As mentioned previously, I'd stopped blogging. I somewhat reluctantly came to the realisation that the only way to have any kind of coherent presence was to aggregate what I was already creating elsewhere. I looked into lifestreaming solutions like sweetcron, but I couldn't bring myself to run yet another piece of server-side PHP to pull it all together when the stuff was already out there.  With the advent of nearly every Web 2.0 service having an API (be it RSS, JSON or XML) I figured I could write something that would be entirely client-side, aggregating all this stuff together with Javascript. The problem is that Javascript generated content is about as useful as a chocolate teapot accessibility-wise.  However, if all we're doing is aggregating content from other places then why not just point to the various places the information is being aggregated from, so users who have Javascript disabled can find it. Combine this with a judicious use of microformats, xfn, foaf, rel=me to act as a pivotal point for my social graph (whenever Google updates !) and we can make things easier for the search indexers out there as well.

I think there's a nice opportunity to create a single page client side application (a bit of html) that provides a user's lifestream combined with some biographical info along with metadata to link into and feed the social graph, a kind of factoryjoe on steroids, which just involves a simple setup and a bit of theming via CSS.  I've got similar bits of Javascript that can import services like Last.fm or youtube and it's simple to convert any RSS feed to JSON using rss2json.  I like to think of it as a kind of happy medium between the classic static personal homepage that everyone used to build and a realtime lifestream, with zero maintenance and a simple setup.

In the last two years, I've managed to blog very infrequently and a small accident with a robots.txt file and a Wordpress upgrade caused all my previous years of posts to disappear from Google which has actually left me feeling very liberated if a little guilty (cool URI's don't change or completely vanish !).  I've switched from having the blog as my main 'page' on the web to a kind of hybrid homepage/lifestream rjlee.net (more on this in another post) which replaces my previous monkeyhelper.com blog.  The reasons for not blogging were varied, originally due to time pressures when we started up Rattle and now due to Ethan coming into my life (both wonderful, if time consuming things !).  The landscape of the blogging world has changed drastically in the last 5 years, moving from delayed consideration to real-time splurging, some people have started to notice the down sides to this.  I'm hoping for a bit of an equalisation back towards blogging, so as Russell says "Back to more fragments on here from me".