With a week of downtime to ponder about things, I also thought about this site and its role in my portfolio of things to maintain.
It has been a year since I posted here and not for the lack of things to say or share but for the much-discussed oncoming of byte-size social media. I’ve been posting on Twitter almost daily (and it was fun to rediscover I wrote about that becoming a trend for me in April 2009 here) and as anyone, hit an occasional Facebook Like button or write a comment to a friend’s feed.
I still came to a conclusion that a blog has a place for me in my conversations with all of you. And then realized that I’m basically rephrasing what Clive Thompson recently said so well in Wired: Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis. It is so weird to think that just a few years ago you had to self-host of blogging engine to share a crappy mobile-quality photo (example: a typical post from Oct 2005) – there are so many new and better tools for that. But still, at times you feel like writing more than 140 characters to convey an idea, and do it in a space you actually control.
So, I took a few hours to revamp the software setup sten.tamkivi.com runs on to meet the changed needs. This is what’s changed:
- Moved from MovableType to WordPress. Long overdue, but really needed the thinking above to be worth the conversion effort. Also considered Tumblr, Edicy & Squarespace, but as I already have a Dreamhost account anyway and WP has been quite painless for our kids’ blog, made this one easy.
- Refreshed the visual skin that had been eye-hurtingly stuck somewhere in the nineties.
- Moved comment threads to Disqus. Just the thought of logging into an admin interface to see another 10,000 spam comments slipping through MT’s broken filters was discouraging to writing anything. And as I don’t see in any value in anonymous comments, Disqus let’s you log in with your existing Facebook and Twitter credentials.
- Drew my more frequent Twitter activity more visibility into this site.
- Provided some standard tools to share content from here to social sites – Twitter, Delicious & Facebook.
So, in a way, as everything else on the interwebs, this blog has been downgraded from being a central portal about what Sten thinks to one of the several repositories of content I produce as I go – focussing on being simpler, and playing better together with all the other pieces in the puzzle. I am still happy if you choose to subscribe, as at the end of the day – does any content even exist if it is not read?
Old content wise, most of the archives seem intact, just the permalinks have changed – I expect Google to reindex them in no time and thus didn’t bother to rework. One known casualty of conversion were tags – if anyone has any past experience with that MT->WP, please let me know?
End of the technical interlude and hope for a more regular programming – I’ve been overoptimistic about the time needed for that before. Thanks for coming back – there were over 5000 unique readers here even over the quiet 2010.