Some of you may have noticed that I can be read on platforms other than straight Blogger. I post links to new blog entries on Twitter, and bounce the entries to tumblr, among other things. I also have a Last.fm account, which I sometimes even remember to use, and I'm trying to keep up on Goodreads. I'm terrible at it. I read stuff and then forget to leave any kind of comments on it. But if you were curious about what I raid the library for, hey -- generally, it's going to be there.

Tumblr also has a slew of other stuff on it. The tumblr platform runs on a basis of clango ergo sum, so in addition to the blog entries (once a day, ideally), I have If This, Then That bouncing a lot of the stuff I regularly read, watch, or listen to into the queue, which is set to post two or three times a day. IfTTT is a fantastic free redirect service that is useful for throwing things around on the internet. It's a little like an RSS aggregator that can monitor a lot of other kinds of feeds as well, and then send the contents (or a link thereto) to a specified output. Behind the scenes, I have it doing things like tossing blog feeds to Instapaper, which drops them onto my Kindle whenever I remember to turn the wifi on, and sending me a daily text message with the weather forecast. Notably, now that Google has inconveniently discontinued the text alerts on Calendar -- you're supposed to have a smartphone brilliant enough to access data from anywhere, which I do not -- I can get it to toss the notification emails from my Gmail inbox to my phone via SMS.

I do get notifications from the tumblr ask box, so if you have a question, feel free to drop it in there.

I do not, however, reblog things on tumblr. It's not because I do not love all your weird little brains; it's because the interface makes me froth at the mouth. I hate it. Passionately. Chrome (or an extension) hates it too, so if I'm linked to a tumblr post, the login/dashboard/reblog buttons don't work properly, even if I smash them a million times to make sure tumblr gets the message. I therefore do not actually go on tumblr, so I don't see anything that cycles through there unless someone specifically sends me the URL.

I also have a delicio.us account, which you can probably find if you have half a mind to, but it exists specifically so that when I bookmark random stuff on it, said random stuff also gets IfTTT-thrown onto tumblr. It is completely unsorted and probably looks like someone upended a bookshelf of medical periodicals and cat videos. I don't want to just flat pipe everything that goes to Instapaper onto tumblr; some of them are personal blogs of personal friends, Instapaper tends to throw things onto the feed two or three times if I haven't checked lately and the article is still marked 'unread', and the service also has an irritating habit of cutting me off after so many articles and bugging me to pay for an unlimited subscription.

I don't Pinterest. You all can Pinterest if you want. I find the interface at least as obnoxious as tumblr, and leave it alone. Linking me to Pinterest posts doesn't work, because Pinterest blocks you from seeing the whole thing unless you have a Pinterest account, which strikes me as fucking obnoxious, but never mind.

Blogger does let you set up static pages, and I'm going to try to maintain a list of awesome media I consume, but no promises on speed. I don't know if you've noticed, but there is a lot of stuff on the interwebs, and I send a lot of it through my brain. The Kindle is brilliant, not just because I can carry three million pages of whatever without getting scoliosis, but because I can turn the text-to-speech on and have the gizmo read it all to me as I walk around, operating fare gates and crossing streets and generally watching where I'm going. It's not the smoothest speech synth ever invented, but it does come free with the widget, and it's at least not too unintelligent. It has lately figured out "freem," and gets "truthiness" mostly right. Amusingly, it gets the first vowel in "Colbert" too short, but correctly intuits that the end is read as per French.

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