Call Me Al

I started blogging July 10, 2001. A friend of mine pointed me to her online journal at opendiary.com. I disliked the banner and pop-up ads, but it was free and I started recording my thoughts and feelings about life. At some point OpenDiaryPlus evolved. The only advantage was that it was ad-free. This was before I started using Mozilla, so I didn't have the built in ability to remove them. The servers were more stable, too.

I liked the idea of having one entry per page, along with all of its comments. But OD had some big issues that I wasn't happy with. The first was the lack of effort by the owners to make the site Mozilla-friendly. Several features were either hidden or awkward to get to because the dhtml menus only worked in IE. Most of the important ones were replaced with plain links, but it really began to feel like they didn't care. The lack of ability to really customize the look was a minor quibble. A definite feature was the page that listed when my other OD friends had last-updated.

Although I tried LiveJournal once, I didn't really like having all my entries on a single page. One problem was that if you wanted to read in chronological order, it led to a lot of scrolling up and down. I don't know why I hadn't noticed the daily view. As I got more and more involved in the Mozilla community, I decided to create a seperate blog from my personal one. A few other mozblogs used Blogger.com, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

Even better, with Blogger I could put my web-design skills to use. I was able to make my mozblog blend in with my regular website. And although I was able to eliminate the banner ad with some CSS, I decided to go ahead and pay for an upgrade. And removing the banner ad got my blog to validate.

Unfortunately, there were still some things missing. I no longer had a list of when the other blogs updated. No one could leave me comments, either. Using eNetation, I was able to add comments, but not pingbacks or trackbacks, so there was no real interlocking between blogs. eNetation links didn't always show up, either. I did find out how to make my own RSS feed, though. Of course I'm unable to get tracking statistics for that, so I have no idea who reads me.

Ideally I could get web hosting and get everything all set up. I'm very impressed with the blogs that run MoveableType. It seems as though a lot of thought went into covering all those aspects of blogging.

My next problem is blog reading. I find this issue to be much more complicated and am having trouble making up my mind. At a minimum, I like list of links with the most recently updated at the top. But that doesn't tell me whether they wrote about anything I want to read. So maybe slap in a title and description from the RSS. Except that I find myself reading 99% of the entries on my list anyways. That, in turn, means I wind up opening up to 30 tabs in Firebird. In which case I didn't really need those descriptions, did I? At least it's 30 tabs instead of 30 seperate windows. I still had to open them, though. The next step, for me, would be to just click a button and have all the ones that are unread open in new tabs. That puts strain on all those webservers out there, especially since I'll be ignoring most of the other content. I'd rather have all of my "favorites" have their entries loaded into a single page, similar to a LiveJournal Friends page.

The only remaining problem is sorting. Should they be ascending or descending according to timestamp? I suppose that if I only want to see what's new since my last update they should be ascending. Group them by author just to maintain streams of thought.

I've completely forgotten why I started this entry.