If you’re seeing this, I have migrated this blog both to WordPress as a platform and to my own domain. I never really knew what to do with tinysubversions.com, and the blogspot page was always my real home on the internet. I’m happy to say that everything has moved over nicely. I might take a hit in PageRank for a little while, but the important thing is that the old permalinks work. Here, try it:

http://tinysubversions.blogspot.com/2007/12/effective-networking-art-of-finding.html

Ta-da!

To do the migration, I ended up using:

• WordPress’ native Blogger import function
• this Blogger to WordPress plugin, which handled the permalink redirection
• Feedburner‘s awesome feed redirection

Granted, it took me forever to find the right combination of tools, but once I did it was easy. Hopefully this will make it easy for anyone who finds this on Google.

For those of you wondering about the theme, I shelled out the cash for Thesis, which is a pretty amazing premium WordPress theme. It lets you do a whole lot of painless tweaking and has some amazing features. Do check out their demo video if you’re interested. Many thanks to Darren Torpey for the recommendation. Hopefully I can return the favor by helping him migrate his Blogger site to WordPress!

Also, I’d like to thank everyone who contributed information when I wrote about my troubles migrating last month.

I’ll be tweaking the theme over the coming days, but for now you might want to take note of the handy “Effective Networking” tab at the top, which leads to my networking articles.

Hey folks, I need a favor. I’m compiling a list of schools that use my articles as reference material. It’s useful for me to know. For example, I might use it to reach out to schools if I’m in the area to see if they’d like me to drop by and give a talk.

I am thinking of completely nuking the layout of this blog and starting fresh, possibly using pre-generated themes that are already available. I’ve never been all that happy with the way this blog looks, and there are actual professional graphic designers who have made themes for Blogger that I can use. Plus the new Blogger themes are easy to tweak and you can add neat gadget thingies.

Hello dear readers. Happy new year to you all.

Is it wrong that I am very excited to have finally entered the “500+ Connections” territory on LinkedIn?

Know everyone.

Is there anything you would like me to write about, related to networking? I feel like it’s about time to write another networking article, but I’m straining to think of something I’m particularly excited to write about.

If you have a Facebook account, click on this link to use the Blog Network thingie and join my community. This way you, my readers, can talk to each other. If you want.

Actually I’m having second thoughts about introducing you to each other. It seems like some horrible breeding experiment waiting to go wrong.

Also, as a reminder, I’m speaking at PAX this weekend! For some reason they don’t have the schedule in HTML, only in PDF, but here’s the info for my talk:

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM
Raven Theatre
Breaking In: How to Get Your Foot In the Door
So you’ve got skills and you’ve got passion, but you have no idea how you’re going to break into the game industry. You send out resumes, and nobody ever gets back to you. In this session, Darius Kazemi covers exactly how, even as a lowly student, you can make friends at game companies and eventually, maybe, turn those connections into a career.

I will devote 25 or 30 minutes to my talk and the rest to Q&A.

I’m thinking what I will cover is this:

• My usual five-minute blast of “how I got to where I am, starting with high school.” This is really helpful for establishing context, and is generally entertaining.
• The caveats: my advice is only useful if you’re already pretty knowledgeable about video games, and you have something of a portfolio (or are working on it), and you really actually want to make games and are not just someone who likes playing them.
• How to apply for a job the official way (website–>resume–>interview).
• How to apply for a job the unofficial way (I know a dude who’s looking for a tester, I’ll forward your info to him).
• Swallow your pride. Take any job you can. I took a QA job for $10/hr even though, looking back, I was in some ways overqualified for it.
• How to turn that crap job into something good. (I probably rename my talk “How to Get Your Foot in the Door, And Keep It There.”)

Maybe some other stuff too. As usual, though, I think the best stuff will come out in Q&A.

I just used a service called Wordle to create a rather fetching tag cloud of all the text in my blog. (Wordle doesn’t auto-import your blog, I had to use Blogger Backup to extract an XML file of my entire blog and then I used Vim’s regex features to trim out all the markup and incidental text.)

Many of these words I was expecting to see: “(g/G)ame(s)” and “people” being most prominent. But “networking” isn’t that big, and for some reason “time” is way up there. Huh.

Be sure to click the image to see a bigger, more readable version!

I’m attempting to redirect this blog’s feed using Blogger’s auto-redirect feature, mostly because I like to have more complete metrics on who’s reading my blog. If you’re reading this site on a feed and for some reason aren’t getting an updated feed, please let me know.

I used this neat web application called TagCrowd, along with some Blogger-fu, to visualize word frequencies for my last 200 posts. I removed common words. Top ten words I like: game industry networking GDC developers people think talk work design. People who know me in the game industry can verify that this pretty much sums me up. (Also note that I used three of my top ten in that last sentence!)

Also, I use the words something, really, important, and probably way too often.