Another one from the department of only-of-interest-to-me, but I have spent most of the night writing a little tool to delete the vast swathe of duplicate posts that my shiny new-edition blog dumped back into my LJ. I have no idea if this means that the people who got a swathe of notifications the other day are going to get another swathe – in any event my apologies for one or both sets of pointless email garbage, but with any luck, that’ll be the last of it. And I can go back to playing computer games with my free time, instead of coding.

Or: where to find me, 2010 edition.

So, after years of blogging at umpty-tum different places, I’ve decided not to bother with all that any more. I’m not going to have a linkblog, a photoblog, a writing blog, and a whatever-else blog any more. I’m just going to have one blog. If not all of it’s of interest to you, well, I’m sorry about that, but it’s all of interest to me.

As of today, I go back to blogging at www.black-ink.org. As far as possible, all my myriad old URLs will redirect there, after I’ve had time to make sure that everything is working correctly in my new set up and that I’ve properly mothballed everything at the old URLs.

Further, in the unlikely event that you’re desperate to read stuff I wrote years ago, almost everything I’ve ever blogged is now in the archive there. I’m missing some posts from some time around 2003/2004 when I was using a CMS called nucleus that detonated itself unbacked-up during an upgrade (you can bet I’ve never done that since), but everything else that wasn’t some kind of private post is now back on my blog. (This includes, for example, my old blogger archive from 2000-2002, absent from the intertubes since some time in 2003). Most of it’s only of interest to me and my obsession with continuity, but still, if you didn’t know me ten years ago, and have a burning urge to find out exactly how stupid I was back then, it’s all there in it’s slightly humiliating glory.

(Those of you reading this via livejournal, do not panic (in the unlikely event that my presence, or lack thereof, on livejournal is something you might panic over) – I’ll still be cross-posting everything automatically. Do please bear with me if there are some teething troubles with this new set up, though.)

I finally got around to putting an actual photography portfolio site together over the weekend. If you point your browser at http://photogr.aphi.st (you can’t buy .er domain names yet, so I cheated) you’ll find what I think of as my best photos from a few years of sporadic photoblogging at electricana.

I’m really only noting this here so I’ve got a record of when I got around to sorting it out, but if anyone’s interested enough to take a look, and let me know if they think I’ve missed any really good shots out, that’d be terribly nice of them.

This morning, I am thinking about Dunbar’s Number, and my LJ friends list. I have noticed of late that there are an increasing number of people on my list whose journals I don’t read, because I simply don’t have the attention span to concentrate on them as well as everyone else’s, and in fact, that this is carrying over, and I am interacting less with other journals that I might like, because they’re getting lost in the churn.

So a question: should I
a) set up a default view?
b) have a cull?

If a), would you prefer to know if you were on the default view or not? I have not hitherto set up a default view, because I feel it’s kind of hypocritical to describe someone as a “friend” (god, how much simpler would things be if LJ hadn’t used the emotionally loaded term) and not read their journal, but then, as I’ve just admitted, that’s what I’m doing at the moment anyway. But one way round that hypocrisy might be to be open about who’s journals I am reading. Would it break anyone’s heart to discover that while I do consider them a friend, I don’t read their journal very often? Would that be better or worse than a Friends List cull?

Dear god, but I over-think things sometimes. Maybe I should just arrange to have 75 of you shot. That would simplify matters…

After some small effort, and a couple of false starts, I have more or less finished redesigning my main personal website, ala.sda.ir. I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out. I’ve got an IE-only display bug to sort out (the photo grid isn’t quite aligned in IE at the moment, and I really want to spend a bit of time on the related posts feature, because I’m not really sure how the plugin I’m using to run it works out what is related – it feels a bit pot-luck to me at the moment. Still, it’s a rather more modern design than I had been using, which is nice.