The Flow of Consciousness

For many, many years, my blogs have been called “The Flow of Consciousness,” an allusion to the stream-of-consciousness type of story-telling I enjoyed in high school. My first blog was actually called “Sojourns into the Life of Rinisari.” It was a Blogger blog, but I wrote maybe five entires because I didn’t have anything to write about in 11^th grade.

When I went off to college, I started a blog and called it The Flow of Consciousness because it was meant to be done in the stream-of-consciousness style. I never quite accomplished that, and it instead became a typical blog: moaning and groaning about college classes, romances, and life in general. It was hardly something I’d want the professional world to see.

The next evolution was a LiveJournal blog. Most of my college friends had LiveJournal accounts, and the friends page feature helped them corral all their friends’ entries in a single location. I wanted my friends to read my blog, so I started cross-posting to the old blog, based on Microblogger, and my LiveJournal blog. The LiveJournal blog was more mature, but it was still not something to which I’d like to be professionally attached. What’s posted there is my work and my thoughts, and there’s nothing there which is public that I wouldn’t want my parents or future constituents to see.

The next logical progression of my blogging life is this blog, powered by WordPress. It is meant to be a professional-quality blog with well-written, prepared, researched posts and content which, if extended, I would mind having published in a magazine, newspaper, or book.

His dictis, it’s obvious that the name of the blog, The Flow of Consciousness, no longer fits the neither the style nor the content.

Regular readers, all three of you, will see that I’ve changed the subtitle. I added education and politics to the list of penchants. My blog has become very political lately, and it will continue to be so long as I continue to write. I added education because I have a feeling that I will probably write on education-related things whenever I feel like it.

Eventually, I may move the Linux-related posts to BIOS LEVEL and post all Linux-related HOWTOs and such there. I don’t know if I’ll actually do it, or when, should I decide to do so.

This brings me to the question of the moment: Should I change the title of the blog? If yes, to what should I change it? I’m the top Google result for “flow of consciousness” and “colinbloggen”, the Frakturedsounden Deutschsprachen nickname which some of my friends use when linking to my blog or referencing it.

The other thing I’d have to do eventually is change feed URLs. The actual URL of my blog won’t change, but it would be silly to keep my feed URL as http://feeds.cad.cx/TheFlowOfConsciousness when the name of the blog is no longer that.

To the more experienced bloggers who read my blog: have you ever changed the name of your blog? How did it affect your readership, at all?

For the first time since I started this blog, I’ve devised a new theme: Fluid Colinese. It’s based on Fluid Blue by Srini G. and uses a primarily brown and dark orange theme. Sean Potter said it reminded him of Ubuntu’s color leanings. I agree. Honestly, the blog looks as intended with the fonts FreeSerif and FreeSans installed. Both are available on most Linux distributions, and font files for Windows are linked (however, the fonts looks terrible on Windows, at least to me). It looks acceptable for Windows Vista users or XP users who have acquired the font Segoe UI. Otherwise, the body text looks alright and the headlines default to Arial, which is alright.

Also, this theme is made for WordPress 2.3, so it can use all of the widgets and whatnot. I know WordPress 2.5 is coming out soon, but the only real changes to the theme side of things is the inclusion of avatars. I haven’t decided if I want to enable them, but I’ll decide when I see how annoying they are when WordPress 2.5 is actually released.

I’m working on enabling OpenID for commenting. I’d wanted to use it for my previous theme, but I couldn’t ever get it to play nicely. My old theme was made for WordPress 1.5, I think. Anyway, I’m running into a few issues because of conflicting versions of OpenID and Yadis in the plugin source and in /usr/share/php, which is used by my own OpenID server.

You’ll also notice the addition of some widgets. I’ve added the tag cloud and some RSS feeds from sites for which I write.

I’m going to take a little time here and there and reorganize the categories, too. I’ve got some categories which have one or two posts, such as the battlefield and g15 categories. I’m also going to get rid of the Uncategorized tag left over from Ultimate Tag Warrior’s shenanigans.

If you read my blog regularly and know me, either in person or through some organization, drop me a line and we can do a link exchange of sorts. Please, though, I prefer people whom I’ve met in person and who update their blog regularly. I tend to remove links to blogs which haven’t updated in months. Really, I should just import the OPML file from Liferea, my preferred Linux feed reader.

The URL for my blog won’t change, but the RSS URL will. I’m planning to rename the blog, as it’s no longer the Flow of Consciousness it was in the past. I’m almost out of that phase of my life, so it’s time to move on to more professional and responsible blogging.

Tell me your thoughts, folks. ¿Te gusta? ¿No te gusta?

I’m having some issues with WWL and mightyadsense javascript showing up in feeds. I’m gonna troubleshoot it this weekend when I’ve got a spare hour or two.

Worse case scenario: I disable both and find a replacement for mightyadsense. I’d re-enable WWL when the problem is fixed in the new version.

Update: I’ve fixed at least the WWL problem. The mightyadsense problem occurs far more infrequently, so it might take a while.

I signed up for this affiliate service called Boo-Box. When clicked, a link shows a lightbox with a selection of products inside. When the user clicks on a product, he or she is taken to the Amazon.com product page.

It basically works like Amazon’s referral program, but you only have to add ‘boo-box-link’ to the class attribute of a <span> or <img> tag with some text describing the contents of the span or image.

We’ll see how it goes. It kinda clashes with my background, so I’m going to suggest that Boo-box let the user decide its look in some way.

I noticed just now while reading John Chow‘s blog that WordPress 2.0.7 has been released. It’s only a couple of files:

• wp-admin/inline-uploading.php
• wp-admin/post.php
• wp-includes/classes.php
• wp-includes/functions.php
• wp-settings.php
• wp-includes/version.php

Run along, my blogging bretheren, and get it!