• Applescript support in Adium 1.2 and later — AppleScript reference for hooks in Adium.
• AppleScript Language Guide: Introduction to AppleScript Language Guide — This document is a guide to the AppleScript language—its lexical conventions, syntax, keywords, and other elements. It is intended primarily for use with AppleScript 2.0 or later and Mac OS X version 10.5 or later.
• Matt Legend Gemmell – MGTwitterEngine – Twitter from Cocoa — MGTwitterEngine is an Objective-C class which lets you integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa application, by making use of the Twitter API. The entire API is covered, and appropriate data is returned as simple native Cocoa objects.
• The Raw Story | Whistleblower: NSA spied on everyone, targeted journalists — “The National Security Agency had access to all Americans communications – faxes phone calls and their computer communications” Tice claimed. “It didn’t matter whether you were in Kansas in the middle of the country and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.”
• RedBedlam Boss Says Gold Farming “Inevitable” | Rock, Paper, Shotgun — The boss of virtual world tech company RedBedlam, Kerry Fraser-Robinson, has said that companies must find a way to bring virtual currency trading into their games. The must, he argued, accept that virtual currency trading will take place in games that have an economy. “Trying to stop that happening is literally like telling the tide not to come in – you will fail.”
• Key binding in L4D — Brief tutorial on how to bind keys in Left 4 Dead, including a list of Vocalize commands.
• GreaseKit – User Scripting for all WebKit applications — GreaseKit is a SIMBL plugin, that adds user scripting to Safari, Mailplane, Diet Pibb.app and all WebKit applications.

While I love all these wonderful social sites like Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter and various other clever services that tend to end in -r, I am starting to feel like I spread myself thin across the internet. So many places to post stuff to, so many places that contain fragments of my thought streams. It’s hard to keep track of me.

As I wrote, I feel that I have a certain expected level of quality for things I want to post on my personal site. While I grin just as much as anyone else at lolcats, that’s not really stuff I’d like to post here.

I’ve started experimenting a bit with Tumblr — you can find me here. Just like I enjoy the 140-character format of Twitter, the Tumbler format of posting various short text snippets, quotes and images is also very appealing. That default theme doesn’t quite agree with me about what a quote is, though. I have a habit of finding interesting quotes that can span several paragraphs, so blowing up the text size like that can get confusing. But I’ll fiddle with that later.

But Tumblr is still an experiment for me. I don’t find myself wanting to post there that frequently. Twitter is still the main source for my thought streams. I’ll keep fiddling with it for a while, and if I find a format that works for me I’ll try to incorporate it into my social stream.

So here’s the crux of it: do I try to tie it all together on my personal site, or just leave it with links to the various services I use?

Let’s look at what some other people do.

Jon Tan has a front page that is not the actual blog, but contains the first sentences from the latest blog entries prominently displayed in the center column. He then uses a very condensed format of asides, with just a link to the services he uses, and then a link to a separate page titled Asides, also linked from the top of the page. The Asides page itself looks very good and readable. One column with bookmarks from Delicious, one column with tweets from Twitter, and a third column with thumbnails from Flickr and Upcoming events below those.

Great idea, might steal it.

dooce has a two-column layout with Twitter and Flickr items in the sidebar. Classic blog layout, not much else to say about it. Still looking great though.

It started with Zeldman, so it might as well end there too. He has the two-column layout with a note on where he will be speaking (hey, offline thought streams counts too), a single tweet and a list of the recent entries in the sidebar.

Time to think it over. I’ll probably think by sketching out a new layout for the site. Tends to end up that way when I think design.

The ten entries currently on the front page stretch back a year. The entry before this one was written six months ago. That’s… not really a good update frequency. So for the last week or so I’ve been reconsidering the whole format for this site.

It’s easy for me to tell why I’m not writing more: there’s just not a whole lot of stuff going on in my life. I was way more active back when I was in school and actually did stuff.

So writing full-blown blog entries is a no-go in my current situation. I have, however, been quite active on Twitter lately. That’s a format that feels a lot more comfortable for me now — bite-sized observations condensed into less than 140 characters.

A week passes…

Yes. It’s now one week later. That’s how difficult it is for me to write something of substance right now. Those last two entries? Wrote them in the meanwhile. They were just a link and a short rant; that’s easy to manage.

Though I did just upgrade WordPress to the latest version and did some general maintenance on the nuts and bolts and got a brief spurt of creativity. At least I got something done on the site.

Another week passes…

Yep. Serious problems writing. And this isn’t exactly a format where I can just click “publish” without feeling that the entry is somewhat complete — blogging doesn’t lend itself to a disjointed thought stream spread out between unconnected entries.

In some vaguely related news, Dean Allen is writing again. And his latest entry mirrors my experience in a rather interesting way:

You’ll agree that everything deserves a second chance. A few months ago Twitter started slowly making sense.

I joined Twitter very early. Here is a graph of my usage — you’ll note the huge spike a few months back. That coincides with a forum thread about Twitter on the Penny Arcade forums.

A bunch of like-minded gaming nerds talking about Twitter and following each other rekindled my interest in Twitter, and it shows in that graph. Much easier to write for an audience.

Where to take it from here? I don’t really have much of an idea, right now I just want to get this damn entry done and click publish.

I have some half-baked plans about a new format that, though not intentionally, is essentially what Jason Kottke is doing with his site — a stream of short (though not of Twitter-length) entries mixed in with the longer stuff, maybe hook in my Twitter updates every now and then. We’ll see.

At any rate, even getting this brainfart-slash-rant down on virtual paper made my interest jump. While I do like the lovely MistyLook theme I’m currently using, I think I’ll make a theme of my own sometime soon. I can never really get used to other people’s style of writing CSS.

Now to see if cross-posting to Twitter when I write a new entry works. Here goes nothing!