Net presences and where to go next

• An Engine Fit For My Proceeding (Drupal) - a long-running Journal but (a) all about Second Life, where I am not present all that much these days, and (b) all “In Character”, which means even longer run-on sentences and even more tortured prose generally. No posts here for a long time now; effectively mothballed. Also it is Drupal 6 and there is no simple path to move it all to 7.

• @ordinal (Twitter) - a lot of followers, mostly I suspect because I wrote (the first?) Twitter client for Second Life, rather than because people actually like what I tweet. But if there are any better services for dashing off quick thoughts or notifying readers of new content elsewhere, I am not sure what they are. I am very unlikely to abandon Twitter.

• ordinal (Plurk) - I really don’t use this any more, though there are an awful lot of Second Life folk there and Plurk is actually a decent system.

• chasing daisies… (Wordpress) - I originally started this as a place to put reviews of iPad apps, and also updates to an Applescript syncing app that I wrote and which doesn’t work any more. I began to post reviews of fountain pens and stationery, and then moved on to camera nonsense, but it is still basically a Reviews Of Stuff Blog, rather than one to which I can post general thoughts. Not read by many people anyway - mostly Googlefodder.

• Ordinal M (Google+) - I “engage” reasonably with G+ and get into arguments on other people’s comment threads, but am increasingly irritated by G+’s design changes, impermiability to other networks and systems, lack of community features, enforcement of homogeneity and limits on (and de-emphasis of) content, so don’t write very much on it.

• Ordinal’s Cabinet of Ephemera (Tumblr) - a scrapbook blog, the idea of which I do quite like but which I just haven’t kept up. (Existing entries are also very “ste*mpunk”, and I am very tired of that - well, of what it has come to mean anyway.)

• ordinal (Dreamwidth) - full posting options, great commenting, communities, proper archiving, an ethical company with an excellent record on free speech, and no past history to stop me using it for whatever content I feel like. This is a system I want to use and promote. But there is nobody here. (Apologies to those of you reading this on DW, but you know it’s true.) I don’t gain much if anything over self-hosting, apart from a certain level of convenience.

At the moment I am thinking of just using Dreamwidth and Twitter to post content, with the occasional entry on chasing daisies perhaps, and using G+ et al only for replying to others. The DW account does at least automatically feed to Twitter, so people who follow me there may see new entries.

I really do need to customise the appearance of it though.