So how's the blogging going, anyway?

To revisit some earlier ramblings, I set this blog up mostly as an experiment in blogging, and because one of my main computer interests has become social software - so I really ought to be involved in actually using the tools that interest me! And what do I think so far, you might ask?

Well, I'm hooked. I really am. I am starting to get to the point when I make mental bookmarks of things that I think would make good blog posts. I was ecstatic when I got a comment, and I love seeing my traffic grow (I'm using reinvigorate.net for site stats). The process of blogging has led me to all sorts of wonderful online discoveries that I wouldn't have made otherwise.

I've had my own web site(s) for years - aahlookout.com for personal stuff, outsideinthesun.com for business, back when I was freelancing. I chose to make this blog a stand-alone entity on blogspot.com because I wanted to see how easy or difficult it was to emerge from nothing on the Web. Of course, I got impatient, because I'd rather be part of a big network than a wallflower in the corner. Human nature and all. And now I've got a third site to deal with - crows to burnaby. I just bought the domain name and I'm pointing it to this blog; should be good to go in a few hours. Is this not a bit silly, though? crowstoburnaby and aahlookout should be lumped into one site, but I can't bring myself to part with either name.

I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with blogger.com forever. First, it's been having some server issues (coincidentally, the server started returning errors while I was writing this post, and if I hadn't copied it into the buffer, I would have lost it). Also, I'm finding myself increasingly impatient for some of the features that other blog services offer, like categories and TrackBack. And there haven't been any hints forthcoming from Blogger on when they're going to incorporate any of these features. I'm a bit surprised that they're so far behind, given that Google (who owns Blogger) is usually right on top of things and blogs are a pretty hot & trendy topic at the moment. Makes me wonder what's going on with them internally. Anyone care to enlighten me?

My other social-software dilemma is, of course, Furl vs. del.icio.us. I've grown to very much like Furl. I appreciate that you can make links private - not that I need to often, but it's nice to have the choice. I get the feeling when using del.icio.us that it's more of a broadcast to the world, whereas Furl feels like my personal bookmark collection that I just happen to be sharing with anyone who seeks it out. Maybe it's an illusion. In any case, I'm going to keep using them both for the time being - I've only been using del.icio.us for a few days, so I have yet to get a real feel for it. It seems a little less organized and haphazard than Furl, but that does have its own charm.

And Flickr still rocks.