Atomic Echo

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.

Outside of those who have seen the preview in Paris I'm not sure who has seen or got their hands on Roland Mouret's venture into menswear under the label "Mr". The Guardian describes it as "The new label to covet" going on to say

"Mouret's new venture, brilliantly named Mr (his initials reversed) will be super luxurious but based around unfussy clothes that are designed to go together. Available from August, our favourite look has the whiff of Don Draper relaxing at the weekend about it - never a bad thing."

Monsieur Mouret is quoted by Fashion United describing it thus:

"I wanted it to be sensual, understated sexiness, almost Kubrick-like but something a woman could look at and immediately see that would be perfect for their husband."

Which is why I feel rather honoured that he gave me an engagement gift of one of his sweaters. Actually, he gave it to my fiancée for me, who has known him for years.

I've yet to wear it out of the house. In fact every time I try it on I'm mildly terrified of snagging it or spilling something on it.

I've never owned such a high-end item of clothing. I only get that nervous about new shoes or bikes usually.

I now understand how women feel when they buy a special dress. It's nerve-wracking.

That aside, it feels ever so nice on. It's merino wool with silk and cashmere, so light that it practically floats.

The knit is amazing, like crocodile skin but in wool. I could stare at it for hours.

And I have no idea what to wear with it to do it justice. You can't really team it with a pair of Old Navy jeans or something from M&S, even if it is from the Autograph range.

The label says it's a Dover Street Market exclusive, so I assume this is a style that will turn up there once the range starts going into stores.

One final quote from Mouret, via the NY Times:

"'I see this as a wardrobe, not a collection,' said Mr. Mouret. 'Men are shy, and they really want to be understood without talking.'"

It's easy to see why the collection is so desirable when it can be described in such beautiful language. And I really love the suit he's wearing in the pic on this article on Vogue.co.uk.

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.

Genuinely I do. For all it's utter absurdity it's brilliant telly. And I'm going to miss the final because I'm at work, according to my diary.

What it lacks in class it makes up for in panache. It's a song and dance show that's actually quite old-fashioned: everyone tries their hardest and then the phone vote throws the rotten fruit.

The X Factor facebook page is quite something to behold as well. It's a very smart piece of work that's clearly been well thought out to hit the mark bang on. Name me another programme that can get several thousand comments and likes in a matter of minutes.

And if you're looking for the amount of news it generates, look no further than the volume of content Holy Moly has got aggregated under it's section of content tagged with the X Factor.

So we came up with our slogan and our company name - read the full explanation - now we've got to decide what to do with it. I'm blaming Eamonn for not admitting to drunkenly encouraging it for our lack of "vision".

I need to find some time to design the site and "brand identity" which is always a time consuming process. I'm using the pixie CMS from toggle which is open source, so it's a bit of a learning curve for me as well.

I think the name is one for a no-nonsense consultancy and creative agency. Now we just need to get some clients.

What can Pancake do for you?