Hello. My name is Harry Wolff.

I am a web developer working at GetGlue.

I enjoy tweeting, taking pictures, and making movies.

This is where I write.

Blogging Is Harder Than You Think

Posted on 04/30/2012 by Harry

When I began to blog I wasn’t aware of the challenges I would be facing. ’So many people blog all the time, it can’t be that hard!’. I could not have been more wrong.

How do you start blogging?

The first (non) challenge of blogging is what software or service to use. The most popular choices are WordPress and Blogger. Some may go the self-hosted route which opens up many more options, no decision objectively better than the rest.

After selecting your blogging engine of choice the real challenge begins. You have to write.

What do you write about? Guess what, only you know. You’re blogging because you want to. No one told you to blog or what to blog about. As a result the topics at your disposal are limitless.

At least at first. You should probably figure out what your dominant subject will be. It could be blogging about things you know intimately, or you could chronicle your foray into new experiences.

Or you could be like me and refuse to choose. Honestly it’s a stupid decision, one that causes me to curse my stubbornness daily.

Again, it’s up to you what you want to write about.

Have you chosen what it is yet?

Now start writing.

How often should you write?

Again, this is up to you. You’re blogging because you want to right?

I suggest setting an attainable goal for yourself to hit. When I started blogging I promised myself to post at least once per week. It was a goal I felt confident I could keep without burning myself out.

Write as often as you feel comfortable. Only you know the pace you can maintain. But above all else…

Write.

Write, write, write.

So now you’re writing.

Congratulations! Keep it up! Keep going! It doesn’t get easier but you do become more experienced.

With that experience you learn more about yourself as a blogger. You’ll learn that you blog best in the morning, or while on the train.

You’ll learn the posts that you enjoy writing most and the ones people love reading most.

Along the way you’ll pick up some comments, each one just as exciting as the first.

I yelped after I got my first comment on this blog, and I still do. It’s a joy to know my words bring joys to others.

So stop reading and get writing!

And for starters you can write me a nice comment.

The Ideal Home Entertainment Setup

Posted on 04/08/2012 by Harry

I love TV and movies. I love watching new shows and I love kicking back to old favorites. I think it would be fair to call myself an entertainment junkie.

To supplement this large diet of TV and movies I’ve taken it upon myself to create a home entertainment setup that I would be proud to call my own. At long last I have found the winning combination of hardware and software that now make up my setup.

I thought it would be helpful to the internet at large if I shared what I’ve learned along the way. I’ve gone through a few rounds of trial and error before arriving at my current setup, and hopefully you’ll be able to benefit from my mistakes.

Continue reading →

Google Chrome’s Users Feature – Making Web Development Easier

Posted on 02/23/2012 by Harry

Recently on the stable branch of Google Chrome a little feature was added that has improved my development experience tremendously.

It’s called Users and you can find it in your settings:

Continue reading →

The Best Mac Git Gui

Posted on 01/30/2012 by Harry

Git is one of the most powerful and effective revision control systems available. It’s lightweight and highly configurable, complimenting almost anyone’s programming workflow. Predominately you interact with git from the command line, inputting commands such as `git status` or `git commit` to manipulate your repository.

When you first learn git the CLI can be daunting and confusing. Browsing through your history of commits with `git log` is not efficient. Even after you learn a few tricks such as `git log –graph –oneline –all` it remains difficult to really explore your history.

This is why a git GUI can put the joy back into using git.

Continue reading →

Import Posterous Posts Into WordPress

Posted on 01/02/2012 by Harry

Even though I’ve been using Posterous to host my photo blog for the past few months I’ve begun to grow weary of not using WordPress. While Posterous is easy to use I don’t feel like I’m in complete possession of all the content I’ve been creating. With that in mind, last night I started the process of exporting my Posterous posts and importing them into a WordPress installation.

Exporting posts from Posterous was not as easy as I had hoped. There is no native export tool on Posterous’ website nor any 3rd-party Posterous export tool.

