Octopodial Chrome

Ryan Tomayko has used Tufte’s ideas to remove administrative debris and remodel his blog and articles. Some excellent ideas about how best to present information—I really should look into implementing them for Octopodial Chrome.

Redstate has a great list of overused blogging clichés. I’ll do my best to avoid them in the future.

Those of you who are observant may notice that this site now resides at octopodial-chrome.com. The old hostname latakia.dyndns.org should continue to work for the foreseeable future (i.e. for at least another year or so), but it automatically redirects to the new hostname. I’ve also replaced my old boring front page with this blog.

Why yes, I do rock—thanks for noticing!

My frequent readers (do I actually have any frequent readers?) may have noticed that this blog has been especially quiet of late, even more strikingly so when one considers that the month just past was my most prolific to date. Well, ever since January I have been busy at work—they’re actually getting their money’s worth out of me! And thus rather than spend my time browsing the web and blogging about neat stuff, I find that my time is spent working rather hard.

But now it’s the weekend, I’ve no films from Netflix, and I’ve time to catch up. So buckle your seatbelts, folks—we’re in for quite a ride!

As many of you might now, it’s considered good practise to link to one’s friends and acquaintances throughout the blogosphere, as it helps their blogs get discovered. OTOH, linking gives a certain amount of validation to their views. Different folks have different answers to this quandary: some of my acquaintances have linked to me despite heavily disagreeing with me about just about everything; others don’t link at all. Until recently, I had linked only to my family and my best friend, but that’s no longer the case. I think that I’ll start linking to folks and let my readers judge for themselves—my opinions are not exactly hidden, so it should be pretty easy to figure out if I advocate the view espoused in other blogs.

Another tool for bloggers is BlogStreet; I’ve just submitted myself there.

I’ve added Octopodial Chrome to syndic8, which means that it has its own page where it can be managed by you, the reader.

Yes, that’s right—I’ve been added to the list of recently changed pages at Weblogs.Com. I’ve also written a small script to monitor when the a new item is added, and then notify that site of the fact. In this way various blog monitors will be able to tell that my site is active—and hopefully folks will be drawn to my site. Ain’t I cool?

Well, I finally managed to get blosxom installed and configured. Had more than a slight bit of trouble getting TrackBack links working—they don't make it easy—but they do now, and that's what counts. Tomorrow I hope to find time to document the procedure I followed.

Hopefully I'll be able to use this blog as a good stepping-off point for all sorts of digressions about philosophy, beer, work, computers and beer.