I purposely stopped blogging here because I thought I was going to start a couple of new blogging projects. Except I just kept thinking about them and didn't end up starting either one.

So I'm back here now and contemplating upgrades. This blog software is ancient and needs a lot of hand holding to do simple things like updating the side nav. I can never remember which side nav file to edit. And I have to manually run the perl script everytime I add a new entry (I could set up a cron job but that might take me 30 seconds). I have to touch a file if I edit it to maintain the original timestamp. I can't turn on commenting or any of the other bells and whistles up to date, modern blogs have without installing and configuring additional software. I feel like I'm a decade behind.

I've always been a do-it-myself kind of girl. Use the software I have the most control over, write my own apps. But these days, I find it's foolish to try to do everything yourself. What you want is to be able to pull data from all your multiple sources and get it in one place. The other thing that I'm slowly starting to enjoy is the social aspect of sites like flickr.com and goodreads.com -- you can share books with your friends and browse other people's neat photos, make comments on, make new friends, join communities of like minded folks.

I know, I know, online communities were all the new thing like 10 years ago or more, and I have a bunch of profiles that prove I was aware of this long ago, but I clung to the old notion that my data, my content, had to be hosted only on a server I owned for a very long time. It took me forever to get on flickr because I was torn about this -- my files on someone else's server? It used to make me uncomfortable. Now, I appreciate and understand the value of these services. The only thing I'm concerned about now is migrating content over from one app to another. I moved all of my book reviews to goodreads, but that was easy because I only had 5 or 6 of them here. What about all my photo albums that aren't in flickr? Or all these blog entries when I move to blogger? I haven't quite figured that one out yet.