Well, not really… I’m just in less of a bad mood with it and have realised that TextPat­tern really isn’t that great unless you just want a blog and noth­ing more. And I’m loathed to use Mambo or the like… though I imag­ine that’s prob­a­bly largely poor brand per­cep­tion on my part (hav­ing seen the hor­ri­ble stuff peo­ple can cre­ate with it). I lump it into the same bas­ket as phpBB and other bloated/insecure/inaccessible crap like that.

It’s prob­a­bly not really, but I’ll per­sist in my delu­sions until forced to learn oth­er­wise (either by myself or others!)

Any­way, syn­di­ca­tion ser­vices (Atom, RSS) rock my world and should be more broadly used even inter­nally for things that you mightn’t think would require it. This is the con­clu­sion I’ve come to hav­ing started putting together a new site (the one based around Word­Press I was whin­ing about) for my church and won­der­ing how best to inte­grate an upcom­ing events cal­en­dar on the front page.

It remains to be seen whether or not I actu­ally do it that way, but it’d be nice if syn­di­ca­tion was already so heav­ily a part of Word­Press’ pro­cess­ing that it became a triv­ial thing to run a parser func­tion on any page. I’m still try­ing to decide whether to setup cus­tom queries in Word­Press to read future-dated posts for events + make them acces­si­ble (able to be accessed, that is; not espe­cially applied to broad audi­ences, assis­tive tech­nolo­gies, etc.) prior to when they’re sched­uled to appear… or whether to sim­ply build my own app on the side that either spits out an include I’ll grab with PHP in my tem­plates — bor­ing — or an Atom feed that Word­Press can parse, and lots of non-IE browsers (Well, prior to ver­sion 7! Can’t wait!) can do Use­ful­Stuff™ with, and that can inte­grate into a Dash­board wid­get for Mac users and a Kon­fab­u­la­tor wid­get for PC users, etc.

Yeah, peo­ple mightn’t use it lots but it’s a cool idea ;-) This is what doing one web­site for a TV net­work has done to me — it’s all about eye-candy and out-gimmicking the opposition!

Speak­ing of the Oppo­si­tion (NineMSN, I guess) and Gim­micks, Win­dows Mes­sen­ger 8 Beta looks like it’s shap­ing up into some­thing I could actu­ally use with­out com­plain­ing too loudly. They’ve pulled off the disposing-of-normal-UI-occasionally thing far bet­ter than Win­dows Media Player ever has, and every­thing feels as though it gels really nicely.

I’m a lit­tle con­cerned they’re try­ing to pull users into their own ‘por­tal’ thing with Spaces and var­i­ous other Live.com crap, but it’s hardly as if they’re the only ones doing that. It’s ironic that we’re get­ting into an era of allegedly-more-open citizen-powered media that’s becom­ing pro­gres­sively more iso­lated because of ser­vice providers. For exam­ple, what the heck do Yahoo! do? I don’t get it. I don’t know any­one that uses their Mes­sen­ger ser­vice, or their blog ser­vice (Yeah! They have one! What the heck?! Dis­cov­ered this last week and was suit­ably shocked), or their email ser­vice. Same goes for AOL (nearly… I know a hand­ful of peo­ple that have an AIM account and sup­pos­edly use it… but it’s lit­er­ally a hand­ful, as in I have enough fin­gers to count all of them, and I don’t know whether they actu­ally use it or not, not hav­ing an account myself!). And as for MSN Spaces… hmm. Well, my MSN Spaces page says “This isn’t my real blog, go else­where.” I flicked through a cou­ple of other peo­ples today (Mes­sen­ger Beta makes that pretty easy, though not sig­nif­i­cantly any bet­ter than the lat­est sta­ble release) and found more than a few who were uncer­tain as to whether they should keep their MSN space or just go with Blog­ger. Every non-geek I know who blogs uses Blog­ger. More power to Google.

But I’m sure these demo­graph­ics vary enor­mously depend­ing on who you know: the point is, I’m not see­ing any crossover, which is a lit­tle wor­ry­ing. Of course, I only ever search using Google, so go fire con­spir­acy the­o­ries around all you like… I reckon most blog con­tent on these ser­vices isn’t at all com­pelling, and doesn’t need to be. Blogs are, for the most part, mass-CC:-email sub­sti­tutes that really shouldn’t be archived… and these eas­ier to use ser­vices are prob­a­bly exac­er­bat­ing that problem.

I don’t excuse this blog from that entirely, of course, but there’s more than a lit­tle bit of con­tent here that draws search engine traf­fic and is “time­less” in a sense that “my dog ate crayons for break­fast this morn­ing and went to the vet and they said this hap­pens all the time” could never be. But I digress, hugely (a fail­ing of the medium, no doubt!)

So that’s all very inter­est­ing. Inter­ested to hear if oth­ers know peo­ple in mul­ti­ple “ser­vice provider uni­verses” or if everyone’s friends are, for the most part, con­fined to a par­tic­u­lar ser­vice (and what that ser­vice may be). If you’ve got a blog, this’d be a great time to play pingback/trackback tag instead of just com­ment­ing here… I’d love it if this could get a lit­tle viral and we could see what plat­forms peo­ple are using and “why”. For me, it’s mostly just that every­one I know is using a par­tic­u­lar ser­vice. What is it for you?