New Year, New Blog

January 30, 2010 in meta, 

I’ve had the same blog look for longer than I’ve known the woman who’s now my wife. That’s too darned long. I’ve changed, the Interwebs have changed, and it’s time for something new. So, it’s goodbye Movable Type, hello Tumblr, hello all new stuff. Not hello better content, let’s not get carried away. Just hello new stuff. Say hello, everybody.

The first big news is the switch to Tumblr. There’s three reasons for that: First, I wanted to incorporate my Flickr photos and my Twitter posts into my blog. I’d used Movable Type since 2003, but they just didn’t offer a good way to do that — their Action Streams plug-in hard-codes everything so I couldn’t make things look like I want without editing a passel of perl scripts, and the third-party Feeds.App… well, I just couldn’t get it to work. Tumblr, on the other hand, handles feeds great (and has pretty good documentation to boot).

And then there were the hacks. I was just tired of running updater after updater to get around some vulnerability; part of what appealed to me about Tumblr was that I could switch to a hosted service that someone else would keep running for me. It’s not ideal, but I’m hopeful it’ll be a lot better.

Finally there’s the backup issue. I never backed up my old blog properly; Tumblr has a simple backup app. It’d be a pity to lose all this stuff I’ve written; this should help prevent that.

The second big news is the new content: the Twitter feed and the photos. It’s the bigger news, probably, except that I’m geeky and I get into things like what my blogging platform should be.

The Twitter feed should be pretty much self-explanatory. Some people may find it interesting.

The photos are things I take with my iPhone. I basically try to use it to take a shot I wouldn’t otherwise take, to get my shooting more creative. My old moblog was more about composition; this is about really trying new things and getting a new look out of the shots I take. Learning to do this will probably mean I take a lot of crappy, crappy photos along the way. Sorry about that.

And I’m sorry that you all have to register with yet another service to comment. At least the one I’m using now, Disqus, is used in tons of other places. Hopefully, it won’t be very complicated to get signed up.

So that’s the new blog. Hope you enjoy it.

(Oh, and if somebody could explain to me why there’s that border around the Juniorbird logo, that’d be awesome. Spending half a day trying to get rid of it demonstrated to me that I’m no longer an ace html jockey and that it’s a great idea for me to move away from doing all this by hand!)