Angry Robot

Site Changes

Man, there have been things I’ve wanted to do on this site for quite some time. Ever since turning it back into a personal blog, I’ve wanted to blend photos and links into the main content area like I used to do with d.sankey.ca. Philosophically, I never saw the links I post here as any less important than the articles I write, so it bothered me to have them shunted away to the side – and the same goes for the photos.

Thing is, I didn’t know how to do it in the manner I wanted to, which was to use delicious (actually, soon pinboard) for links and flickr for photos, yet have them show up on this site. I tried out Tumblr and was sorely tempted as it can do what I want, but I was unable to pull the trigger, perhaps because I love textpattern so much, perhaps out of laziness.

In steps this TXP plugin asv_tumblelog. Or rather, I stumble into it – it’s been around for ages, I just never noticed it. It can basically replicate a tumblr-like tumblelog within textpattern. It takes a lot of setting up and troubleshooting, but it can indeed work, as you can see if you’re reading this from the site proper. There’s an aspect of risk here, since it doesn’t seem to be actively developed right now, but I’m so happy with what it does that I’m willing to go along with that.

I’m still not sure about other categories of content. Quotes I don’t think I’d use much, or just post them as links. I can see grabbing my YouTube favourites feed would be pretty cool, and probably my uploads from youtube and vimeo. On flickr, I’m only pulling photos that I specifically tag for posting here, as I don’t want to drown the other content. And while I think I sometimes post interesting stuff to twitter, I haven’t yet figured out a way to only import select tweets, and ignore all the @replies that probably won’t mean anything to anyone. So, they stay shunted off into the side column still.

If you don’t like the new changes, there are options. Going to the article page will give you a list of only blog posts. The feeds (blog posts only, posts and links) will stay the same for now, but I will eventually change the latter to include photos. I may make the everything feed the default feed for the page.

While I’m on the site news tip, there’s still a long-overdue redesign coming. Probably nothing structural, but a new logo / colour scheme.