Soldier Ant 

I'm in Burlington, MA for the better part of this week, to attend orientation for my new job: I've recently accepted a position with Sun Microsystems as an interface designer and I'm pleased as hell about it.

Business Logs looks like an interesting business resource for all things blog-, wiki- and writing-related. (And it's nicely designed, too.)

Google has introduced a promising development in the war against comment spam:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

Certain company-pitbull-cheerleaders (!) should consider their words carefully on their industry-related blogs:

Suppose, for example, an employee says very negative things about a competitor or publishes an unfair product comparison. If these opinions are stated as facts and they are not true, it could lead to a “trade disparagement” suit.

Now this is exciting. My old comrade John Panzer mentions that AOL has opened up their AOL Journals to anyone with an AIM account! I kept an AOL Journal for awhile when I was still on my freebie employee account, and I gotta admit -- it's hard to beat that 'Blog via IM' feature. I may revive my journal with my AIM screenname.

This being summer, and me having a couple of projects percolating.. I have to warn you, gentle reader (I love saying stuff like 'gentle reader' cause it makes me feel all Stephen-King-preamble-y..) that my postings to Soldier Ant will be somewhat sporadic, and very random, I'm sure.

And two status updates: the home automation is going nowhere. And revealing more has also been somewhat of a non-starter.

Wow. Me stay up too late, play with Movable type themes. Make bloggy go boom. And now I'm tired and going to bed. So.. internet... deal with this for a while. (Being a soldierant reader is like being trapped in an abusive relationship.)

I'm mucking around a little bit with my RSS feed (for the whole six of you that subscribe to it.) After swapping out templates last week, I realized that it obscured the access-point to my FeedBurner feed for Soldier Ant. So I added that back in to the sidebar to your right. (If you're reading this from the site.)

While I was in there (signed in at FeedBurner) I tweaked the configuration of my feed a little, too. Having the digest of my delicious bookmarks in there was really starting to bother me. I realize that it's probably the closest thing to fresh content that my feed subscribers get, but I've really been using delicious more for personal bookmarking of odds, sods and digital detritus. Most of what I stick in there just isn't really audience-worthy, so I removed the once-daily digest that was appearing.

I really envy the way that John Tolva incorporates his delicious links in the 'marginalia' sidebar on his site. Tight, pithy titles and descriptions.. I just don't usually have the energy to make my bookmarks any more presentation-worthy than however the bookmarklet sucks 'em in. (So I end up with a lot of bm's titled things like "TUTORIAL: tether your motorola/nokia/se phone to your mac with via BT!" Snooze.)

And, anyway, I am exploring some other social bookmarking options. My homeboy Mr. Laaker is one more conversation away from enticing me over to MyWeb. The killer feature is the integration with Yahoo Search. Yep, you heard me right - when you do a Yahoo search, any sites that you yourself have personally bookmarked will appear high in the returned listings. (Of course, they only do so when they match the terms you searched on. We ain't dummies over at Yahoo, y'know.) This is hecka enticing.

I made one other slight change to my feed. Photos from my Flickr-stream will now appear in the Soldier Ant feed only if I tag them with a specific tag. (Cleverly enough, 'soldierant'.) I made this change for reasons that I am too tired to bother discussing right now.

Friend and fellow Columbus techie (and potential Coworker?) Jason Long has a new tumblelog up called The Strake. I've been after Jason for a while now to start a blog, cause he's an interesting guy with a great perspective—an independent programmer and designer, active in the local Rails community, and a father as well. He's really managed to carve out a cool space for himself. I think his blog already reflects that sensibility. Color me subscribed!