A Wordle I recently made of the entirety of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Posted to Tumblr AND Pinterest, natch.

The last couple of weeks have been particularly vivid and that may have to do with the following in no particular order:

Battlestar Galactica
TheHusband and I began watching Battle Star Galactica several weeks ago and we’re almost finished with S3. He has remarked BSG is “…like Downton Abbey, except in space,” which I can totally get behind. When I almost accused a student recently of treason when they asked for books on Cicero AND I had been mildly hallucinating the parking lot elevators are Cyclons, I told TheHusband we needed to take a break from the action, though for the last few BSG-free nights he’s been a titch antsy in not getting his fix.

Pinterest
I’ve become slightly addicted to Pinterest. I blame Jessica, whom I met recently in California while we were in a nearly week long training workshop together, for this problem though to be fair I should actually blame Amy because it was because of her that I obtained a Pinterest account many moons ago to stalk her shopping choices since our tastes are so similar, even though the only thing pinned on my boards these months was a Doctor Who inspired hoodie until Jessica rekindled that Pinterest fire. Regardless of whom I blame, I’ve started using it heavily these last few weeks to track all things visual, much as I used to clip visual things to Evernote. (The problem with clipping things to Evernote, however, was that for visual things it is almost (but not quite) useless where textual, Evernote rocks my socks.) With Pinterest, I’m starting to see patterns emerge (I’m love things that are orange, for example) but having that visual pinboard is making it a lot easier to track wants/needs for things to buy or wish for AND I’m also going to start using Pinterest for several of my departments that I liase to at work, such as Fashion and Interiors and the visual arts. THAT last bit is why I’m super excited about using Pinterest since it will be awesome to interact with students on the site to create projects and what not.

Plus Pinterest is great for keeping track of my future husbands.

Tumblr
The best way to describe Tumblr is that it’s for those things that are longer than 140 characters but does not quite warrant a full blog post. I’m certainly not new to Tumblr as I’ve been trolling that site for ages, but I’m not very active in posting to the site though I am a heavy reader and follower. Tumblr is great for getting that fandom fix (i.e. Doctor Who, Downton Abbey, Cabin Pressure, et al) but I’ve never really used it for curating content until I stumbled upon this article to litify my Tumblr dashboard. This article cinched that Tumblr is more than just a bunch of teenagers reposting animated gifs of various fandoms all over the place, so it’s nice to new content being added that does not contain an OMG or ballz reference somewhere.

I’ve often described Pinterest as Etsy’s Treasury function married with Tumblr, but in terms of curating content beyond just images, Pinterest isn’t robust to do that while Tumblr handles video AND audio in addition to text and images. How to decide to post what is what? Images get cross posted to both sites, while links/videos/songs/etc are posted to Tumblr. I’ve started feeding my blog into Tumblr after the Blog Disaster of 2011 because there is a built in community aspect to Tumblr that doesn’t exist (yet) in Pinterest or even in Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. Tumblr’s tagging and search makes it so easy to find and follow topics of interest that it’s almost criminal. Pinterest is great for finding visual inspiration and ideas in digital boards of my choosing, while Tumblr is for that get-quick fix tapping the multimedia vein of fandom delights.

Google Reader
I decided 2012 was going to be the year of simplification and ditching the very high signal to noise ratio. I started by cleaning up my Google Reader account, in which I was hoarding subscriptions to sites like Imelda Marcos hoarded shoes.

After doing away with my ultra narrow categorization method in which I had dozens of tags, I lumped the feeds into broader groups and removed content that I was getting duplicates from. So if I followed them on Twitter, Facebook, and had a RSS feed to their site, I removed/unfollowed/unliked the method I was least likely able to get info. Much how many Tumblr accounts I followed were reblogging of other Tumblr accounts, I also ditched sites that were link feeders and rebloggers. I also marked READ all stories older than a week and if that was stil unwieldily, older then a day.

With my Reader account now squeaky clean, I find I’m more apt to read (and post items of interest to Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook) and stay more up to date with news and events before, specifically in blogs and sites that are geared to interests that I don’t follow anywhere else (fairy tales, calligraphy, and other such things).

biblyotheke.net
Last, but not least, I’ve been spending a lot of time hacking the backend of my website to make it just so. While I love the original theme, my few tweaks to move some objects around has grown into a almost redesign that looks almost nothing like the original theme that it is based on. I also found a color palette that I just adore that I’ve also started incorporating into here. Some things are stil a bit off, but I’m excited as it starts to come together.

And that is what has been consuming me as of late. What about you?

Backyard after the great snow, January 14, 2012. (Using the cutout filter from Photoshop.)

I have been incredibly lackadasical in regards to posting here as of late, but much of that has more to do with technical difficulties over pure laziness. But this is said from the person who only took down their holiday tree on January 31.

To not put a too terrible fine point on it, several things occurred:

• All of my domains were infected with the same malware injection not once, but three times
• The same week as the last injection infection took place, my provider was dDOSed.
• Though I was ritualistic with backups of my WordPress databases across all of my domains, I apparently missed a crucial step as when I restored the databases, none of the content populated through the WordPress GUI. Ergo, logging into PHPmyAdmin shows me all of the lovely, lovely entries from many, many years and logging into WordPress shows me posts = 0. That’s sobering.

So if you’ve been wondering where the hell I’ve been and why every single one of my domains is empty – here is that explanation.

While I took massive steps to protect myself from future attacks and did everything by the book (supposedly), the best recourse seemed to be to wipe everything, including SQL tables, across the Lisa network and start fresh. A week after I blew everything away, I remember thinking how much relief I felt having no presence (or virtually no presence) on the web. How long has it been? 10 years? Maybe 12? Actually it’s been 16 since my first page up on Geocities and wrote my first entries, wondering if anyone would ever read them? And even when I was not writing, there were bits of me always present. But during that semi-glorious week in January, there was nothing. And that relief turned to emptiness.

So the cycle starts again, as it was in the beginning and so too shall it go forward to the future.