All seems to be right.  Looking through this page and back posts reveal the malicious site in question is no longer linked anywhere.  Anyone can screw up, but if it happens again I might be looking about for a new web host.  For now, however, it seems no harm, no foul.

I found in the past month I’ve used Twitter (meh) and Facebook (blah) quite a bit more.  In some ways they are a little bit interesting for instant gratification.  Well now it’s about time to start tying the different parts of my online life together.  First off I’ve started out with a bit of Twitter and LiveJournal integration.  In theory this post will get put on both my LiveJournal and referenced in a tweet automagically.

My next step is to work on Facebook integration, and after that I’ll start working on some Flickr integration.  That might mean I’m in for another theme change, and if so, then so be it.  Still, it’ll be nice to get back in to the habit of playing with WordPress while also adding a little bit of organization of my online persona.

In the meantime, for those looking for some pictures, check out my Flickr photostream.

This main page is something I’m going to give some focus to.  I’ll go back to other more general posts in LiveJournal (though it’s possible I’ll start a second, more personal blog here on this website – a page off of this one or some such).

While there may be thousands of other tech focused blogs out there, I think that’s the path I’m going to go down with this one.  Even after leaving the professional IT field, I’ve always kept myself up to date on the technology, the issues, and all sorts of related things.  A lot of which I played with, but never really have had the chance to put in to practice.  As such I want to use this blog to help me get back in touch with my tech roots.  From time to time I’m sure I’ll post some things that aren’t exactly technology related, but hey, that’ll just be my slant, right?

With that said I thought maybe I’d make a little list, mostly for myself, so that at the end of the year I can look back and see exactly what I managed to accomplish.

• I need to write more.  I’ve fallen out of the habit and I’d really like to get back in to it.  The end of 2009 I actually made some headway so I want to ride that momentum through 2010 and have something to show for it.
• In the vein of the above, I want to focus more on this blog.  Maybe give it some actual focus, but for now I’ll just settle for getting in to a routine of regular posting.
• Finish painting the inside of the house, remodeling the home office, getting the nursery ready, and fixing up the sun room so its actually usable for this year.
• While I’m most likely not going to be looking for full time work I’d like to find something part time, or at least get some freelance writing and/or computer consulting gigs going to start bringing in a little bit extra – especially with the baby due in March.
• I’d like to get back in to painting Warhammer miniatures.  I don’t know if I’ll actually get back in to play Warhammer at all, but I always found the painting relaxing and it would be great to get back in to that habit as well.  Hobbies have been sorely lacking in my life the last several years.
• Finish cleaning the basement.  It’s chaos down there but this is totally doable.  I managed to clean the one part in only a couple of days, so taking care of the rest can be done with a week of solid work on it.
• Finally, I want to get the hang of catching passed on the back hand in hockey.  That’s going to be my one developmental skill to work on with the rest of this season.

I don’t know how much of this I’ll accomplish, but all of it is absolutely doable.  I just need to find a little more routines in my life to get the creative energies going and to chase away the blahs that haunted me through most of 2009.

So here we go 2010 – stumbled at the start and fell flat on my face, but let’s see if I can’t pick myself back up and fight my way back in to the thick of things.

Flickr, is of course, the most obvious and tempting option.  Lots of people use it.  Lots of people seem really happy with it.  However it has one flaw that keeps me from using it.  It’s all run and controlled by someone else.  That someone else being the Yahoo! collective and I’m not sure I want them asserting whatever rights they feel, or selling the entire site to whomever they want at the drop of a hat.  I’m not as worried about losing photos if they ever went away (I doubt Flickr will just close its doors overnight at some point), nor am I worried about what happens if their servers fall apart, or are hacked, or what have you.  I back things up.  I have local copies of everything as well as offsite copies.  I just don’t like giving too much control over my words or pictures to others.  It’s why I maintain this blog (more or less) in addition to my LiveJournal one.  It’s also why I post more important (to me anyway) posts here and use LiveJournal for announcements and random thought type posts.  So at the end of the day I decided to use Yet Another Photo Blog plugin with WordPress.

Right now I haven’t added all the photo’s that I had posted before, but I will slowly be adding my favorites along with new ones that I find.  So feel free to explore my new PhotoBlog!

The way to combat this is organization.  Simply sitting down and saying, I’m going to write something, is not a productive endeavor.  It leads to the rushed, forced feeling.  In the end it makes the writing feel almost like a chore.  I’ve always looked at various ways to become more organized, but generally never implemented much in the way of a system.  I never gave it enough time for that system to take hold and become so routine that it was just another of the many processes I go through on any given day.  Now, with a lot of time available to me, it seems to be the perfect opportunity to begin finding a system of organization, research, and writing that helps everything come together; something to make the process flow and seem more natural rather than a chore.  This search for a system is also a wonderful writing opportunity.

As I research and test out different ways in which to better organize my writing life (and perhaps other aspects of my life as well) I’ll share them here.  There are many methodologies, and each person has to find the one that works best for them, but perhaps for other people looking to get a better grasp on things some of what I chronicle might be a spring board to discovering your own method for gaining control of the spiraling chaos that life can sometimes become.

My only real fear over Livejournal going away is that more of my friends, the ones who decide to keep being active on some service anyway, will shift over to something such as Facebook, which, while I check it on occasion, I am not at all fond of.  It is a service set up to fritter away any privacy you may still hope to cling to.  Along with its cluttered, horrid interface (no, I don’t want to play your stupid facebook games or take your facebook quizzes), the signal to noise ratio on it is incredibly unfavorable.

Fortunately, for those of my friends who make a shift over to a private journal, or other journaling service, I already make use of Newsfire, an excellent RSS aggregator.  It’s available on the Mac and I’ve been using it for years to follow a bunch of websites I read.  It feeds in to my addiction of merely skimming headlines.  For those who aren’t on a Mac, or not inclined to pay for software, I understand that Google Reader is pretty easy to use.

All of this, of course, assumes that Livejournal is actually circling the drain.  In the online world you just never know where things may end up.  So for now I’ll keep making the occasional post in my Livejournal, and checking up on my friends there, not worrying about what to do next until the day I click on the link and find nothing there.

I’m sure I’ll manage at least a few more post before my mind wanders elsewhere, but I’ll give it all a good try.