Overspecialization?

With all the different specialized blogging, pseudo-blogging, or linking websites and services available these days, I’m starting to lose track of how I’m ‘supposed’ to do this one-to-many online communication thing.

It used to be easy. Back in the ‘old days,’ you’d hand-edit a simple HTML file with whatever you wanted to put on it, whenever you wanted to put something on it. Maybe it’d be a link, maybe it’d be a screed. Maybe people would see it, maybe they wouldn’t. Pretty simple.

Then blogging arrived to make everything simpler. Gone were the days of hand-editing HTML and managing pages directly, now you had specialized software that handled the details for you. Databases to store the information, automatically dynamically generated pages, comments, the whole shebang. Still, content-wise, it was still a grab-bag. Some posts would be long, detailed, and in-depth; other posts would be a single small link or quip; sometimes you’d get lists of links that caught someone’s eye.

Now, however, you’ve got a veritable plethora of specialized sites to handle all the different types of information you might want to share. The ones that I either use (in some fashion) or have pinged my radar strongly enough to trigger this little round of rambling, in rough order of depth:

  1. Twitter: 140-character messages originally meant to be IM-style ‘status updates,’ but now often used for ‘nanoblogging’ — short, pithy messages. No more, no less. Since brevity is the soul of wit, we will all tweet brief.

  2. del.icio.us: Social bookmarking that has evolved far more towards the social side than the bookmarking side. While I’m sure there are plenty of people that actually use their del.icio.us account as a substitute for the ‘bookmarks’ menu in their web browser, I see far more who use it as a ‘microblog’ (often displayed as a sidebar to their main weblog) wherein each post is a single link with short commentary.

  3. Tumblr: “The easiest way to share yourself,” according to their splash page. I’ve not bothered setting up a ‘tumblelog’ for myself, but this appears to fill in the ‘miniblogging’ niche, with an emphasis on simple link and media inclusion. Apparently, “this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.” Honestly, I’m still a little confused by the niche that this one fills (or attempts to fill).

  4. Weblogs (the usual suspects): Finally, the sites and software packages that used to be simple ‘blogging’ tools are now…what? Is this still ‘blogging’? Or is it now ‘macroblogging’?

I’m starting to feel like I’m losing track of what kind of post is ‘supposed’ to go to which service, and I’m more and more wondering if it’s even worth continuing to keep them all separate. However, there are occasional advantages to the specializations of the services (del.icio.us’s tagging and quick bookmarklets, the dedicated clients that are available for many of the services) that keep me using them instead of just using ‘old-school’ weblog posts for everything.

If I had the time (which student life prevents) and design skills (which simply don’t exist), I’d love to put some effort into seeing if I could assemble an über skin for my site that would streamline everything into one stream-of-consciousness approach (along the lines of what I see on Daring Fireball and kottke.org) but still allow me to use those services that I find useful. It doesn’t seem horrendously complex: plugins (some of which are probably available in some form or another) that would automatically convert each post at one service or another into its own post on my weblog, default posting options for each type of post (perhaps tweets don’t need comments enabled, for instance), and possibly some CSS work that would distinguish the types of posts.

But then, would that still be too complex? There’s always the question of what happens when one service or another is having connection issues (which I keep running into with Twitter — apparently there’s some avian flu going around over there). Perhaps I’d still be better off just coming back around to using my weblog for everything. Consolidate everything in one place — after all, there’s absolutely no real reason why I “have” to ramble on for a certain length for the post to be worthy of going on the blog, rather than being posted as a tumble, del.icio.us link, or tweet.

There’s a few things I’d miss, though, which may keep me from doing this. The in-built social networking of places like Twitter are nice, though not necessarily a dealbreaker. Being able to have my tweets and del.icio.us links show up on my Facebook profile is nice. Sometimes I like the compartmentalization (on the weblog, for instance, ‘big’ posts in the center, tweets and links over in the sidebar), sometimes I feel like it’s unnecessarily over complicating things.

Meh. I’ve gone on to just rambling now. Maybe that 140 character limit isn’t so much of a bad thing, huh?

New Header Images

Two new images for the title banner have been added to the random rotation, one from each of the last two posts. The cropped versions have been added to the end of my header images roundup (which may lose a few soon — as we move into spring, I may remove the obviously wintery choices).

Blarch Badness: Me!

Put your voting shoes on! Er…that doesn’t even make sense. Moving on…

Metroblogging Seattle is kicking off Blarch Badness today. Um, what? Blarch Badness!

As I was writing my last post, I was thinking if there were a way we could figure out what the important, meaningful, and wonderful blogs in this city were. Maybe a tournament. You know, like March Madness. Only with blogs.

Sadly, the best I could do for a name was Blorch Badness. Or Super Fantastic Mega Blogger Ultimate Supremacy Championship. I need to work on names.

