The 2009 site revision

Aug 4, 2009 Alun Digital Academia, Life 5 Comments Blogging, Social networking, web 2.0

I’ve star­ted to con­sol­id­ate vari­ous web pres­ences into one Me Portal as Kim­berly Alder­man called it. It means mov­ing from WordPress.com because in the end a hos­ted solu­tion isn’t flex­ible enough. I’d still highly recom­mend WordPress.com, espe­cially as a site for new blog­gers. Still the little things, like spend­ing an after­noon writ­ing a script to import links, start to annoy. Now Posta­li­cious will read what I’ve marked with a ‘share’ on Google Reader and you can read the latest shares on the home page.

Changes and Upgrades

The entries now fall into six cat­egor­ies: The Past, Sci­ence, Polit­ics, Digital Aca­demia and Life. The sixth cat­egory, for those who can count, is Fea­tured. That’s the easy way of stick­ing stor­ies into rota­tion on the front page.

The reason for doing that is that it should work bet­ter for vari­ous aggreg­at­ors. Maia Atlan­tides doesn’t need to know about a photo of a cute kit­ten that I’ve seen, so I can provide a Past feed which only sends the rel­ev­ant stuff. Like­wise I’ve been think­ing for a which of adding this site to an Athe­ism aggreg­ator, but a lot of what I write wouldn’t really be rel­ev­ant for that either. Now I have a Polit­ics feed. I could have called it Philo­sophy, but I’m wary of people in the human­it­ies who call them­selves philo­soph­ers without any basic ground­ing in the sub­ject. Even if it is philo­sophy, they also tend to be posts about the art of liv­ing with people so it’s also polit­ics with a small p. I’ll prob­ably change the Digital Aca­demia name when I can work out what a com­bin­a­tion of Life­hack­ing / Edu­ca­tion / Gen­eral inter­net­ness should be called.

It’s still pos­sible to track Ancient His­tory, Archae­ology and Archae­oastro­nomy entries via the tag pages, and now the site is off WordPress.com the tag pages are a lot more usable,

Lots of image and video links are broken. I’ll try and fix them as and when I can. On the plus side I’m hop­ing that adding video and audio will have become a lot easier.

I’m using Posta­li­cious to handle blog posts based on what I’ve been read­ing. Soci­able for book­mark­lets at the bot­tom of posts. WP-Touch makes the site a lot more mobile friendly.

Com­ment­ing

I’ve changed the com­ment sys­tem to be oper­ated by Dis­qus. It should oper­ate more or less as it did before. You can leave a com­ment by leav­ing a name and an email address. The email address won’t be made pub­lic. How­ever, there’s cer­tain extra things you can do, You can sign in with your Twit­ter account, your Face­book account or Open ID if you prefer. You can also sign up with a Dis­qus account and aggreg­ate all your com­ments. If Dis­qus and Intense Debate could talk to each other and agree a com­mon stand­ard then you’d be able to effect­ively blog like Statler or Wal­dorf, gath­er­ing together all your com­ments on other posts. If it takes off then adding a sys­tem like this could add more value for the com­ment­at­ors on the blog. I say if as it hasn’t yet. I’d expec­ted Auto­mat­tic to make more of their acquis­i­tion of Intense Debate by rolling it out on WordPress.com.

Expan­sion

I can now expand the site in some dir­ec­tions. I’m hold­ing off adding a forum for now. I’m not sure there’d be a lot of point, though I’m sure it would add a lot of hassle mod­er­at­ing it. I used to play with Pligg, but I don’t think another Past-themed ver­sion of that is neces­sary. Maia Atlan­tides does a good enough job aggreg­at­ing posts. On the other hand there’s plenty I can add.

There’ll be a pho­tob­log sooner or later. Prob­ably show­ing 700px or 800px wide images on a black back­ground. Text looks bet­ter on white, but pho­tos tend to work bet­ter with a darker back­ground. Word­Press simply isn’t a suit­able engine for ser­i­ous pho­tob­log­ging at the moment.

I also want to get to grips with Wikindx. For me it’s a word pro­cessor with built in bib­li­o­graphic tools. For every­one else it’ll be a way of fol­low­ing my bib­li­o­graphy. I’d like to work out what to do with CiteU­Like as well, but at the moment it simply doesn’t it in with how I work. I sus­pect if more people I knew were using CiteU­Like it would get more useful.

I’ll also be able to set up short urls for sup­port for con­fer­ence talks. For instance I could set up a site ca2010.alunsalt.com to sup­port a talk given at the Clas­sical Asso­ci­ation con­fer­ence next year. I’m not plan­ning to go there, so it’s a bit of a waste for now, but the prin­ciple is sound. To an extent this is a bit of pol­ish for my online pres­ence before the next round of job hunt­ing, but it’s more about mak­ing my life easier by gath­er­ing together vari­ous webby things into one toolbox.

Oh and the ‘fol­low me’ tag at the right of the page? Stolen from Civil War Memory. Basic­ally if it’s not nailed down and I like it, I’ll take it. And I’m still on hiatus as far as I’m con­cerned.