Bloggery

Weblog/journal/rss/feed related content, pages, tools. Thok Blogs will generally be announced here later.

Frequently Updated

Trackforward is an insufficiently-automated scraper of my postings on other sites. It's a way of capturing one of the larger chunks of my writing, and a way of claiming my words as mine; anything actually posted by me should show up here relatively quickly. (This is one of those things that should really be part of the web-as-a-platform, but where to put it? Proxy, browser, disqus? Everyone should have one of these but I don't know how to give it to them...)

• Trackforward - outbound postings - eichin@thok.org
• RSS for Trackforward - outbound postings - eichin@thok.org

Photography

Photography is my primary social communication mechanism... Here be dragonflies!

• My Flickr gallery. I have found about 5% of my shooting interesting enough to post, though sometimes there are reasons to post beyond basic photographic quality.
• My original "photomoblog" from 2003-2005, Burn Before Reading (yes, it predates the book of the same title) based on taking pictures with a PDA with a wifi card and an email client, and turning them into an index and an RSS feed. (Mostly created to explore why this was even interesting - why were people so excited by a presentation concept that could be implemented in 50 lines of shell script?)

Writing

New experiments:

• Ice Cream! (direct rss feed) Inspired by otherwise-disappointing "Massachusetts Ice Cream Trail", I started visiting and documenting ice cream shops in Massachusetts, with pictures and vaguely consistent details. This tasty journey also served as an opportunity to play with Enrico Zini's staticsite and Bastian Venthur's blag in a context where it wouldn't make sense to write anything about blogging, thus avoiding the usual traps.
• THOK Operational Notes While assembling the plumbing for the ice cream blog, I kept needing to write down explanations for some of the problems and solutions. In proper XKCD 927 style, rather than writing things up in one of my existing blogs, I started a new one, but this time it seems to have worked.

Classics:

• New Technical Aggregation (direct rss feed) based on my README-blog tool; there's an additional Python-specific subset (also with direct rss feed) which focusses on python-language projects. Individual categories/blogs include:
  • Notes From The Management
  • Rants
  • Conferences
  • Everything Else
• Publications
• Codes Well With Others serves both as a place to rant about development style and as a tool to encourage me to more actively use many of the toolkits I spend so much time reading about... (formerly on tumblr)
• No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to fund my kickstarter was inspired by a couple of friends sharing pointers to interesting kickstarter projects, though it's a broader gadget blog vaguely related to my old "gadget lust" feed... (formerly on tumblr)

Conventional Social

Some of these are more "presence" than "output", but the main thing is that they're someone else's platform.

• MIT Mastodon Mastodon is the best place to chat with me real-time.
• Twitter Only Mostly Dead, but there are a few people I don't have any other links to.
• Amazon I've only recently started thinking about my amazon "presence" as a social media component, but I review enough things (which already show up in trackforward above) and have enough readers (over 150 "that was helpful" clicks - nothing epic, but not unheard ramblings either...)
• Linked-in Profile which serves as an excellent zero-maintenance substitute for a resume - especially since most of the work came though personal contacts in the first place, not blind resume sending
• Had a GitLab gitlab account for years just for access to some bug lists, only recently noticed how advanced it has gotten - still need to set up a personal instance, but I'm starting to move personal projects over there - at least ones I actually want contributors for, like qlabels.
• GitHub in order to do lazy sharing of a project or two, without figuring out how to publish directly from here. See also my GitHub Gists.
• KickStarter itself has been a fine source of cutting-edge gadgets over the past couple of years...
• Stack Overflow started turning up in enough google hits that I signed up, and answered a few obscure X11 and Python questions.
• Reddit comments which are also in the trackforward feed above
• FriendFeed ( formerly http://friendfeed.com/eichin ) which doesn't have anything that isn't on this page, it just glues it together chronologically. FriendFeed is now a raw redirect to facebook, which is beyond "stale" and well into hostile.
• Google Profile which is almost as circular as FriendFeed is
• Google Scholar profile; most of it is "With Microscope and Tweezers", a little bit of Zephyr work, and a pile of Arepa-derived patents related to "software on demand", back when cable internet was a cool new thing.

Dead Tree Collector

• LibraryThing which only has a couple of shelves so far, but should soon become my main reference, with ISBNs mirrored to Google "My Library" for search. In 2017, they finally got an Android app with barcode scanning, so this is finally back to being an inventory problem and not software one.
• GoodReads which I bootstrapped with a 2012 LibraryThing export and the most recent ASINs from my kindle backups, so it's still sparse but not bad for recent stuff and "live" recommendations.

Rarely Updated

• Facebook was only set up to post High School Reunion pictures back in 2009; basically dead (last login 2019.)
• My Dreamwidth (formerly My LiveJournal until the Russians bought it) used to carry technical content, but THOK is real enough at this point that all of my new writing ends up there.
• OurDoings was set up to experiment with "story-telling with pictures" but it didn't really click for me (not that anything else has done better.)
• YouTube since they dropped the post-upload image stabilization, and since my Flickr API client handles video now, I rarely upload.

Dead but embalmed

• Technicalities, my former MIT blog - low traffic because it's a weak implementation (in terms of features, not just because it uses ASP.NET) and because a Safari bug gets in the way of posting. (Too bad it has the good name...) blogs.mit.edu appears to have burned down fallen into the hands of the MIT Geonumerics department.
• My former Blogspot blog is now just another THOK.ORG blog section after I concluded that other people's tools were interesting but not for me, and that self-hosted MarkDown was the way, the truth, and the light :-)
• Wordpress placeholder so I can authenticate in order to comment on other wordpress blogs.
• Playing with Dave Winer's OPML tool, I've got a temporary OPML blog set up, mostly with bug reports about the tool blogs.opml.org is also gone, though dev.opml.org has plenty of tech and standards docs.
• My del.icio.us link bucket
• My GigaPan gigapixel panorama gallery. I still have the 1st-gen hardware, it's just very tedious to use - and things like the Sony DSC-HX1 "sweep panorama" mode should be able to outdo it soon.
• StackOverflow Careers 2.0 is clearly trying to be "LinkedIn 2.0" and has direct connections with "stuff the cool kids use" like Github and Google Code. (renamed to jobs, and then discontinued 2022-04-01.)
• My secondary picasaweb (google) gallery where I store bulk "all the shots from this event" things, so as not to clutter my "photostream" on flickr. (Hint: flickr, you need a feature like this :-)
• Gitorious is dead (but I didn't actually have any of my projects there, just commenting access to others.)
• C2 Wiki Last time I touched it was 2004 but as it is the original wiki, I can't really bring myself to move it to the "embalmed" list, especially as it's still getting legitimate edits. Per the last changed page on the site they actually embalmed the site itself in early 2015 because people are horrible but the links still work.