Two Slashes

I’ve spent the better part of the past two months debating whether I’d be up for a mass purge of everything I have posted on this site to date. Perhaps a fresh start would be motivation enough to actually click “Publish” on something rather than file it away in my cache of drafts that probably will never see the light of day. (I’ve also considered getting out the stepladder and coating everything in a shiny new layer of paint, wondering if a change of scenery would be any help.)

An announcement by Facebook last week changed my mind about the mass purge, though. More specifically, the announcement about all of the new features for their built-in chat, now with 25% more useless fluff. I’ve always been annoyed by in-site chat clients, but Facebook’s in particular actually drove me to post these instructions to hide the bloody thing from the site. (I should probably update them with instructions for Chrome, though.) Anyway, the recent rush in traffic thanks to those instructions reminded me that everything here is worth preserving because someone might find it useful somewhere down the line.

Another point to bring up is that most of my short biography “blurbs” claim that I’m a “professional ranter.” It’s hard to keep up that title without actually ranting about anything, so it’s high time I got back to work.

It’s not going to be easy, though, especially if I convince myself to add to my huge pile of “to-do” items and spend some of my spare time at work drawing up a new WordPress template. Over the course of just the past few months:

• I’ve been working on a custom URL shortener platform for flng.us that I think should do rather nicely, but it’s missing a few things before I can start using it on a daily basis. (Importing the shortened links from my current shortener is probably an important thing to take care of, don’t you think? )
• The image host I used for most of my visual content on earlier posts decided to close up shop, so I need to figure out what images are working and either replace or remove references to them and archive/transfer those that are still available over to a new host. (I’m thinking Imgur or to take advantage of all of my paid storage space on Picasa, but we’ll see.)
• Google selected me as a tester for a few products, including the Cr-48 (not kidding) and Cloud Connect projects; in both cases, my applications to the tests included mentions to this blog, and it would be a shame to have taken part (or allow myself to be considered for future products) without actually having an updated site.
• I’ve started migrating my (probably useless) public projects to a place more suitable for developer consumption, namely BitBucket. Everything I’m working on that I’ve enabled for public viewing (admittedly, not a lot), can be found in my repository here.

Of course, all of this is failing to even take into account my utter lack of consideration for my Tumblr, which is similarly collecting dust. Let’s just sum it up this way and be done with it: I’m doing a much better job of being a content consumer than a content creator.

* This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled blog posts.