Now that I'm actually working full-time on a web-based product, it seemed a bit of a shame to not use more of the amazing web technology on my blog. In the last three days I've pimped my blog quite a bit.
del.icio.us links
flickr photos
On the right sidebar, I replace my old and unused links list with a list of my del.icio.us bookmarks. This uses their Javascript badge slightly customised with CSS. It took about 5 minutes to set up.
As with my old links blog, this will include stuff that I browse daily but don't really have enough to say about it to write a full post. It also includes stuff that I've tagged as for:someone, which might mean some meaningless description is included that isn't directed at you.
Also on the right, I've added the four most recent photos from my Flickr photostream. This uses the default Flickr badge with some trickier CSS to make it scroll over two lines. It took about 10 minutes to set up, once I found the create badge page. (For some reason, it didn't rate highly in the Google searches, even when restricted to flickr.com.)
My Flickr photos should also be updated much more regularly now. I've upgraded to be a Pro user, which means no limit on uploads or sets, and also bought FlickrExport for iPhoto which makes uploading images from my laptop super-easy.
I've reenabled comments again. This is only possible because of the new moderation process: comments will get emailed to me for approval before being displayed. Writing the approvals code took me about 2 hours, and while I was doing it I accidentally reset all my comment timestamps. Oops, didn't have a recent backup.
Comment moderation is pretty typical on the web these days, so I hope it won't be too much hassle for me or for anyone who wants to comment.
Then there's the four brand new feeds, all running off Feedburner. Feedburner is a great service. Each feed took only about thirty seconds to set up.
The idea of the feeds is to give access to all the new links, photos and comments. Going through Feedburner gives me statistics on how people are using my feeds, which is really interesting.
If you're still using the old feeds, please consider changing to use the Feedburner feeds. I'll be changing the old URLs to redirect to the new ones at some point which may break the feeds in some readers.
I hope you like the new content, and find it interesting. I was certainly amazed how much cool stuff I could build with just a few hours' work.
