Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

2006 Bloggies - The Nominees
January 23, 2006

I was reading Jenn’s feed, where she pointed out that she was nominated for a Bloggy (Bloggies?) for “Best Tagline of a Weblog”. I decided to stop by and see who all got nominated, and now that I’ve seen it, I thought I would give you my impressions of the sites listed there.

It turns out that I am a bitter old coot and have nothing good to say about any of these sites. Well, there are a few exceptions. But mostly, I hate them because they were nominated and I was not. Maybe next year. I’ll add it to my 43 things.

Best Web Application for Weblogs

The category is kind of nebulous. Is it an application that you use to make a weblog? Or is it a tool that helps you create blog entries? Or maybe just a thing that you can use from your blog? Maybe it’s any of the above! Check out the nominees:

Flickr
Ah, the mac daddy of the photo repos. But is this really a blogging tool? Not really, unless you're using it as your sole photoblog site. You can store your blog's images there, but then all of the functionality that makes Flickr special is useless to you.
Del.icio.us
There are a few ways to get your browsed links onto your blog, and Del.icio.us is one. The thing that bugs me most about Del.icio.us is having to type the freaking URL. Also, even with the recent improvements, it's still not all that pretty. But service-wise, top-notch. I'm still not sure what exactly this has to do with blogging, though.
Blogger
Ah, finally a blogging tool. I've had the opportunity to try Blogger a bit more, and it's a pretty service for basic blog creation. Basic. And has it really changed over the years it's been around?
Site Meter
How the heck did this get on the list? Especially with Google Analytics and Mint laying around.
WordPress
Hmm.

My vote: Flickr. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but the API that provides external access to your photos has the potential to rock the socks off of every blogger, provided that some enterprising individual takes advantage of it for your platform.

Two Yahoo tools in this list? And a Yahoo bedfellow? Very interesting.

Oh, but there are more categories to dissect… Whee!

Identity
January 22, 2006

After my attendence of the blogging meetups yesterday, it has become abundantly apparent that I need to produce a business card sot hat I can share my identity with people in the real world. Unfortunately, I’m not exactly sure what sort of identity I want to portray.

It has been a long time since I have used the Midnight Circus domain for anything. And if you’ve received email from me, you might wonder why it comes from Midnight Circus and not Asymptomatic. The history is long and complicated - well, ok, not so much.

Back when I started on the web, I was creating a resource page for the White Wolf role-playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade. If you know me really well (most people who visit the site don’t know too much about my real-life work, which is a very strange phenomenon to me and worthy of a post all on its own) then you know that I have worked with some folks at White Wolf for various reasons, and have actually been given a small credit in a poorly received supplement. Nonetheless, the tabletop gaming industry was a significant part of my life at the time.

Since Midnight Circus was created as a dedicated role-playing resource, I wanted a site to write about things that were unrelated to that topic. Out of that need, Asymptomatic evolved and become what it is today. The Midnight Circus web site has long since been taken offline, as my disenchantment with White Wolf and their products grew, but I have been using the domain for my email for so long that I couldn’t change it now - it’s part of my online identity.

As my online endeavors expanded, I’ve created a couple more sites. Particularly well known these days is Red Alt, which is a blog software resource site on which I host a good bit of my open source work. And through my work at Red Alt, I was able to jockey a position with Shimmer Studio, where my freelance work is brokered.

So the question for me becomes, What identity am I trying to portray? Do I want people to see my personal site, or my professional sites? Which of those should they see? Or should I create a whole new brand under Midnight Circus (an idea I had been toying with for a long while but never actually completed) to work from?

Down at Fergie's
January 21, 2006

Ah, late lunch, early meetup.

The expressway was joy today, weaving in and out of wide spaces between cars. This is probably the fastest I’ve gotten to the city. And so you have no excuse but to come on down for the Wordpress/Philly-blogger meetup. Right now. I demand it! And I’m already here, for pity’s sake…