After a fair amount of searching I found the only way to get my posts out of Posterous was to use WordPress’ import Posterous tool.
Continue reading →

List Your iTunes Library By Artist and Year

Posted on 11/15/2011 by Harry

Just found out: you can organize your iTunes Library to show your music by artist and by the year their albums were released.

This means that rather than just listing all your music alphabetically by artist, and then by the artist’s albums, you can instead have each artist’s album listed by the year they were released.

I didn’t even know that I wanted to list my music like this, but now that I know I can I do. Awesome.

10 things to know about street photography

Posted on 09/07/2011 by Harry

I’m a hobbyist photographer and I’m always looking to improve my craft. I learn what I can through practice but that can only get you so far. It’s always helpful to pick up a trick or two from someone who is an expert.

Until reading this article I didn’t know who Henri Cartier-Bresson was. Now I do and I appreciate his work and tips.

The page is easy to consume as it’s in easy list format. I especially like tip #7: ‘See the world like a painter’. Good tips.

Read all the tips here.

How To Find A Tech Job

Posted on 08/02/2011 by Harry

I’m helping a friend find a job. I’ve already gone through the entire job search process and I do not envy the guy. It’s a hard, grueling process but one that when successful is such a rush.

Off the top of my head I shared with him a list of job listing websites I used during my search. These sites are mostly geared toward technology jobs but hopefully it’ll spark an idea of a place to search for a job you haven’t thought of before. Like maybe one of your favorite websites is hiring, or has links towards a website that is hiring.
Continue reading →

Making A Brain Dump On The Internet

Posted on 01/06/2011 by Harry

I had an idea the other day to start documenting all the various pieces of information that I’ve collected over my years of living. The types of information I intend to share are those that I have found aren’t common knowledge. The knowledge is more ‘special’. As in – it is highly targeted and specific in its use and application.

In summary, most of the information I intend to share are technical in nature.

However! It is my hope that through the power of words I will make complex concepts easy to understand. Skills that once were mysterious may be shown to be as plain to understand as brushing your teeth. (Which is not to underestimate the difficulty of brushing three times a day.)

I’m starting by fanning out what topics I intend to cover and will slowly update each page with information as time permits.

Get started with the hub page which for now I’m calling Resources. Click here to read my newly created Resources page.

How I Make My Week of Links

Posted on 10/25/2010 by Harry

The first few times I was formatting my ‘Week of Links’ post I had a very loose and chaotic system in place. Most of my reading is done through my Google Reader account, which helps centralize all the different websites and blog feeds into one place. This way, instead of having to load 10+ websites every day to catch up on news, I am able to go to my Google Reader and read all my news in one neat location.

When I first started saving links to use for these posts I would shift between tagging them, starring them, or sending them to my Instapaper account. This quickly became chaos and resulted in more confusion and work than I had ever intended.

Slowly, as the weeks progressed, I fell into a rhythm. During the week I would Star each Google Reader item that I thought was interesting or worthwhile to share. After the week was over I would go through my starred items from the past week, sometimes skipping articles that were no longer relevant or interesting, and open each article in a new tab (in the background thanks to this Google Chrome Extension). At this point I have one Google Chrome windows open with about 15-20 tabs, each with the article loaded.

From here I open the most excellent Chrome Extension Session Buddy and use its export feature of my open tabs to produce a CSV file with the title and URL of each article.

Until this week I would manually go through this list and create the HTML necessary to make each headline linkable, which was quite an arduous and boring job. This week however I made a breakthrough and was able to automate this task through the use of only FOUR lines of Python code. Opening a Terminal window on my Mac I entered into the Python Interpretator and ran the following four lines:

import csv
reader = csv.reader(open("googlRss.csv", "rb"))
for row in reader:
	print '<a href="%s" target="_blank">%s</a>' % (row[1], row[0])

Which produced the following result:

After this point it was only a matter of adding my comments to each headline, and voila! The Week of Links was ready for publishing!