Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Blog Changes

One of the things I love about the internet is the portability factor. When I was going through university, I became keenly aware of the benefits of having your resources available wherever you had an internet connection. I would often use my email to send myself essays, book titles to check out of the library, notes, etc. This need for portability only increased after I started seeing my husband and spending a lot of time at his place instead of at home. I also had a few incidences with floppy disks that made me yearn for redundancy (did you know that cell phones can wipe data off disks? It happened to me twice with my old phone!)

If you've been paying any attention to the new websites being developed and the powerful tools coming along (Web 2.0, ajax, ruby on rails, etc.) you'll realize that data portability is more powerful than ever. In fact, you don't even really have to know a lot about the details of the stuff, you just need to recognize the user-friendly and sleek designs of some of the new sites to realize that the internet is in a process of evolution.

So, what does all this rambling have to do with my blog? Be patient, I'm getting there.

Today, I was posting a link I found to del.icio.us when I thought it would be cool if I could find a way to put some of my recent del.icio.us links onto my blog. (Delicious is a social bookmarking site. Your bookmarks are all saved online and can be shared or kept private at your discretion. Things are tagged according to topics, so it's a great way to quickly find new links in areas that are relevant or of intererst to you.) It only took a few moments to find a variety of ways to do so. I was going about getting the code for the nifty list of del.icio.us links you will now see in my sidebar (just below the links to other blogs and above my list of webcomics) and loggin into my blogger account when I came to a screen announcing that blogger now had a beta! I have been all over beta programs so far and I love them! True, you need to put up with glitches and server crashes. And, if you are saving data on there and not backing it up, don't get upset if everything gets lost. But so far, I have been supremely pleased with my other beta services.

Anyway, I tried to be a guinea pig and sign up with the beta, but it wouldn't let me. It seems as though the almighty google brand reared it's head and the beta was full on the first day of release (yesterday - *sigh*). However, I am hopeful that more spots will become open, or that someone will find a hack for it in a similar fashion to how I got on with the Yahoo! beta.

One of the features mentioned is one of the ones I was looking to add to my own blog - categories! One of the other features is going to be a selective readership feature, meaning you will designate who can have access to your blog. I'm hoping they also include some of the other neat things like Trackbacks, technorati tags, and daily link posting from del.icio.us.

P.S. Can you tell I'm also trying to include more links in my posts?

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