I've taken another step in Lifestreaming (as I think they call it nowadays). I took an immediate liking to soup.io as an online RSS aggregator and blog. I had collected most of my content from around the web in the "lindsay.at/everywhere" link ("Preoccupations" on my home website's menu). The problem was that it didn't work so well all the time, and was often down. By redirecting to my soup page, I can now get a better-looking, more reliable stream of the content I excrete onto the web.
I also took an immediate liking to Posterous, a blog-by-mail site. The site isn't particularly pretty or customizable yet, but it handles email input fairly deftly. I'm now treating it as a tumblelog, a receptacle for interesting and amusing links that I send to friends. With a simple CC, I can stick links on my site with trivial amounts of effort. When I get an iPhone, I can easily imagine it handling mobile blogging as well.
These two sites are also worth a mention in their very easy, no-commitment, no-password-or-signup approaches to enticing new users. Posterous simply asks for an email: they'll auto-generate a URL for you. Soup similarly gently leads you down a garden path, asking for no personal data, simply for addresses to import. Well done, and it's something that other sites will do well to emulate.
If anyone out there cares, I've finally gotten off the $100/year hamster-wheel called .mac, and transferred the existing major pages living there into this site's CMS. Most notable are the Paradiddle and ConTeXt pages, both of which document work done over three years ago. I hope Google is able to index the page transitions, but in general, I seem to be pretty find-able.
I don't normally watch these things too closely, but in scanning my logs, I seemed to get hit a few times by a particular search. I checked on google myself, and was surprised at the results:
This and the
referrals thing are the little buzzes like winning 20 bucks in the lottery that keep me blogging, I guess.
The underlying CMS engine, which should be invisible to most users, is the
Flux content management system. (It's based on
Popoon, a PHP-based clone of Apache's
Cocoon.) I mention it because already it's starting to pay for the fairly small time investment to learn it: the XSLT/XML processing pipeline on the back end has proven its usefulness in adapting some XSLT stylesheets I had lying around for my work. To my surprise, the localisation that I had built into the stylesheets worked in the CMS
with no extra effort. That's the sort of project I like: a fairly small bit of glue that multiplies the benefits with everything around it....
So, welcome to my blog. I actually started deploying and mentioning it sooner than expected, prompted by Apple's media event. It provided a lot of food for thought, and it didn't really fit my other
main online outlet, so I put those musings here.
I hope to have a chance to import some relevant content from my old livejournal (since May 2000!), which had been my previous blog platform of choice. It still has a place, I think, for much more personal musings and as a somewhat social hangout. The geekier and more political entries could find their home here. If I still have emo or personal things to post, they should still live at livejournal. I don't want to be that kind of blogger, putting
everything out in the public to see, all in one feed. I've never attempted to be entirely anonymous, though, so anyone with a bit of initiative could find me.
