It’s been a long time

It’s been an incredibly long time since my last post on this blog. This post is partially a reminder to myself, that I have no intention of ever closing this blog. In fact, I often compost new posts in my head when not online, and never get around to posting about them. I need to fix that.

So, in no particular order, here is some random stuff I’ve been involved with or are on my mind right now.

• I still run Waste Nothing, a project I introduced in my previous post. While it is the same basic site as it was when I first announced it, it has been improved in almost every way since then. There’s lots more still to go. Waste Nothing has it’s own blog, but I have largely only been announcing major updates on there, and the same goes for the Waste Nothing twitter account.
• Largely as a result of Waste Nothing, there are lots of little web development tidbits or techniques I’ve done that I think are worth sharing with others, and I’ve intended for a long time to write them up here for everyone’s benefit. I’m still planning on that.
• I had put my Quizify project on hold to focus on Waste Nothing, and that is still the case. Someone wanted to use quizify.com, and as I wasn’t really using it much, I let it go. So if and when I come up with an online quiz/study tool in the future, it won’t be at that address. I’ve returned to Quizify’s old url, faganm.com/quizify/, and that page will have further information if there every is any.
• Waste Nothing provides information about all sorts of waste reduction options; largely local services that are different everywhere. I’ve now begun one such local service, the Toronto Clothing Repairathon, which is in the early stages but will probably have its first event in April.
• I was initially pretty upset about the closing of Google Reader. After all, I’m am extremely dependent on it, and have been for years. I switched to it after years of using Bloglines, when that services was starting to fail too often to use. But I’m starting to think that it’s a good thing… many similar services are starting to spring up and existing competitors are improving their operations. I refuse to believe this is the death of RSS, and perhaps it’ll lead to greater innovation that Google Reader was effectively stifling.
• Twitter… so many years on, and I still haven’t figured it out. I have a couple of accounts (personal, Fagan Finder, Waste Nothing, Repairathon), but writing short things frequently has never been my style. I’m much better at spending a long time to do something carefully researched and thought out. Despite this, I’m trying to force myself to adopt the Twitter-style cultural norms for my newest project at the Repairathon twitter account. It feels weird. On my Waste Nothing Twitter account, I follow tons of other accounts related to reducing waste in some way (over 1,300)… which sounds cool, but it makes Twitter completely useless for actually reading. The signal-to-noise ratio on the site just does not work. There’s a feature they have (Discover > Tweets) that works a bit better, but I know there’s got to be something much better than that still.
• I thought the genetic testing offered by 23andMe was really cool when it first came out, but it was far too expensive for me to even consider it. Not anymore, and I finally did the test a few months ago. My ancestry results were very much what I expected, but it is still very neat to see that all, as well as the health information. Oh, and I’m 2.5% neanderthal.