[tags]syndication, livejournal, tumblr, tumblelog, wordpress, rss[/tags]

After today, I’ve decided to stop syndicating my entries to my livejournal account for several reasons:

1. I changed my domain from techslut.net to sophistechate.com, so it’s a good time to change shit anyway.
2. I’m integrating my tumblelog with my regular blog, so the frequency of posts will greatly increase. If people want to subscribe to this new feed, I’d rather them opt-in than annoy a bunch of people who eventually decide to opt-out.
3. Having too much duplicate content screws up google rankings. I used to automatically syndicate from techslut.net to my own livejournal account and another wordpress blog, but since “techslut” has naughty words in it, that site was getting heavily penalized. Other factors may have been involved, but limiting my posts to only one domain helped the matter greatly.
4. I never use the livejournal features any more for my own content, and even the most graceful means of managing comments between the two systems still proved to be kludgy. I’m still subscribed to a whole bunch of other lj users’ feeds, though…so I’m not going away.
5. I’m also getting rid of openid authentication in wordpress, because it is obnoxious and never worked as easily as everyone said it would.

So, here’s the two feeds people may be interested in:

• http://www.sophistechate.com/feed - All of the content on sophistechate.com. This includes regular blog posts plus the content from my tumblelog - twitter updates, quotes from sites I’m reading, lots of images, witty chat logs, and the occasional oddball video. Posts tend to be short, to the point, and easy to digest (which is why I prefer tumblelogs in the first place). Frequency is somewhere between 5-10 posts per day.
• http://www.sophistechate.com/category/blog/rss - Blog posts only, which are much longer and in depth. Frequency averages less than 1 post per week, but does tend to come in spurts.

If any paid or permanent account holders want to create syndicated accounts, please feel free. Just let me know so I can link them here.

So with all that said and done…I’m really really excited about the changes taking place around here lately. The summer season kicked off with a bang with San Diego’s first Barcamp, which totally energized my creativity for my photography work and general project ideas. I was interviewed and published in an honest to god real magazine. And best of all, I’m almost ready to announce a super exciting project that a friend and I have been working on for the past few months. I’m also going to make my first trip to San Francisco next week for WordCamp, and will be going to Defcon a couple of weeks after that (and maybe Blackhat, but that remains to be decided). Conventions make me super motivated and excited to the point of being overwhelmed, but it’s a kind of crack I doubt I could live without. =]

[tags]tumblelog, tumblr, lifestream, wordpress[/tags]

For years I’ve wanted to do something with the amusing crap I discover and link other people to each day. I recently discovered lifestreams and thought that was what I wanted, so for the past several weeks I’ve been toying off and on with trying to get one set up. I tried everything from quickly-hacked php scripts to yahoo pipes, but none of these solutions stirred me.

Then I discovered tumblelogs. I felt like the bee girl from No Rain. Talk about finding your creative element.

Instead of being a passive list of places you’ve visited, where the interesting content is beyond the link itself, tumblelogs create more of a rich-media experience by allowing you to quickly post the most interesting snippet of a website you read, embed the entire video you found on youtube, or even upload a picture from your cell phone. These are little bits of content that make up the internet experience, but are weak on their own. When posted as a tumblelog, this information creates a context that defines our interests and personalities.

A quick google search proved that tumblr is the tool to use for such things. The control freak in me was nervous trying a hosted service, but so far I have been pleasantly surprised. Elated, even. Tumblr allows for complete creative control, even going as far as enabling you to set up custom domain names. And posting content is blissfully simple via the site or bookmarklet. You can even set up other rss feeds to import automatically (like your flickr stream, mog/last.fm/pandora, wishlistr, etc). I would pay for this service. Happily.

Soooo….yeah. Now that I’ve got the big soapbox speech out of the way, let me present my new tumblelog: tumblelog.techslut.net. Seamlessly integrated into wordpress with a bit of a custom theme, and very very squishy. I expect it will mainly end up being a bunch of quotes, but I could prove mysef wrong. It will most certainly be a lot more active than my regular blog. If you want to keep track of these updates, feel free to add my rss feed.

So for the past several weeks, I’ve been going flipping nuts because not all of my recent pictures were showing up in my gallery. Asking on the developer’s forum was no help, although it was comforting to discover I’m not the only one having this problem. So I finally banged on it long enough yesterday to discover that FAlbum uses date-taken-desc instead of date-posted-desc, and Dearest Dan’s shiny new Nikon is set for 2005. Noob. ^_^

My apologies if anyone got annoyed by my photostream when I was constantly reuploading the same picture (with minor EXIF changes) during troubleshooting. Your suffering has gone towards the greater good.

If anyone is interested, here’s a link to my v0.6.9 falbum.class.php file that goes by the posted date.