Introducing omglog.com

For some time, I’ve wanted another blog with a significantly lower threshold for posting short shutouts of those random links that keep me distracted. The source of this text, the notes section on my personal site, should for a number of reasons be kept relatively tidy and reserved for longer posts with my own, original content. There’s at least the aspect of tagging and categorizing mutating into some completely different, before unseen beast on any site with more than 5 posts a day; designing sites with lots of different content is difficult. “Difficult” is a word I’d like to not be descriptive of a site that one day might become a CV of some kind.

I like writing longer texts, but length leads to a number of problems. Most importantly: the editing process of making a long text readable is a timesink in itself. To make things more difficult, I’m usually blogging in a language I don’t speak natively, which makes it hard to live up to the ideal of posting nothing but well structured divine words of wisdom, unless I choose to give writing indecent amounts of time I’d rather spend procrastinating in a different fashion. Also: no one reads long texts on the web, at least I know I hardly do so.

In other words, by writing only longer texts, fewer individual works get written and I’m giving any readers I might have less useful information. Choosing to focus on longer texts of a certain level of depth causes the the exclusion of stuff that really should be posted somewhere.

I think I’ve now solved this dilemma. No, I didn’t discover Delicious/SU or the for ‘merican Internet celebrity and presidential candidate types so popular combination of Twitter and Tinyurl – the whole point here is to be self hosted, and besides I already use IRC and Facebook for real world contacts.

What I did do was to open a WP site at omglog.com. Beginning with the Prologue based design, it feels like a combination of a microblog and a tumblelog. Keeping omglog.com within the bounds of being a simple diary of notable links is a high priority, as I believe that all the five to eight people who read my posts regularly don’t need another source of lengthy rants written in dysfunctional English.

Hoping to activate a few potential contributors, I chose to include the author’s name in the “permalink structure”, the way URLs look on the blog. To illustrate this: my entries can be reached at omglog.com/thomas. All authors obviously have individual feeds with their own posts; my first use for this was to automatically import my posts as “notes” on Facebook and similar places.

I invite all readers of this to subsribe to the main omglog feed. Anyone I know is also welcome to join omglog.com as a contributor, consider contacting me if you need a place for storing interesting links in mainly English, Finnish and Scandinavian languages. The goal is to be very free-form, all contributors are asked to kindly define “interesting” by themselves, I’m already busy being interested on my own.

If you don’t want to post yourself, feel free to send me links (hello [at] omglog [dot] com).