Recently in Karlo.Org Category

I've finally gotten around to the long-overdue task of properly linking to the sprawling reaches of my little Web 2.0 empire from the main page on Karlo.Org. From now on, if you're looking for my Flickr page, or my Facebook profile, or whatever, you can find it in the link of lists on the Karlo.Org home page. If you run into any problem using the new links, let me know -- they seem to work for me, but some services can be a little funny about profile links (I'm looking at you, Facebook.)

One of the big issues for blogs these days is that most authors also generate a lot of online activity away from their weblog (this wasn't true in the pre-Facebook/Flickr/YouTube days). A great option I've found for Moveable Type users is Action Streams, which I'm using to power the "Elsewhere" section at the right side of my home page. The items aren't posted into the weblog, however, as per my old "link for date" posts from de.licio.us. At first I considered that a shortcoming (I wouldn't mind Twitter comments showing up in my blog) but for the moment I'm in favor of it, as I've realized that the combined activity on other sites would overwhelm the edited content in the weblog.

One problem I'm starting to encounter is that when you use meta-social sites like FriendFeed, which aggregate activity from the social sites, you can start seeing some circularities in your feeds... my FriendFeed feed follows my twitter and Facebook profiiles, but it's also able to post events into my Facebook profile via a plugin, and... uh... problems start to arise.

As you can probably tell if you've visited this page any time in the past few years, there's some major changes going on right now. After much frustration around my old host (including today being unable to download a copy of my files there due to the server being so slow), I've surrendered to the inevitable and moved to a new company, LivingDot.

The move has a number of downsides (at the moment, any links to within the old site are broken and I haven't decided if I'm going to change the link format to address that.) But in general, the move is a huge improvement and should result a lot of good things happening here.

In terms of the photoblog that used to front Karlo.Org, I'll be getting that content over on this site at some point soon. Going forward, the site will likely mix written and photographic content -- I originally switched to the photos-only format because work limited my ability to write online, but that restriction is now lifted so I'm moving back to a more varied format.

I've finally brought things into the modern age with an upgrade to Moveable Type 4.1 for the server. It may take a bit work out the bugs.

Due to what I can (at best) describe as a total debacle at my current hosting company, I've had to restore the site from a backup done at the beginning of 2006. Unfortunately that means a good number of lost posts here on the weblog, which I'll try to pull out of archive.org or something later this week as possible, plus the loss of the photo posts put up since the beginning of the year.

The first step was to get the site back up; that took four days of back and forth with my hosting service. Now that it's taken care of I'll be able to both post some new photos that are in the hopper and also work to restore lost content.

Just a few minor notes on recent changes around here -- I've turned off comments for all but the most recent posts on this log. Having open comments on older entries was just leaving the door open to a constant barrage of comment spam. Comments and trackbacks are on for recent photos in the main page, and will be turned on for posts in here when relevant.

Well, I know it's been quiet for a long time -- unfortunately there was a whole sequence of issues that kept me from updating, including a crashed hard drive on my desktop computer as well as problems resulting from not having updated MoveableType to the latest version. All of that's resolved now, so there should be more updates both here and on the photolog. Thanks for visiting.

(You'll also notice some changes around the comment system. MT 3.2 is an improvement, generally, on the old comment filtering, so I'm allowing comments somewhat more frequently.)

Yes, I've gone back to a default style for the moment. I didn't like the old style, and I didn't feel like modifying it. So I've taken the opportunity to move to the most up-to-date default MT templates and a basic style before revising it to my taste.

Sorry if you had a link in the right edge and it's disappeared. I'll be adding those back shortly, don't worry. Email me if you were there and I don't put you back in relatively soon.

After a long period of being hidden behind some password protection, I've decided to put this weblog back online. It's better to at least have control over the content associated with you online.

Plus, I still periodically discover things that I want to recommend to whoever will listen. This week, two things:

• Google Desktop -- it's been getting some good press, but the bottom line here is, install it and try it out. It's how Windows' search function should REALLY work.
• BaseCamp From 37signals, BaseCamp is the kind of simplified online project management tool more people need to use.

Well, an effort to add a tiny mini-site onto my main weblog has (as usual) snowballed into a flurry of alterations after several months of relative quiet.

Sadly, I've dropped TypePad as my hosting provider. I think they're great as a straight weblog host, but it's very difficult to serve pages other than a weblog from them. So I've moved to this new provider, AffordableHost.

As you obviously figured out in order to read this, the text weblog, with its 400+ entries, has been relegated to a subdir while a photolog that features just one image at a time is now at the primary Karlo.Org address. We'll still have the occasional update here but I'm not going to make any attempt at maintaining a regular posting schedule here (not that I did in the past, either.)