Bah. Hopefully I can find a fix for this.

I’ve gotten back into Twittering again, if only because I can ‘microblog’ and that’s easier than blogging. Friend me if you like but it’ll probably be song quotes that are stuck in my head or other inane ramblings most of the time. That lead to trigger119 saying I should check out Flock. It integrates with practically every ‘Web 2.0′ service out there, which was nice. I integrate my Facebook into enough programs (Flock, Digsby, etc) that it almost seems as though I should actually do something with Facebook. Almost.

I gave up on Flock today, as it does a lot of cool things to 75% functionality:

• Bookmark to del.icio.us automatically! … but not let you tag them
• See all your friends’ updates in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc! … except it’s slow to update, and Twitter already IMs me with updates
• Post to your blog! … unless it’s WordPress, which magically doesn’t work
• Read blogs! … except its auto-mark-read feature only works some of the time, and they’re sorted newest first (has the ability to do oldest first been added to Google Reader yet?), and I can’t access them from anywhere but my laptop, unlike Bloglines

So it’s a cool idea, but needs work. Also, as far as I can tell I can’t get the Web Developer Toolbar for it either.

It did get me thinking about other services and so forth. Blogging from my browser sounds cool! Maybe I’ll actually do it! So I checked out Scribefire. Didn’t work. Deepest Sender. Didn’t work. Looked at Ecto but I’m too cheap to pay for anything. Eventually I realized it may be my xmlrpc file, as Deepest Sender could connect to my LJ (no, you’re not getting a link) but not danconley.net. So I upgraded WordPress… and found out that I don’t meet the minimum requirements for it after I overwrote my old, but yet actually functional, installation. A quick, but frantic, search later I found the version I had and re-installed. Tried Deepest Sender again and lo and behold, I’m typing in it! Of course if this fails upon posting I’m going to be pissed.

The other thing that came out of the day’s exploits is that tiny showed me Fyreball, which I’m now using.

I’ve gone back to its original style, Beast Blog 1.0; it had been using Beast Blog 2.0 but I didn’t like the auto “Read more” creation. I’m sure that with minimal code changes I could have disabled it, but I had already spent five minutes or so on image hacks and I’m a busy man! Or lazy, I can never be bothered to remember which.

I think the main reason for the lack of content on the blog, with the exception of the aforementioned laziness, is that I was trying to make something that didn’t come naturally. I registered the domain shortly after I was scared into the “Must be professional, must be intelligent, must be marketable!” mindset that so many people have. Maybe it’s because I have a great job, maybe it’s because I’ve mellowed out or maybe it’s because I’ve been influenced by xkcd, but:

Apologies for the slightly compressed text; the original comic doesn’t look like crap.

Of course, having said that, for a while I wasn’t sure what I could talk about. I still maintain a friends-only Livejournal, simply because there are some things I’d like to say that I don’t want everyone to read; they’re mostly things containing the word “fuck,” so you’re not missing much. But recently I’ve gotten into homebrewing my own beer: so recent that I’ve yet to taste any of it apart from hydrometer tests. Still, though, it seems like a rich subjects and so when combined with the various bits of geekery/miscellanea I can come with on my own, it seems like it may actually give me something to talk about.

Here’s hoping, at least.

Heh. That worked well.

The problem has been, of course, that I habitually bite off more than I can chew. Last semester’s “two jobs, three classes and a practicum” debacle was a good example; though I think I got a remarkable amount out of all of it, all things considered. Still, the fact remains that, although I’d like to blog regularly, I don’t necessarily have the time to do it and even if I did I’m not sure what I’d say.

Part of this is that I feel to some extent that I’m not qualified to talk about much. That seems to be changing, though, as I become more comfortable with web programming, databases and other aspects of system librarianship (do you realize that, until 5 minutes ago, this blog was called “Metadan”? As though I know anything about metadata!). It’s interesting to see how different my expectations were coming into library school — that I’d be an archivist specializing in metadata, having written a thesis on it — and what has actually happened; namely, that I’m very proud of my accomplishments but have again embraced my geeky nature over everything else. I hadn’t done much of anything with coding since my ill-fated stint as a computer science major, but I do really enjoy it. I have some projects, mostly hobbies, in the works and hopefully they’ll turn out well.

I was considering tearing this blog down, calling it a failure and moving on. However, I might actually have contributions to make now to the blagosphere, so I think I’ll ride it out. I’ll need to update the theme (probably from Beast-Blog to Beast-Blog 2.0; and Mike, I swear I’ll try not to butcher your graphics this time) and so on, but that will take all of five minutes.

See you in six months, internet.

This weekend I plan to devote some (entirely too much, I expect) time to getting this all settled, after which I can start planning out the rest of the site. I really need to learn php…