Tiny activity
I recently did a little rewiring of the technologies behind the on-line representation of me. Almost certainly unwarranted given how little watched and how inactive I am, but it means this post gets an apt title, and the approaches were interesting for their own sake.
Firstly, a little vanity. I’m pretty happy using anthonybailey.net as my home on the Net, but it can be incoveniently long sometimes. So I registered antb.me/ as a tiny URL vanity domain, and wired up my blog framing machinery so that I can shorten e.g. http://anthonybailey.net/tumblelog/2009/03/30/a-happy-accident-memetics-and-pairing to antb.me/t214 if I want to.
Secondly, some aggregation. I display a headlines summary as part of my homepage. This used to be generated from a special-purpose merge of my blog and tumblelog feeds, but I am a little active on sites that I don’t own as well, and activity streams are all the rage. So, now it’s powered by a FriendFeed blend of these blogs together with comments tracked by the excellent Disqus and BackType services. (This is still imperfect. Ideally, FriendFeed wouldn’t abbreviate my blog content and then the feed itself would be a more useful read. Actually, ideally trackback would have caught on enough that I could comment on other blogs by posting on my own, but that wishful distributive thinking just hasn’t worked out.)
