I've been tinkering away for a while now with a Tumblr account. You can view the results at Leguape's tumblr of fun.

It's an aggregation of pretty much all my social media activity outside of Facebook and Friendfeed (which I barely use now other than passively).

What does it use?

For content I read and want to make a note of online, it takes in my reddit and delicious bookmarks, as well as my google reader shared items.

I then mash these three together through a simple Yahoo! Pipes Feed to reduce the number of individual feeds I have to try and pull in.

Tumblr limits you to five feeds by default, so it seemed like a waste to pull these three in as separate items. The presentation of the feed output could do with some refining, but it does the job of making the all-important data available.

Then I also pull in my Twitter and Flickr feeds individually as the two most likely places for activity.

I also pull in the Chasing Wheels blog Feedburner feed separately as that's another major source of activity. I'm now trialling pulling in a Yahoo! Pipe feed that aggregates all my blogs together to simplify things. I'll be interested to see how this post appears via that feed.

Weirdly I don't seem to be pulling in any video. In fact I don't seem to shoot much video.

What purpose does it serve?

A while back I tried the Action Streams plugin for Movable Type but never managed to make it work. I can't remember the exact reason but I think it was as simple as I couldn't just plug and play.

Tumblr allows me to quickly plug in a bunch of things and get going straight off, right down to setting it up to point to a custom domain. I like that.

Also the interface offers me a whole bunch of options easily. I think it might even pass the "Mum test of usability".

I like how easy it is and how low they've set the bar to entry.

I've even started on a second tumblr experiment, a photojournal called ToyCam Mono with a very simple premise.

I guess is part of the appeal of tumblr as a platform: its lower threshold to getting started and continuing. No fiddling with templates and code, just straight in.

Posted by Alex at 11:48 PM

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Site's been down for most of the last day due to host deciding to suspend my account due to a spambot going after a tag cloud and causing the movable type search .cgi script to overload a bit. Apparently this was causing a heavy load on their server.

So after a day of trying to get a response from the service desk the account got reinstated and I'm now going to back up everything and look at my hosting options. Any recommendations welcome. I just want a nice simple hosting deal which allows me to get on with things and not worry about outages and suspended accounts when my site gets spammed.

Posted by Alex at 11:14 PM

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So there was a fanfare and loads of excitement promised, and what am I left with? Well the layout has changed without me doing anything, as you can see. It was thin-wide-thin, now it's gone wide-thin-thin without my permission. FFS, If I wanted this much hassle with my non-office setup I would have bought a Windows Vista machine.

Looks like it's a case if it gets fixed when I can be arsed.

Posted by Alex at 9:41 PM

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Everyone seems to want your identity these days, from crooks to corporates. I'm playing around with Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect at the moment to see which one offers me most as someone running a piffling little website.

First up, a completely different topic: I have a problem with Facebook only allowing me to import the one blog. Is it too much to ask to be able to pull in two feeds, this one and my cycling blog?

Back to the subject, there's a really helpful analysis of the Facebook Connect vs Google Friend Connect on Mashable which is where I started this morning with it. At the moment it seems to boil down to ease of implementation vs where the social audience is.

As a mediocre developer who gets a mild fear when I hear people talking code, google won the first round on grounds of fire-and-forget implementation. Let's face it, if you are a hobbyist web site owner, do you want to sit through an 8-minute video on how to do a basic Facebook Connect login and then have to do the coding yourself; or just go click-click-bang to implement google friend connect?

That's why there's a small Wall widget on each page of the site from Google and not a Facebook one as yet. OK I've got the side issue that I've only recently started using Disqus for comments and I don't see how either of them plugs in to that but Google won because I could do it and do it quickly.

Posted by Alex at 1:14 PM

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I was trying to find out more about a company today and in doing so clicked on a link taking me to their website. Which was as useful as a wet fart.

They are the UK contact for a flashy brand of bicycle component. I know this because the component manufacturer's website tells me that. In fact I know more about them from that site than their own. The only thing I found out from their site is that if I hit the "contact us" link then I'll send an email to someone with the same name as one of the big bike brands.

It's this sort of thing that really infuriates me. Do businesses really care or value the internet so little that it's too much trouble to even put up a basic, functional site?

Of course tomorrow I'll find that this was a "holding page" while they were getting their site redone. It still doesn't excuse it in my book. Out-of-date content is bad, but no content is worse.

How much trouble is it to put up a single page giving your email contact plus postal and phone details alongside a brief summary of what your business does? After all, most of the ones I've ever encountered seem to have been able to afford a logo and a hosting deal.

It really defies belief that any business thinks it can afford not to have a decent online proposition when so many first contacts are likely to come through that route. Are these businesses really unaware of this?

There are so many tools out there that allow you to build a basic site without resorting the the sort of comic sans hell that blighted the first generation of self-build that I can't see why anyone wouldn't want to spend a day or two getting to grips with them.

