it's all connected … somehow

Happy Patriot’s Day! It’s a holiday for me, so I’ve taken my bonus holiday to sleep in, eat a fresh peach-blueberry-almond muffin I baked last night, and watch some morning baseball (the traditional start time for the Red Sox is 11am).

I’ve also spent the day working on my blog renovations. There are so many plugins and options. Apparently all the sites I use (at least the non-porn ones) and all the content I maintain can know what each other is doing. Theoretically (now or at some point in the near future), all this stuff should be happening:

• my recent tweets should appear on the blog (check)
• my recent tweets should post on Facebook (check)
• new blog posts are announced on Facebook (check)
• new blog posts are announced on Twitter (check)
• Flickr photos show up on the blog (check)
• Flickr photos show up on Facebook (investigating this)
• post mobile photos to Flickr (check)
• post mobile photos to the blog via Flickr (check)
• posting to Flickr will alert Twitter via Twitterfeed (check)

I don’t know about you, but I almost need a diagram to figure out what the heck is going on. Am I unleashing a continuous loop where my updates are just updating about the fact that something has been updated? On the other hand, I’m a completist and I have the nagging feeling I’m missing something — that crucial missing link that I just know I’ll need someday when I want to twitter about a flickr post that I tried to blog when I was stuck on the subway with someone I met on Facebook.

UPDATE: I just discovered (and installed) a plugin for Aperture, Apple’s photo management studio that I use, that allows me to export directly from Aperture to Flickr. Total geekfest getting all this stuff working!

baking bread and other creative outlets

Sometimes, when the creative horse runs into your corral, you’ve just got to strap on the saddle and kick the spurs. In the past 24+ hours, I redesigned the blog. Simplified it quite a bit too. I like it much better.

Another creative outlet in recent weeks has been learning how to bake bread. From scratch. I’ve made plain old white bread (I made a very tasty loaf with fresh thyme) and wheat bread (I made a honey wheat, but it turned out a bit dense so I need to work that recipe a bit more). Last weekend, I began a sourdough starter from King Arthur Flour and today, with lots of ripe starter, I baked my first two loaves of sourdough (in this case, a very sesame-heavy sourdough).

I’m very happy with the results. Photo below. Another part of the blog redesign/upgrade is moving all my photos. I’ve broken my Gallery application beyond repair, so hello Flickr. My first upload was sourdough loaves, and the remainder of my 818 photos will be moved soon.

And yes, I’ve been away from the blog too long. I feel that’s about to change.

thanks, askimet

I just caught an alert on my dashboard in leatheregg.com’s WordPress dashboard — nearly 50,000 spam comments caught by Askimet. Considering there are days when I still get 4 or 5 comments going into moderation that Askimet doesn’t catch, I’m pretty happy that Askimet exists. That’s a lot of potential spam to manually trash.

a trimester

Wow … over 3 months since I’ve posted here. I’m not sure I’ve gone that long without a post over the past 10+ years. I’ve been focusing mostly on a huge work project which launched on Labor Day, so I think the 50-60+ hour weeks are behind me, at least for the foreseeable future. But the project also involved extensive work in the most recent version of WordPress, so now when I come back to the blog and see this old version of WordPress, I want to upgrade. But will it fuck up my template? Throwing caution to winds of tropical storm Hanna (which has been dumping heavy rain here the past 8 hours), I think I’ll just upgrade and if it warps the template, I’ll deal with it when I get around to it. Hopefully it won’t muck the site up too much, because I’ve got some catching up to do and a lot to say.