etc.

My little experiment in lifestreaming seems to have failed. The FriendFeed plugin I was using was mostly fine, but the date never did work, making it look like I was only ever active on the internets on Wednesdays at 15:45. An annoyance that I was willing to overlook for a few months, but then it just got to me. SO, this iteration uses FlickrRSS, this Twitter widget plugin, and Last.fm for WordPress, all three of which represent the three most active online spaces I inhabit. And, that’s that.

I’ve also started using the Posterous account I set up ages ago and linked it to this blog, which means that a few more linky/random things will show up here starting soon. Hooray for easy!

For a while now I’ve been thinking that the only sustainable way to breathe life into this space is to integrate content from my other online haunts. Bottom line? I am not now, nor have I ever really been a regular blogger. Lately, it’s been months (not weeks) between posts. At the same time, while I have considered ditching this blog altogether, I am not quite sure I’m ready to do that just yet. I’m sentimental that way.

So, I started thinking about doing a bit more “lifestreaming” in this space a few months ago, but never did anything about it, mostly for lack of time. To-day I started tooling around, looking for plugins & such, then the tooling turned into testing, and testing turned into a template refresh and a few hours later, we have this. If you’re reading this via RSS, pop over and have a look.

Four resources made it happen:

• this really simple page explains how to add a second sidebar to your theme.
• the Homepage Excerpts plugin excerpts blog posts on the index page.
• the FlicrkRSS widget generates the image sidebar.
• the RSS Stream plugin makes the lifestreaming section come together.

I like it. It feels right. Of course, now that I’ve dusted things off around here, the blogging impulse has returned somewhat (of course!). If things look funky in your browser, let me know? Thanks!

Bought some begonias for the garden today. I mostly dislike gardening, but then I start doing it and it usually turns out being OK. Not big fun, but, you know, fine.

Thought I’d pop in before June fizzled away entirely. If I visited my own blog once in a while, I might have actually been prompted to post sooner, given that I’ve had a raccoon at the top of this page for, oh, weeks. Oh, sure, he’s a cute raccoon, but his cuteness is ever so slightly tempered by the knowledge that the Humane Society undoubtedly fattened him & his brothers up and brought them right back to our neighbourhood to settle in, find some mates, and have more cute raccoon babies in our walls. Ah, circle of life.

So, here we are with half the year gone. You know how time seems to speed up as you get older? Well, a colleague speculated the other day that it’s because time is relative, and when you’re young, every day occupies a larger percentage of your life, compared to when you’re older. Best explanation I’ve heard yet. Summers felt like they lasted forever when I was younger, but that’s probably because when you’re 13, you’ve only really known 13 summers, and you actually remember fewer.

The mister and I have been trying to make the very most of this summer (“Summer of Us”, we’re calling it), which means we’re doing a lot more than our usual home-body selves are used to. For us, this means less couch surfing/movie watching and more getting out into the world and seeing people. It’s remarkably enriching and makes me feel like we’ve already had a very full summer, and there’s still 2 months of it to go. I feel younger just thinking about it.

Oh, and? I’ve perked things up around here with a little redesign. I finally tired of the minimal sidebar and added some content (current blog reads coming soon!). I’ve only tested it on Mac/FF3, so let me know if anything looks broken on your end.

Hello, December. I did a little design update on the site, getting right back to basics. Some notes, mostly for me, but also for you, if you’re at all interested:

• no more background image. Instead, white!
• installed Smart Archives which produces this nice archives page. That’s a lot of detail right there, which I like for now.
• got PHP code running on WP pages thanks to Exec-PHP. I used to use RunPHP but that sort of stopped working after some WP upgrade, and rather than trying to fix it, I just found something that works instead.
• dumped all sidebar content in favour of a short blurb that mostly links to the important stuff.

Anything broken in your browser? Let me know! And, more substantial bloggy content soon, I promise.

Is it just me, or does anyone else miss the right nav of yore? Right. Just me. That’s what I thought.

You know what this means, don’t you? That’s right, I’m actively looking for a new template. Because being unhappy with your nav is irritation enough to blow up your whole site and start over.

Also, I’ve been meaning to ask: how are you?

