Thursday, May 16, 2013

technicalities / cross-polination

OK, me being rubbish at this blogging lark isn't new. In fact it has a long and fine tradition going back almost a decade (scary thought) but lately I've been conscious of letting this place languish and wondering why. I think I just stumbled onto parts of the reason.

excuse part the first: "Apple took my RSS away"
It's ages back now, but the last major overhaul of Safari removed the RSS reader functionality (for no good reason) and put it in Mail instead... which is a stupid place to put RSS. Having painstakingly moved all my feeds (friends blogs and a few cartoons) to Mail I promptly forgot to check them for three months, after which I found that (presumably having realised an email application is a stupid place to put RSS) Apple have removed RSS from Mail as well... GAH!

So last month I started reconstructing my RSS feeds in a neat little standalone app called Netnewswire and that's working nicely.

...what does this have to do with me blogging or not? I hadn't really realised before but reading my friends' thoughts and musings prompts me to put down my own, and without that prompt I was forgetting.

excuse part the second: "Google broke my blogger"
I'm still not sure why but since its last update blogger's front end has been bitching at me about utterly spurious and non-existant faults every time I do anything. How do I know they're non-existant? Because everything still works, I'm just plagued with error messages.

That's less of a disincentive than the conversational vacuum I was in, but I think it's a contributory factor nonetheless.

So. That's my "dog ate my homework" bit for 2013, and (hopefully) the start of another period of regular posts... about nothing in particular, to be read by nobody in particular.