Please tell me I'm not alone in feeling like this every time I find myself clicking into a link that is, to all intents, dead. I'm going to stop now before I even start to think about the full horror of flash holding pages and ridiculous De Mille-style epic flash intro movies.

Posted by Alex at 6:49 PM

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I use three social bookmarking sites at the moment - Delicious, Digg and Reddit - all in slightly different ways. Of the three, Digg is the one that I seems to find the most awkward to post into.

I thought it might be because, primarily, I use Safari to browse on my mac at home and Google's Chrome in the office for social stuff. This means I don't really take advantage of the nice Firefox toolbar or other browser integration.

Then I thought again and actually what stops me using it as often as the others is the submission process. With Delicious and Reddit the process feels very much "click,click, click, done"; whereas with Digg it feels far more hit and hope that the title and description will appear and that I won't lose patience before I get to the final step.

So the answer to that rhetorical question is "sometimes not". Or to be more specific, sometimes I just can be bothered.

Posted by Alex at 5:07 PM

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We all know how we can end up being a very different person online to in real life (IRL) but we've grown to accept that as part of the fun really. Hands up who doesn't enjoy the occasional foray into being a keyboard hero?

[sidetracked] How come only one gets an acronym? Or is it OK to use OL for online[/sidetracked]

What is frustrating is the multiplicity of logins and usenames you end up with. I've almost scaled back mine to perhaps just two main ones with a couple more for emergencies or particular versions of myself. I do try to hold on to versions of the_rebel_mp that I've got purely for my own amusement.

But I know at some point I'm going end up trying to log in to some new service and find that someone has already acquired one of my two desired logins. And that really bugs me and why I'm not entirely onboard with OpenID

It's been ten or so years since I got into this internet lark and since then all my identities have been forced to change with the exception of one. Given the choice, would have have kept them? Quite possibly, but I would have liked the option to change and homogenise them under a new preferred ID.

The problem with OpenId as I see it is that I can have one ID but there's no guarantee I'm going to be able to use it to bring together my presence on a whole bunch of sites. So I've got one through Typepad for this blog, but that's not tied in with my one for yahoo services such as Flickr, or my twitter identity, or reddit, or my facebook, or my myspace.

OK, not all those use or support openID but I hope you get my point. Essentially it's the question of what happens when I see a new service that I want to use and manage with my atomicecho identity and discover that someone else has got there first.

Have I misunderstood OpenID, or is this one of those flaws that someone will eventually iron out?

Posted by Alex at 9:42 PM

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Finally managed to install it as my first line of defence against the never-ending onslaught of spam. It's done the job very well indeed - no spam as far as I can see since it was deployed.

Why did it take me so long? Well, I've got a tendency just to tinker along with fixing and trying things on the site. Movable Type seems to be one long process of tinkering as I add widgets and so on. If I could get the Action Streams plugin to work properly it would solve that to some extent.

The other dilemma I'm facing is whether to change the layout of the site to three column to accomodate a wider site and more content blocks. It's a time-consuming piece of work to attempt for a site which gets relatively little traffic and which I've still yet to figure out what purpose it serves. Any easy way to do it?

Posted by Alex at 11:21 AM

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Have got these two working almost as I would like, along with Twitter. Now just got to get Last.fm to do what I want and I'll have most of the Web 2.0 tools that I commonly use on this page. Then there's they rest of the site to overhaul from being static pages to something slightly more dynamic. In theory it can all be done through Movable Type but we shall see...

Posted by Alex at 6:37 PM

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I've now added twitter updates and de.licio.us links. Twitter seems to be appearing nicely and was no problem. Getting the other one to line up is proving one of those finickety nightmares of tweekery. I have stopped trying after two days. Any ideas?

Going to add the Flickr badge as well when I get a moment - I know how to do that, it's relatively straightforward.

Posted by Alex at 11:03 AM

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It's a totally new interface so bear with me if things start getting rather broken while I'm tinkering under the hood.

Posted by Alex at 10:24 PM

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I've just swapped a couple of things around. Why on earth I need a "News" page when it's so infrequent is a question I have now answered by getting rid of it and stick my Movable Type content in the main slot.

I might need to do a bit more work on this idea to make the site a bit more consistent. It should also give me a chance to drop in more elements that I'm experimenting with/using, such as twitter, facebook and flickr.

I know that a few of my sites have become a bit stuck in the past. I'd forgottten just how much time it takes to do all those things when you've got a full time bunch of other paying stuff to deal with.

Posted by Alex at 8:12 AM

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I've moved my hosting service from freezone to servage.net who so far have been excellent in the package the offer and in their support service.

On the list of things to do are:

- An update on various bits of code and parts of the site
- Sort out EchoSound Location's myspace materials
- Start on getting sponsorship for the Etape site and for my ride
- Get a few paying clients or a new job

Posted by Alex at 2:56 PM

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Posted by Alex at 4:02 PM

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