Hello again. Seems like I’ve finally gotten around to fixing my blog so I figure I should post a quick catch up post first.
2010 has been a bloody weird and at times bewildering year. Sometimes too busy to talk about, sometimes too painful and occasionally I’ve just been too lazy. There’s been some good along the way; losing all four of my wisdom teeth has to go down as one of the highlights.
So, what next – politics, cycling, music or eBooks? Hmm. Something anyway.
Facebook have updated their site design again, in what many say is an attempt to counter the growing popularity of twitter. I’m in two minds about the update. On the one hand it’s facebook’s site and theirs to do what they want with. If I want control of content, delivery and style then that’s what this blog is for (and long term readers can attest to the issues in that model). Alternatively, though, I now look like the most spamming user in the world. This is because I feed facebook from a number of sources, so all my status updates are just shipped in from twitter, links come from my delicious bookmarks and google reader shared items, images are all uploaded to flickr with a notification to facebook and my likes on youtube and last.fm are moved over as well. Also, of course my blog comes through from it’s RSS feed.
And I can see that to a point that works rather well, I have no desire to use Facebook to do all my activity on, as I’m already happily using those sites to perform the functions they’re good at. However, I also gain because by linking back to facebook I can still update my friends on what I’m doing.
Until recently these updates were much less prominent, in large part because facebook was in the habit of only showing the latest status updates or activity of each person in the news feed. Now, however, it seems happy to show multiple events from a single user on the main page, and also to show updates from a feed instantly.
This makes a user like me who feeds in a lot of content swamp their friends news feeds. I don’t like the idea of that so I hope facebook either introduce options for throttling your own activity updates back a bit. Alternatively you can hide me, but then you get nothing, which seems to defeat the point rather.
I’ve finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7 after much procrastination. This means that my blog is finally on a somewhat customised template and with many more features working, so it finally feels more personal.
Naturally, upgrading I had originally planned as a brief post Sunday lunch (well, late breakfast porridge) activity has now bled right through the afternoon and only just completed. I must say that my enthusiasm for finally upgrading was entirely down to loving the rather fine Fast Moving theme on the site Prosaic Paradise. A site which I incidentally visited thanks to inviting a photo into my recently created flickr pool of Heart Shaped Tyre Tracks, of which more in a later post.
The upgrade itself was as easy as usual, with more time spent carefully backing up files than putting the new ones into the right place, with all that done it was just a single click to upgrade. Then I realised how much more I’d have to do, I tracked down my chosen theme and then got it setup, which was a doddle, until I screwed up the permissions in various directories and had to change them three times. At that point I did swear loudly. CHMOD, how I hate thee.
My next struggle was the realisation that I had everything on the blog setup using categories when in fact tags would be far more useful. I then spent a good ten minutes doing it manually before I found the categories –> tags converter option in the admin interface. *Facepalm*
Once that was complete it was time to start looking for interesting plugins, having upgraded all my current ones, with the main priority being to integrate as much content and activity I have elsewhere on the web into my blog. I was very glad to find newer versions of Akismet (spam protection), Flickr Photo Album and the Livejournal Cross-Poster as I had come to rely on them.
Of the new plugins I have, none impresses me more than the XML Sitemap generator. Almost as impressive, though sadly not all I want it to be is Lifestream which let me integrate a series of feeds from YouTube, last.fm, flickr, delicous, google reader and twitter into a single list on a page. Not necessarily useful, but certainly kind of nifty when I try to remember something I’ve done recently.
Now to blog about other stuff and look for a meme to post as well… oh and fix my tagging, as the import didn’t get it exactly right!
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