Blog

by Zay_Kureshi

A few months have passed since I announced the end of this blog - well, a little bit prematurely as I have to admit now. Back in summer I was just sick of blogging, especially tech blogging, but I never really stopped reading blogs and tried to keep myself informed as much as I could without wasting too much time. The virus is still there, I guess.

So, what will change with this relaunch? I will focus more on everything “open” - OpenID, of course, the open web, the so called Open Stack, and everything else related to it. I wrote about those topics before and currently there is quite a lot happening in this realm, so it is probably consistent to write about it.
Music, football, and other off-topic stuff won’t get mentioned here anymore. Some people might regret this decision but I think it should be clear to readers what the blog is about. I have seen this blog being linked as a source for netaudio reviews. That is certainly misleading, even if I reviewed releases in the past but it wasn’t really a focus.

I would be very happy if some of the old regular readers were still around. It would be great to read some comments from familiar names. Nostalgia, you know. Though I don’t mind new readers as well. So, let’s see how this blog will shape but please, don’t expect a new post each day. I don’t want to put too much pressure onto myself. Also there are still some glitches with the new theme but hopefully I will be able to fix them rather soon.

Oh, I almost forgot: Happy New Year to all of you!

by somethingcommon

I will keep this short: For the time being, this will be the last post on Not So Relevant. There are various reasons for stopping this blog. Over the last couple of weeks I tried to write them down several times but it did sound stupid each time.

So thanks a lot for stopping by, reading the articles - maybe you even found some useful information -, and some of you were even adventurous enough to subscribe to the feed. Much appreciated! The domain is paid for the next four years already, if I remember correctly, so the articles will still be up on the net for quite some time.

Bye.

P.S. Spread OpenID needs a new editor!

Eventually I updated my WordPress installation over the weekend. I am always hesitant updating it because I usually do something stupid and it ends in a mess. Yeah right, I’m an expert in technology. But it was about time for the update. I was still running version 2.1.2 and the growing number of reports about WordPress blogs being hacked made me quite nervous, to say the least. However, in the end updating was a breeze.

People visiting the blog will notice a new theme (the old one is not compatible with WordPress 2.5.1). It’s very clean and the sidebar is clearly separated from the content. I made some minor changes to it like adding xFolk, hAtom, and hCard microformats to the loop and changing colors of headings and links. It’s also possible to comment with OpenID now. So if you have one, use it please. OpenID comments are whitelisted - until spammers use it, of course.

Unfortunately special characters like German umlauts got messed up but I only corrected them on the last few articles. If you notice any other glitches, please report them. Thanks!

May 1st is not just a bank holiday celebrating workers’ rights. Some people thought it was a good idea to raise awareness of RSS as well. So today is also RSS Awareness Day. I don’t claim it is as important as fighting for workers’ rights. But what did I do without RSS? How could I manage my online life without it?

So just for fun I created a pipe on Yahoo! Pipes. I just spliced some feeds together to create a single feed for all my published items. It includes:

• blog feed
• comment feed
• shared items from FeedDemon
• my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia
• my tweets on Twitter

And just to get a pretty URL I burned a feed at FeedBurner. Very simple, nothing special at all. If you feel really adventurous you can subscribe to it but I don’t promise to keep it alive.

Happy RSS Awareness Day!