Payton Place

Thrashing this site is something I do cyclically. Rather than tweak a little here — tweak a little there, I have?the tendency to store ideas for updates internally and then attempt to implement them all at once to keep my head from exploding! Of course, this leads to creation of entirely too many debugging issues because I’m trying to do too many things at once.

You could almost?term it Binge & Purge?Administration. Hmmm, that concept made more sense in my head than it does?now that its?visible on the page. But this week could certainly be considered one of the purge experiences. Although closer to my original ideas than initially implemented, I still need to tweak some things.

For instance, this week I implemented three new pages:

1. ?A / V (current Audio & Video interests tracking)
2. Micro-Blog (tracking?a new found interested)
3. Webb Alert (a daily technology news feed)

For quite some time I’ve wanted?automated “What I’m Listening to” and “What I’m watching right now” widgets incorporated on the site. Existing widgets are likely to exist but I just haven’t located them. So in the meantime I’ll just stick to two scripts adoped from my Last.fm and YouTube accounts.

The micro-blogging concept is just starting to come into it’s own. It’s a method of posting miniature status updates to a web site directly from your cell phone or web terminal. When using a cell phone you simply send a text message to the phone number of the service. I am using Jaiku at the moment and like the fact it aggregates other web feed information from my blog, my photos, music sites, and just about any service that will generate an RSS feed.

And finally, I added a direct video embedding of Morgan Webb’s Webb Alert, a daily technology blog summary news feed. Actually, I believe the proper description is, “Your Daily Tech Round-Up.” Megan is co-host of X-Play, a computer gaming reviews show on G4TV.

That summarizes the latest thrashings going on at the site . . . let me know if you have recommendations on compact widgets for Wordpress that will perform similar functions, OK?

~SP

This morning I worked on updates to links within our legacy web site, ThePayton.Net, and built hooks into all web log references of that site so they point here to the new Blog. A few of my previous postings to that web log are ported to this new site but many still require going through an import process.

Import isn’t really the best word to use . . . and that’s primarily because something with the WordPress import functions aren’t working as anticipated. It’s odd. I jump through all the hoops and the process indicates “Import Complete!” But the legacy posts appear no where within the web space. This may be the result of how the older blog was published in the first place.

The original blog originated from my Blogger.Com account. Because I own several web spaces I opted to publish the Blogger Blog (say that quickly ten times without error) to ThePayton.Net instead of as a subsite of Blogger.Com. At the time I felt this option was the more personal approach which granted me greater flexibility in the future. Now I know such an approach was flawed. Best laid plans . . . C’est la Vie! And all those other great clich?s.

The end result of these oddities is a forced manual posting of all previous articles. [sigh] In fact, all the topics you see within this Blog so far were created manually. Well, manually in the sense that I had multiple editor windows open simultaneously and used copy/paste functions to suck out the old text and blow it into a new location.

Eventually all these outstanding tasks will be completed. Or perhaps by then I’ll have new direction or ideas about how to better leverage the future, leaving old posts in the past . . . where they belong. Here’s to the Future!

~SP

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• Works with all major blog software
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• Trackback, Technorati and Del.icio.us support

I think I’ll test drive it for a while because it looks like just the ticket for my Wordplace Blog creation needs. Click the link above to get started on your own test drive today!