web New blog

Posted March 30, 2009 • Comments Off on New blog

Everyone:

The hosting that provides my blog space on slithytoves.org is going away, and after much deliberation and annoyance, I’ve decided converting the old blog contents and software to a new site is pretty much impossible.

Therefore I’ve started over, and now I’m doing what I actually want, and what better fits the Internet of 2009 rather than the Internet of 2006 (when I put together this old blog design).

The new site is (really) http://www.kostia.net/blog … so that’s easy to remember.

It will look much different than what you expect. What it does is aggregate all the stuff that was in the sidebar of the old blog, in one stream. Instead of one ancient post in the middle and other, smaller, more recent stuff in the sidebar, it’s all together now. There are little icons to tell you what you’re looking at, and all the category/search/archive links on the left work just as you’d expect to narrow things down.

There are some technical hurdles remaining, like how anything I mark as a favorite on Etsy gets replicated in its entirety, description and payment/shipping instructions and all, and how anything I say on Twitter or mark as a favorite on Twitter shows up twice, as a post title and contents, and how anything I mark “I like it” on StumbleUpon shows up over and over and over again … BUT the author of the software that does the aggregation has a huge new version coming out in a matter of days and promises a lot of this will be fixed.

Included in the stream (as you can see in the categories list on the left side of the page) are:

everything I say on Twitter
things other people say on Twitter that I marked as a favorite
sites I comment on through StumbleUpon
items I add to my favorites (read: wishlist) on Etsy
developments in my silly little virtual city, Jasperopolis
photos I post to Flickr (this is limited; if I post 200 photos in a day, it will only show you the most recent 10)
songs and podcasts I listen to (reported through last.fm)
sites I mark on digg.com (I do this rarely)
sites I bookmark, synced through delicious.com

Not all these categories are showing yet; they will as soon as they have content.

I can, of course, still make regular web posts when I feel like it, some short, some long, and those categories are marked with the little black and white speech-bubble icon. Posts I make from my phone have a little iPhone icon.

You can comment on any post by clicking “leave a comment” or read the existing comments by clicking where it says “1 comment” or whatever. Right now, all comments are saved for moderation, meaning I have to approve them by hand, but at least I’ll see them and not get buried in spam. I’m debating how best to make comments work, because I miss the old old days when y’all actually used to leave me comments.