Author: ABQChristopher

as mentioned in this post, i am making big changes around here…
and some of them are working better than others… i am endeavoring to make regular posts of a favorite photo and there have been a small handful of those, but the big thing i am trying to work out that isn’t working so well is this whole “LifeStream” thing… for those who haven’t heard the term a lifestream is just a feed or list or aggregation of everything i do online, so to speak… i am trying to get a set-up that will post a daily lifestream every night… you can see a few examples on the blog already – it has the twitters i’ve made, links i’ve added to del.icio.us, items i’ve shared in google reader, pics i’ve posted to flickr or twitpic, etc… i just haven’t found the perfect arrangement…
the best i’ve seen is the layout here – the oddly named Profilactic… the main thing being that it properly displays items from all the sites i use and it even shows the pics i post… BUT, there is no way to put it on my site that i can find… they do have a wordpress plugin, but it looks very different than the way it displays on their site… most importantly, it doesn’t show the pics… (temporary example here, if it’s working…)

so, for the moment, i am sticking with the lifestream that you see already being used on the site…
however, i am still testing some things with it – there is no way to do an on-demand post (!!!!), so i have to make changes and then wait until it auto-posts to see how it looks… that REALLY sucks… plus, it keeps double posting each time and i have no idea why… and, it is just far from perfect… if i could get profilactic to post the pics, i’d probably use that…
though, i cannot figure out a way to get it to post the day’s stuff every night (i may have to learn to do cron jobs), so, i would be setting a lifestream page as the homepage, rather than the home page being the main page of the blog… though, i do hate using external services to provide content on my site…
anyway, you will also notice i’ve still been using the twitter update, so those posts are also there and there is often repeated info in the two kinds of posts… and, of course, the right sidebar has a lot of this info, but i’m not removing those widgets until i get the lifestream thing figured out…

anyway, it will all level out eventually and hopefully i will find some ideal solutions… until then, the site will probably be cluttered and confusing… (kinda’ like this hurriedly written post 😛 )

[this post will be bumped up to the top every day for the next week or so, but it was originally posted august 18, 2008… if you have read this announcement already, just scroll down to see new posts…]

beginning asap, my blog is going to get updated a lot more frequently – i am going to start aggregating my twitter, flickr, etc. into this one spot…

two things have triggered this:
one – finding out that twitter is not keeping a long-term archive of my posts… and they weren’t searchable anyway… if only i had started archiving long ago 🙁
and two – having a dslr and being able to view the pics on my psp and now realizing i can upload to flickr from my psp (and flickr will then post them to my blog), i think i will start finally using flickr more… i hope…

but, my blog has never been a frequent-update kinda’ place… this has always mostly been just a place to put links to everything and all my contact info… so, for the last five or more years, i have used the service offered by changedetection.com to notify, via email, those who wanted to be notified when something changed on the site even before it was a blog… this has been handy for the less-tech-saavy in my life who don’t use rss, etc. to keep updated… well, since the blog will be updated daily (i have already turned on the service to daily make a blog post containing all the day’s twitters), i am going to discontinue the use of the changedetection.com service… i know this will be a bummer for some, but there is no sense in having an email go out every day…
the real problem is that changedetection is anonymous… i don’t know who is subscribed to me… so, i will leave the service up for a few days and hopefully you will read this post…

i look forward to my blog becoming something that gets updated regularly, and to using flickr more – i have quite a few photos i want to show off 🙂 and there will be a few tweaks to the sidebars of the site, and i may even bring back the chatbox so people can comment in general on the site, rather than commenting on a specific post or photo or whatever… and i will probably integrate dashwire to some extent, maybe this shozu thingy i’ve been playing with…

either way, big changes are a-comin’… maybe i’ll change the version number of my blog to 5.1 😛

[posted from my mint metallic green Moto Q9c]