What is blogging?

I have to be honest, I tend to try and use my blog (or rather blogs, I have a few that I maintain about as well as this one...) for big thoughtful posts. I tend to write short essays on deep topics, "articles" or reviews and things like that; but that sort of writing takes time, it takes time to think about what to write and how to write it.

A blog, short for web log, is a public form of journalling.... Dear diary, today I ate a sandwich... etc. But I write short updates about my life on Facebook, share geeky things on Google+ and publish pictures through both Facebook and Instagram.

I like having a blog, for those times I do have something to share, but perhaps I'm not making the most of it...

So here's what I'd like to do:
This blog becomes about me, I'll start trying to journal interesting events in my life, projects I'm doing (unless they're software-related in which case the TwinkleBob blog might be the place to do that), books, geeky stuff and perhaps a weekly update of my activity elsewhere across the interweb.

The BackRods blog I would like to become much more a journal of our family and our adventures in autonomous education, as well as the articles on our parenting choices (which is how it is primarily used at the moment). Again a summary of relevant updates from across the rest of the web might be nice.

The Mission Cornwall blog becomes the place to share all of my/our updates on deep faith related matters as well as adventures in serving God in this beautiful part of the country. Not that all faith-related stuff will leave this blog, but if it relates to both of us or specifically to our calling then that'll be the place it'll go.

And of course there'll be geeky/tech related reviews and articles on geek-speak.co.uk...

Let's see how this goes!

Yahoo Pipes

I've recently created myself a new "homepage". A single page combining my presence on the internet into one bitesize chunk. This means that anyone can come and see what I'm up to! This is, of course, a public site, so I don't want to give too much away (or say anything that my employer or future employer may find offensive, disturbing or generally off-putting).

I'm getting my current Facebook profile picture and status using a Facebook "badge", my 4 most recent blog posts using feed2js, my pictures using Yahoo Pipes (and Picasa Web albums) and finally a list of top links again using Yahoo Pipes (and Google Documents).

I can't believe Yahoo Pipes! It's so incredible! For instance, the list of links is actually a spreadsheet on Google Documents with 3 colums (Name, Link and Description). It's then published as a CSV which my Pipe then takes and reencodes as an XML compatible feed. What's even better is that you can then stick that on your page as a "badge" like the two I have on mine. Brilliant!

As an aside, I've also updated my profile on here so that it no longer says that I'm getting married, but that I am...

Update

I've added my visual bookshelf from Facebook to the bottom of this blog, it shows books I own, I'm currently reading and books I'd like to read.

It's a cool little tool!

Two Blogs

You might have noticed that my "About Me" talks a lot about university. That's because I first created an account on Blogger to blog about my third year project (blog at http://aivirtualcharacter.blogspot.com).

I have updated the About Me to reflect a little more about me, but since both blogs share the same information, I still wanted to keep this fairly vague.

Just of those of those reading this over an RSS feed, or on Facebook - just ignore this as you can't see the "About Me" section to which I refer ;)

Anyway, I'm off to walk a labyrinth and then lead a Cell group. Oh, and then I'm going to try and create an emotion engine using Prolog... oh the joys!