I’m playing around with Tumblr some more. The RSS feed should redirect automatically. Web version is davextreme.tumblr.com.
It’s a very polished application. As much as I like being able to tweak everything on a self-hosted site (and I do), I like the ease of a third-party service. What it doesn’t have is an import feature, so I can get my Movable Type posts into it. Batch post edit would be nice. But I’ll play with it a bit and then either point my domain there or move the posts back to here.
I don’t want to link to every interview in del.icio.us, so I’ve started a blog on Tumblr to which I’ll post links to Morrison interviews I find. May still post some here, of course.
Dear reader, I ask a slight inconvenience of you. I’ve taken my links out of my blog RSS feed. I’m not sure why, but it felt like the time to do it. I’m very happy with the stuff I find and link to, so if you’d like to keep receiving it, please direct your RSS reader to my del.icio.us feed.
Another relaunch, I guess. I’ve been writing online since August 2002 or so, bouncing from LiveJournal to Movable Type to TypePad to Movable Type to TypePad to Vox to Movable Type to TypePad (think that’s right). I lost about a year’s worth of entries at one point, but most of the stuff from davextreme has been moved over to Vox, where hopefully Six Apart will do a better job at not screwing up the data than I have. It’s neat to have a running archive of what one has written, though, so one day I might end up importing it all back here.
Weblog software does great for proving handy templates in which to stick text, but I’ve always disliked that you’re stuck with one template for everything you’ve ever written. Right now I’m using a very simple white page, but I’ve toyed around with flashier layouts, and I feel like the old stuff should be able to hang around looking like it did when it was originally published. Importing older content into here seems wrong, in a way. Plus, whoever goes back and reads people’s old posts? Some of it is almost embarrassing. But I guess that’s part of growing up.
Anyway, here’s stuff from August 2007 onward. Poke around the web and you can probably find the older stuff if you really want.
It’s been a few weeks now since I’ve moved my page back to TypePad from Movable Type. The 3.2 version of Movable Type seems to be really cool, but I’m kind of glad that I got away when I did lest I suffer even more temtation to tinker. That’s the difference, really, between the two services. Movable Type is customizable to suit almost any need you can find for it. TypePad’s a little more focused. While I like having a weblog that’s tooled to do exactly what I want it to do, I really just don’t want to make it a priority to do all the tooling that the temptation invites. TypePad gives me most of what I want, and at the moment that’s exactly what I’m in the market for. Also I like working within some constrictions. It really makes me be creative when I want to do something that isn’t quite provided by the package.
So, ta-da, here’s the site on TypePad (but you already knew that). I might play around with the visuals a bit, but, as outlined above, this standard look is pretty good. Instead of cramming everything into TypePad I’ve decided to make use of a bunch of great tools that already do what I want to do better than I could hope for. Links are handled by del.icio.us, and photos by Flickr. The XML feed is coming from FeedBurner. If you know what any of that stuff is, I’m sure it sounds like I’m just spouting off the generic list of trendy web things cool people know about, but they really are nifty services.
Anyway, pretty much I’m happy with the tools I use to put this site together for the few dozen who are nice enough to read it. There are two small things, though, that I wish TypePad supported out of the box:
Your aggregator should figure this out automatically, but my feed’s located here now.
A few years ago I started a blog using Movable Type 2.something or other. Then TypePad came out, and I decided that I wanted to use it. Then Movable Type 3 came out, and I switched to it. Then the beta of Movable Type 3.2 came out, and in my excitement to play around with it I pretty much broke everything. I’m somewhat sure that if I did some work I could get it running again, but at the moment the ease of TypePad is pretty appealing to me. At some point I’ll figure out how to get all my old pages working again, but for now, we’ll just call this a fresh start.
I’ve been debating back and forth with myself about whether or not to send TrackBack pings to sites I link to on eXtremities. My interpretation of TrackBack is this: it lets you read other posts inspired by the one you’re currently reading or written about a similar topic. The other interpretation is that it lets every page contain links to every page linking to it. I don’t think the second version is very useful. What I want in reading a TrackBack is more information or thoughts about a topic. Otherwise following a ping to my linklog just gives you a page linking back to where you found it. Great if you want to click in circles all day, but not very constructive.
My inclination is to only send TrackBack pings when I have something to say about a post, not just whenever I link to one.
Daring Fireball has a lot to say about this. My feeling is that lists of referrers are interesting but not altogether useful, whereas TrackBacks would be used to provide easy extra reading material on a topic. In that vein I almost think people should delete incoming TrackBack pings that don’t have anything but a link in them.
I’ve broken my stylesheets up into “structure” and “color” so that I can easily update the tone of the page without accidently messing with the layout. My intention is to rotate the colors and image at least once a season. I couldn’t wait until another few weeks until the official start of winter, so here it is. (Safari users: hit “reload.”)
People often say “I’m speechless” and then go on to write for a few paragraphs about whatever supposedly took away their ability to speak. So I’ll just say “thank you.” In the past week, Unnofficial TypePad Resources and Everything TypePad! have both mentioned my MT→TypePad Permalinks article, Snowman has flatteringly redesigned, and I’m in the “Featured TypePad Sites” box on the main page.
Working as a “Conflicts Research Assistant” doesn’t quite stimulate me from nine to five every day. Getting recognition on my creative endeavors really means a lot to me.
Since Hurricane Isabel gave me the day off, I happily wasted it watching television and redesigning my site. I’ve decided to switch to TypePad for my hosting and weblogging needs. I’m just in love with the service and how easy it makes it to do stuff. At the moment my page on davextreme.com is still up, but the link to my page on the main davextreme page points here to davextreme.typepad.com, but I’ll set up domain mapping a some point. The image of the tree comes from freefoto.com, and I’ve done the color scheme from the photo’s pallete. (I later discovered this article suggesting doing that. Yay me for being clever!)
Feedback on the new look is of course appreciated.
I’ve added a new feature to the left sidebar. Now you can see what books, video games, and movies I’m into at the moment! As per my new method for linking to books, movies, etc., the name of the work will link to its official page if I found one, and the Amazon/Internet Movie Database links will link to the appropriate page on those sites. I’ve also jazzed up the whole affair with some color (!) by including thumbnails of the cover/poster for the works in question. If the item is on sale at Amazon, clicking the image will send you to its product page.