When things get quiet around here, it either means that (a) I’m away (which I was), or (b) I’ve lost my blogging mojo (which I have). When the latter happens, the quickest fix I know is to redesign (which I’ve done). Check it out. No, wait, don’t check it out yet, I’m not quite done*. It might look like I’m done, but knowing my pattern, I’ll be tweaking the stylesheet for another 24-48 hours. So, sit tight, OK?

* assuming you’re reading this in your aggregator and you’re not already here. If you are already here, hi!

Later: see the weirdness going on in this post? Stuff like that drives me crazy! Tweak, tweak, tweak…

The next day: I think I’m tweaked out. I can’t seem to sort out this formatting mess, but what the hell, one more post and it will drop off the main page. Then I never have to look at it again. Chalk it up to a minor exercise in Letting Go.

And, breathe…

I’m experimenting with Snap at the moment. If you haven’t seen a Snap-enabled website yet, you might want to go ahead and hover over this link (forgot to mention: you’ll have to hop out of your aggregator and visit to get the full Snap-advantage). Nice, eh? I thought so. I have a terrible habit of embedding links with no indication of where they will take you (#4 on the list of top ten blog usability mistakes), so I figured that this blog would be a prime candidate for preview thumbnails.

Also, TangognaT reminds us that it’s National Delurking Week. If you’re a lurker, hello! Say “hi” in the comments, won’t you?

Happy Thursday!

Who can resist a blog popularity test that comes with a funky results banner? Not me, to be sure. Here, go find out what list your blog is on.

30 whole days of blogging, whew! I have to admit, I’m a wee bit proud of myself for making it all the way through. There were nights when I thought I couldn’t possibly string three sensible words together, nevermind write an actual blog post. I like the blogging rhythm I’ve fallen into and, while I don’t think I will ever be a daily blogger (on any long-term basis), I have really enjoyed the habit of sitting down to write. I feel like I’ve relaxed all uptight notions about what constitutes a good blog post and simply embraced blogging for the sake of, well, blogging. How liberating!

And thank you all for listening! I won’t be posting daily in December (unlike some!), but I do hope to show up around here more regularly than I did before NaBloPoMo. I hope you’ll stick around, too!

I wish I had profound bloggy words for you on this, the second-last day of NaBloPoMo. Unfortunately, to-day’s post is purely utilitarian. You see, over the past couple of weeks I’ve received odd email messages from friends and regular-ish correspondents asking, “did you receive my last message?” I’m never too surprised to hear this question because I have a pretty aggressive spam filter on my email that sometimes traps the good with the bad, about as often as it lets through the bad with the good (which isn’t all that often). I try to make a habit of checking and emptying my spam folder on a regular basis, and I’ve been paying special attention to it lately as more people ask why I haven’t responded to their last message. Earlier to-day, I logged into my web-based email client to poke around and look for oddities, and what I found there was odd indeed: it seems that my inbox was somehow cloned and I have a whole bunch (hundreds, actually) of legitimate email messages in there that never made it into the inbox in the regular email client I use (Thunderbird). Huh? Yea, I don’t really get it either, and I have no idea how it happened, but all of this is to say that if you have sent me email anytime since the beginning of November, and you haven’t heard back from me, your best bet would be to go ahead and send it again. I’ve just brewed myself a nice pot of tisane and the plan for the next couple of hours is to go through this mysterious new inbox and start responding to messages. If you’re waiting to hear from me, hopefully you won’t be waiting too much longer! Sorry, and thanks.

And happy second-last day of NaBloPoMo!

It never fails. Every time I have something Really Important to work on, I start messing with my site design. Why? Because this Really Important Thing is something I just don’t feel like doing and hey! I think it’s time for a redesign! And, oh hey! To-day is a really good day to work on a new header for my blog! If you’re reading this in an aggregator, don’t bother clicking out to the site, because while I have spent a stupid amount of time tweaking my stylesheet, and while I’ve sunk hours into a new header that I deleted seconds ago (on purpose), there isn’t much to show for it other than a border here, a wider column there, and a whole lot of nothing everywhere else. And now I have 60 minutes to work on said Important Thing before bedtime.

It never fails.

60 minutes later: guess who still hasn’t done any work on the Really Important Thing? But, hey! Check out the new header! That was a lot more fun.