Spring cleaning

I finally tidied up my Blogger template. I'm not using Blogger Layouts, which would make it easy to add things and take things away, because I've been around longer than they have. I could switch, but then I would lose all my template tweaks, and there are quite a lot of them - the random top right photo code, the archive posts in latest-first order code, some of the styles in the stylesheet.

But not switching means I have to add widgets manually, which means delving into already fairly messy code with my rusting HTML skills. So nothing changed for a while.

But then I noticed that my Jaiku badge and my last.fm quilt had both stopped working, and I don't like joella to look neglected. So I opened up TextPad and got to work.

1. Links to Atom feed and old blogs are gone: the first is now irrelevant - surely everyone can do feeds these days - and the old stuff, well, I know where it is if I want to read it again, but why would anyone else?
2. Jaiku = out. I had high hopes when Google bought it, and I liked the multiple feed 'activity stream', though it seems to have broken when they closed down for the Google migration, and I can't work out how to start it up again. And generally, I think they might have missed the boat. Though I'm keeping my account, just in case. It has cool.
3. Last.fm album quilt - I didn't fix this but changed instead to a 'recently played' list. I use last.fm all over the place now - with iTunes, on its own and with the awesome Spotify, so it's a better reflection of what I'm actually listening to than it used to be.
4. Twitter = in. I resisted for a long time, but then two things happened: first, I realised that several people who aren't on FB and I want to be in touch with *are* on Twitter, and second, the Facebook Twitter app meant I could update FB status via Twitter. They're a little bit different, I know, but I don't like the tedious RTing of bit.ly links that seems to make up the majority of (*shudder*) Tweets at the moment. It will evolve as a medium, I'm sure though, and I do like the 140 character constraint. Constraints are good for creativity. But yes, anyway, I've been using Twitter for a while, so it made sense to make the link. But if I start doing that blogging about updating Twitter and Twittering about updating my blog thing, someone please shoot me.
5. Tidied up the 'blogs I read' list. There are other blogs I read, but many of them are only updated v sporadically, or I read them for a very specific reason. So these are more like the blogs I would recommend. There aren't very many of them, but lots of my favourite correspondents just won't blog, dammit.

That's about it. And this is one of those posts that is mainly for my own future information. Sorry about that.

joella