Results tagged “blogging” from Atomic Echo

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.

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?

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?

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...

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

I'm suffering the dreaded "001 java.net. ConnectException: " problem. I'm checking with my ISP as to whether it's them or blogger. Which means a hiatus in my publishing which has been getting going again with the Etape blog.