But a tournament! And it will be just like March Madness, with regionals. You will get to vote on matchups between the 32 highest rated, most popular, possibly best blogs the Seattle metro area has to offer. Even the Slog (if they behave themselves). And there might even be a prize at the end. (Hey! Anyone out there want to donate a prize?)

Surprisingly enough, I made it into the opening round!

3 Seattle Daily Photo vs #6 Michael Hanscom

And finally, a battle of photographers — Kim’s daily shots of Seattle vs. the most famous camera store employee to ever be fired by Microsoft.

Admittedly, I’m not quite sure how I ended up in the West Seattle round (will I have to move if I win?) — truth to tell, I think I’ve been to West Seattle once or twice, and have only lived on First Hill and up here in Northgate — but hey, no complaints!

I should also probably make sure that I actually have a photo up here somewhere, seeing as how I’m matched up against Seattle Daily Photo (some pretty stiff competition…I might not even vote for myself!). Sure, I’ve got lots of photos in various places, but with nothing on the main page…hrm.

I know! I’ll shamelessly stoop to using a photo of Jessica Rabbit kissing Betty Boop (from last Halloween at The Vogue) to court a few votes! I’m sure that’ll work!

Betty Boop and Jessica Rabbit

In any case — check out todays round, and vote! Vote early! Vote often!

(Vote for me?)

Header Images

I’d like to get further into customizing my site later on down the line, but for the moment, I think most of my tweaks will be pretty simple. I have had fun grabbing a selection of images to use for the randomized header image at the top of the page, however. Theoretically, you should see a different image each time the page is loaded.

More may be added to this as time goes by, but for now, here’s a rundown of what you might see (unless you’d prefer to be surprised, in which case, ignore what follows…):

Read more

Back already!

Well now, that didn’t take long!

As you can see, I’m back…mostly. I haven’t uploaded my old graphics/ directories yet, so many of my old (pre-Flickr) entries will be showing lots of broken images until I get all that taken care of. The most important part, however — getting the words transferred over — has been accomplished. Yay me!

Next steps include getting the images reloaded, taking care of dad’s site, and pfutzing around with the theme so I have something other than the default WordPress themeage going on.

Off and running like a herd of turtles…

Lockdown

Seeing as I haven’t been writing a whole lot lately, this seems as good a time as any to declare this site on temporary hiatus while I transfer over to the new webhost.

I’ll be turning off comments while I pfutz around with things, and there will likely be some (hopefully small) amount of time where things essentially cease to exist before I get everything transferred over.

Be back soon(ish)…

Jumping Ship?

So…

…if, while moving over to my new digs, I were to take advantage of the one-click WordPress installation offered by Dreamhost and finally dip my toes in waters other than those of Movable Type, are there any pieces of advice I should know about? Plugins I should pay particular attention to? Tips or tricks I should know or avoid?

So far, I’ve managed to track down PHP Markdown and PHP Smartypants, and have activated Akismet, but that’s it (and all this is on a non-public test installation). I’m particularly interested in seeing if there’s a good (easy to implement) ‘tagging’ solution, such as I’m using here in lieu of categories. Googling for ‘wordpress tags‘ tends to bring up lots of information on the formatting tags used in WP templates, which isn’t what I’m aiming for.

Anything else?

iTunesWhat Is Life” by Mullins, Shawn from the album Big Daddy (1999, 4:09).

Probable Downtime

Theoretically, I should be able to move everything from my current server onto Dreamhost’s servers, flip a virtual switch, and have everything work without any interruption in service. However, I’m having some issues figuring out just how to make this work with Dreamhost’s setup (which is making me feel a little on the dumb side, but that’s beside the point).

It’s entirely possible that at some point in the upcoming weeks, there may be a few days (hopefully not much more than that) where this website isn’t accessible. I hope that this won’t last very long, if at all, but it’s a distinct possibility. Consider yourselves warned.

Time to Move

For the past couple years, this weblog (along with my father’s blog and my Jason Webley bootlegs) has been hosted through the kindness and generosity of Michael at Rain City Story. However, he’s decided it’s time for him to move on to other projects in his life, so it’s time for me to start investigating other hosting options.

At the moment, the two providers I’m looking most seriously at are Media Temple’s (gs) service and Dreamhost.

On the surface, Dreamhost looks like a better deal ($10/mo for 200 Gb of storage and 2 TB of bandwidth vs. $20/mo for 100Gb of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth), but (mt) was Michael’s recommendation. I don’t really know about either company, so I’m open to suggestions.

I thought about simply moving back to Typepad or some such thing, but I’d hate to have to lose the Webley bootlegs page, and between the bootlegs and dad’s site being pretty image heavy, we tend to chew up a good amount of disk space and bandwidth.

Any ideas, suggestions, experiences with either (mt) or Dreamhost, or other recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks much!

iTunesMy Spine” by Fluke from the album Puppy (2004, 7:22).