the amazing work our Chapters are doing, integrated social components (ex. our IoT page and Instagram), and pushed the limits of how many links any sane person should have on a page. I continue to be impressed by the beauty of pages like our Issues page (just move your cursor over the boxes) – or pages like our 2018 Action Plan with all its different rows and backgrounds.
And… it all works great on mobile devices – and we did it all in three languages!
Now, it wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course. As I wrote in some of the posts about our website redesign, we had our share of challenges. We went through three different search solutions until we found a system that worked. We initially had hundreds of thousands of 404 errors while we got redirects in place. We had some serious speed issues that made working on the site … sooooooooo…. incredibly… sssssssssssllllllllllooooooooowwwwwwwww… until we moved to a new hosting provider in June 2018.
But at this point I can say that overall we are definitely pleased with both the front end you see as visitors – and the back end we use to administer the site.
We are NOT done yet!
Launching a site is a long journey. There are still many changes and new features we want to introduce. We have a “timeline” feature we hope to be rolling out soon. We are working on a way to add interactive maps. There are some accessibility issues we still need to address. And we’re always working on increasing speed and providing a better user experience. Plus, we want to see how we can better integrate this main site with a few of our other affiliated sites.
There is a great team of people who have helped make this happen over the past year, and I look forward to working with them and many others to see what we can do with this site over the next year.
Our goal is to deliver on that mission for the site I outlined back in June 2017:
Our website is a driving force in realizing our mission of an open Internet for everyone. It empowers all who care about a free and safe Internet and inspires action to make a positive difference.
It demonstrates our global impact, promotes our point of view, and provides definitive resources on the news, technologies, and policies that shape the Internet – today and tomorrow.
It delivers a focused and engaging experience that connects with a breadth of individuals, organizations and influencers. It extends our reach, supports our community, and grows our membership, creating a foundation for building a stronger Internet.
We want to help you all who are reading this to work with us to help shape the future of an Internet that is open, globally connected and secure.
I welcome any comments and feedback on this site – you can email me at york@isoc.org or leave them on our issue tracker on Github.
Thank you for visiting this site, sharing our information, taking action – and helping us all to #ShapeTomorrow!
The post Celebrating One Year With Our New Website appeared first on Internet Society.
Sep 14
(No title)
Sad to see @Apple killing off its small phones. I’m a very happy iPhone SE user because I LIKE SMALL PHONES! I guess I’ll keep nursing my SE along until I can no longer upgrade it – and then perhaps I’ll.. (gasp!).. look outside Apple’s world for my next small phone 😞
Sep 06
Call for Participation – ICANN DNSSEC Workshop at ICANN63 Barcelona (Featured Blog)
Do you have a great idea about DNSSEC or DANE that you'd like to share with the wider community? If so, and you're planning to be in Barcelona, Spain for ICANN63 in October 2018, submit a proposal to present your idea at the DNSSEC Workshop! Send a brief (1-2 sentence) description of your proposed presentation to dnssec-barcelona@isoc.org by Friday, 07 September 2018. More...
Sep 05
Returning to POSSE – Writing on my own site, THEN on Facebook, Twitter, etc
Over the past few weeks as I’ve been grappling with colon cancer, it has been soooooooooo tempting to just pop open the Facebook app, write a story in the box and press “Share”.
Simple. Easy. Done!
Or inside the Twitter app… or LinkedIn… or… or...
But here’s the problem with that...
All the stories get LOCKED INSIDE A PLATFORM!
They are there living on the platform’s servers, inside the platform’s systems. Maybe they are visible publicly, maybe they aren’t. Maybe they will be around in two years, maybe they won’t. Maybe people will find them, maybe they won’t.
The future of your stories is entirely at the whim of the platform.
As I wrote about on the Internet Society’s blog earlier this year, one of my own guiding principles is “POSSE“, a content publishing model from the “IndieWeb” movement:
Publish on your
Own
Site,
Syndicate
Elsewhere
And so over these past few weeks, I tried really hard to do that with my journey through cancer: the diagnosis, followed by the recovery, followed by the results.
But it’s HARD. It was so insanely tempting yesterday when I got the great news just to pop open Facebook and share it with everyone.
But when I do that… it’s shared ONLY within Facebook’s shiny “walled garden”. It’s not shared with people I know who choose NOT to use Facebook. It’s not shared with the communities I’m in on other social networks.
The “open Web” on top of the “open Internet” is really the only way to do that. But it’s hard. There’s extra steps involved for me right now with the way my various blogs are set up. I want to work to make that easier and simpler… but doing so will take time… which is challenging to find.
But if we don’t find ways to OWN OUR OWN STORIES then they will stay locked away in closed, proprietary walled gardens. And maybe that’s fine for some of those stories. Maybe they are small and mundane… “in the moment” stories that we don’t really care about. But even so, we feed the platforms. We help them to grow.
I’ll keep trying to follow the POSSE rule… and I’ll be writing more here about that.
Image credit: Tom Kelly on Flickr CC BY NC ND
Sep 04
The biopsy results are back… no more cancer!
