Update 2: status of this blog

(This post is part of my blog archiving project. This post appeared on bytecodex.wordpress.com on June 3rd, 2008.)

I’ve been away for awhile, and I’ve now moved into Milwaukee (well, technically Shorewood, to keep the urbanites happy; it’s not quite far enough downtown for them). I should have a new ISP in a week here, but until then, I’m writing posts in coffee shops. Which is to say, I’m enjoying a lot of coffee, and that’s not an entirely bad way to spend time.

The Pirate Bay launched their free WordPress.com-clone service a few months back, with the added promise that they would not censor content as long as it did not violate Swedish law. I set up a blog, at mathiasx.baywords.com and briefly posted there as an experiment, without advertising it much via the usual means. The service leaves a lot to be desired (there’s no file/image upload and there’s a limited set of themes to choose from, with no way to customize the CSS), but then again, for a WordPress.com clone, it does reasonably well.

The main issue seems to be that only people with Baywords accounts can comment, and I’d rather have a way to comment without forcing the user to sign up for any service, perhaps using OpenID to validate identity but not leaving commenting wide open for spam.

My posts at that blog were quite literally inspired by the main character in Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Little Brother. To that end I was going to write a few posts about some topics one might run into at DefCon, and I made a video of myself nuking an RFID tag in a microwave.

But, due to the problems with the Baywords service, I’ve now abandoned it and left my little experiment there. At some point I’d like to pull all the posts I’ve ever written from all the blogging engines I’ve used (including my own blogging system that I wrote all in one big perl file, circa 2001-2004, with an RDF feed that predated RSS 1.0 spec) into a sort of meta-blog with a huge timeline. Until then, I’ll just link things together with RSS glue and pull them into my soup.io tumblog.

This blog has not been particularly focused enough on code and technical ideas as much as I’d hoped, or at least I haven’t updated it enough to justify writing much more here, either. So this, too, will get pulled into my soup, and I may post here occasionally, but right now, I’m looking to abandon the sort of long-form blog posts in favor of short posts on my soup tumblog and twitter messages.

Thanks for stopping by.