dot dot romkey

Right now I have links to a few social sites that I use on the sidebar. These sites include Twitter, delicious.com, Google Reader (selected articles that I thought were interesting enough to share), and last.fm (music I’ve been listening to recently). At some point I’ll get UVFood and Flickr in there, too.

I like the idea of presenting my activity on these sites in the sidebar. It gives you an idea of what I’m up to, and helps make this blog a hub for my activity. At first I used various Wordpress plugins that were tailored to the particular sites. There were two problems with doing that. First, their formatting was all over the place. They used different heading tags, made assumptions about formatting, embedded their own formatting. They looked like a mess when taken together. The second problem was that they all loaded their info in real time, which meant it could take minutes to load a dot-dot-romkey page. No good at all.

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At times I lament the fact that I don’t write quick hacks the way I did years ago. Of course, my brain and mind aren’t the same as they were twenty (or more) years ago, and that contributes to the problem. And the environment that I work in has changed and become much more complex… where two decades ago a piece of software most likely ran from the command-line, now it may need to live in a networked environment and work with a web server and talk to other pieces of software in order to do anything remotely interesting. Which is fascinating but means that software is a lot more complicated than it used to be.

But the biggest problem for me has clearly been that there’s just too much going on – too many things pulling on my attention. I have too many other concerns. That’s natural as you age from twenty to forty, I think. Your perspectives widen, your involvement in the world (hopefully) deepens. You develop deeper relationships, possibly you gain family.

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