The call came this morning, right as my regular weekly Strategic Communications team meeting was starting up. Once I saw the call was the Burlington hospital, I muted my connection, shut off the video ... and waited breathlessly for the news...
The surgeon was delighted to call and say... no more cancer was found in the colon walls or lymph nodes!
It's done. Finished. Fertig.
I'm as close to "cancer-free" as anyone with colon cancer can be.
No further tests needed. No chemo. No other treatments. I'll go back in about three months for a "flexible sigmoidoscopy" where they'll use a probe to check how my reconnected colon looks. And they'll monitor my colon more often (which presumably will mean colonoscopies at more frequent intervals). But that's it. (Yes, I still have further recovery from surgery ahead of me, but that's moving ahead well right now.)
Done.
There are no words to truly express the relief washing over me and my family right now.
As I said in my original post, if a colonoscopy is recommended for you, don't delay, just do it!
The test caught my cancer early. Had I waited and delayed the test months or years... the cancer could have spread so much farther... and this would have been a much different post to write.
There are no words to capture the relief, joy and happiness of right now.
Image: a photo I took of part of the Burlington harbor from the patio of the restaurant where we had a celebration dinner tonight. Yes, the Burlington area is a gorgeous area in which to live!
Sep 04
TDYR 354 – Colon Cancer, Colonoscopies, Vermont, and Recovering from Surgery
TDYR 354 - Colon Cancer, Colonoscopies, Vermont, and Recovering from Surgery by Dan York
Sep 04
TDYR 354 – Colon Cancer, Colonoscopies, Vermont, and Recovering from Surgery
It's been a while since I recorded an episode... and that had a great amount to do with being diagnosed with colon cancer after a routine screening colonoscopy. In this episode I talk about that test, the difficult choices, the surgery... all set in the context of also moving to Vermont! More info on my blog at:
- http://www.danyork.com/2018/08/the-big-c-returns-as-colon-cancer-and-with-me-this-time.html
- http://www.danyork.com/2018/09/post-surgery-recovery-every-day-brings-a-series-of-small-victories.html
Sep 03
Post-surgery recovery: Every day brings a series of small victories
I put on pants today.
Shorts, even.
With a belt!
This was a BIG deal.
It's not that I haven't been wearing pants 😉 ... but that I've only been able to wear running pants with an elastic waste since leaving the hospital on Thursady. My stomach was too bloated from the surgery and it hurt too much to wear anything else.
Until today.
Another small victory!
Never having had surgery before, I'm learning what countless others have learned before me - that each day brings a series of small victories, without hopefully any major defeats along the way.
To follow on my previous post, I did go in for surgery for colon cancer last Tuesday, August 28th. Technically, I guess it was a "Sigmoid Colon Resection" because I was diagnosed with "Malignant Neoplasm Of Sigmoid Colon", but let's put that in plain language...
"They found a small bit of cancer in my colon and so they went in and cut out about 12 inches of my colon and re-attached the other sections to each other."
A high-tech fix of my internal plumbing. Slice out a bad section and re-connect the other open ends.
I went in at 11am and woke up several hours later in a hospital bed feeling like someone had stabbed me and cut me in the stomach! I also apparently had a rather pleasant conversation with my family... of which I remember absolutely nothing! Some time later when the anesthesia fully wore off, I was able to see them all and remember.
I was in the hospital all day on Wednesday but then by Thursday morning I was able to go home!
All along the way it was this series of small but ever-so-important victories! Passing gas and pooping turned out to be the first critical steps... which makes sense given that you want to be sure the pipes got all reconnected.
Then it was walking around the hospital floor, eating solid food, drinking lots of water, etc.
After coming home it was climbing the steps... taking a long, slow, slow, slow walk around the neighborhood. Trying to find some comfortable way to sleep. And so on.
Then it moved on to walking at a more normal pace and moving around more regularly. Saturday we walked around Church Street (photo above) and the Burlington Farmers Market. Sunday I drove the minivan and we took the ferry across Lake Champlain to visit Essex, NY. Today I put on pants. 😊
It's not all normal, of course. I tire easily and have needed afternoon naps. I'm still not sleeping through the night. And I have metal staples protruding from my stomach that I have to be very careful about! While I can eat almost everything, a big restriction is on raw fruits and vegetables, which is something I enjoy eating. (Raw fruits and vegetables (except bananas) turn out to be harder to digest, particularly the skins, and the doctors want only soft things passing through my newly-reconnected colon. (Cooked and mushy vegetables are fine.))
I'm very amazed and obviously pleased at how the recovery is going. The doctors had said that patients were generally in the hospital for 1-5 days, with most people being in 2-3 days... I'm glad I wound up on the low end of that. I'm also pleased that so far I've been able to manage the pain using only the Tylenol and have not had to use any narcotics/opiods.
Thank you to the many who have held me in their thoughts and prayers, or sent positive thoughts, or who just sent me nice messages. All seems good so far.
Tomorrow I'll try being back at work for a bit. Somewhere in here I'll get the staples out (10 days-ish).
Each day a few more victories!
Now, we just wait for the biopsies, which should come "in a week or so". Sigh...
