I am in the process of reviving this blog. For those of you who have been following for a while you know it’s languished over the last year or so. My job didn’t give me much time to author blog posts and most of my time spent on the web was just finding interesting content, so if something was posted it was generally my daily link post pulled from Del.icio.us. But I’ve changed employers and life is starting to get settled into a nice routine again so I am going to start posting again more regularly. I wanted to clean things up a bit here in the process.

It was suggested to me that it might be a good idea to remove my daily links post from my RSS feed. But since, for quite a while, there have been people subscribed to this blog when I hadn’t posted anything but links, I would have to guess that some of you out there do like them! For those folks, I hope you will subscribe to the new links only feed.

For the rest of you, the main feed now no longer includes the daily links and you don’t have to change anything: you’ll only receive blog posts from now on. If you like both, by all means please subscribe to both feeds! In whatever case, thank you for subscribing in the first place and I hope this change will make things better for everyone.

Here are the new feeds:

• Blog Posts (if you’re subscribed already, this is what you’ll have from now on).
• Daily Links only

As I said, I am planning to post new stuff more regularly so stay tuned and thanks again for subscribing!

Rss newspaper by FastIcon.com - isn’t it cool?

Pete on Mashable.com reviewed a site today called EgoSurf. It’s a popularity meter that you can enter your name or aliases and sites that you associate with and get a reading in “egopoints”.

I thought I’d give it a try…

Well, my ego is apparently very small. Fortunately, I’m an introvert so I don’t need a lot of external validation (that’s what I can tell myself, yeah).

I only got 1108 points for this new blog. I suppose that’s not too bad considering it’s only existed for 3 weeks.

I got 4095 for my old not-updated-for-more-than-a-year personal blog.

Running the alias I use just about everywhere with del.icio.us, flickr, and a few other sites as the site got me 2966 points.

I guess it’s better than my Technorati Rank: 1,063,755!

Oh well, not everyone can be popular, I guess. I have better things to do than worry about my popularity on the internet, like slinking off in my corner and singing the worm song to myself!!

It’s now 2006 and there are mere hours left in my vacation. I’ve accomplished about 50% of the things I had planned to do. I suppose that’s better nothing. To be honest, my full TODO list is so long it’d take me most of 2006 to finish anyway, even if I didn’t have to go back to work.

My biggest accomplishment over the holidays was getting this blog set up. I am getting close to happy with my layout, having made about 1000 changes to the theme I started with (one reason I’ve been a bum about posting over the last few days).

These past two weeks I’ve had a crash course in figuring out WordPress and PHP and I think it’s starting to pay off. I might even start working on some themes to give back to the WP community in a while and figure out how to make my own plugins.

Working with PHP is like a flashback to my pre-.Net ASP days with the in-line scripting and lack of strongly typed variables. I’m not really sure why many people prefer it over the nice, clean, code-behind, pre-compiled ASP.Net. I guess it must just be an anti-Microsoft thing, but maybe someone can enlighten me if I’ve missed something. I still vastly prefer ASP.Net for my general web programming needs but it’s always good to learn a new language, if, for no other reason, just to be able to talk intelligently with the “guys in the other camp”. In any case, it’s what Wordpress is built on so I’ll have to learn it to be competant under the hood of my blog.

So I guess it’s back to the daily grind tomorrow. It will actually be nice to get back into normal routines again. Let’s hope I can implement one of my top resolutions this year: “Write something useful in my blog every day!”.

Happy 2006!

Well, here we go. My blog breathes and says “Hello, World”. The world sighs and rolls its eyes. Does it need another blog? Probably not. But do I care? The answer is obvious.

My goals for Macro Linz are to occasionally post something that might be useful or at least interesting to people with my interests and educate or at least entertain myself in the process. Tutorials, code snippets, commentary on interesting developments in the evolution of the internet, geeky stuff in general, absurdity and paradoxes are all things you’ll find here eventually. As well as probably a few rants and raves. We’ll see how it goes.

Assuming that anyone will actually read this post, then I’ll go ahead and say that things are going to be in flux for a while while I learn how to use WordPress, PHP, WordPress themeing, and decide what, if any, ads I should I use and generally get back into the blogging groove.

So I guess that’s the first post down. Stay Tuned!