As you may have realized, my blog has been down for about a fortnight, on and off. Well I promise (well Peppery promises) that it won’t happen again anytime soon. Now I shall return to posting on a regular  schedule knowing that the blog will be up for me to do so. I am going to try for a daily post because I have the time to do that now that I am on holiday.

Well now exams are over and from Monday at 10:30am, I am officially on holiday, although my body and mind have been on holiday for a good two and a half weeks already. I managed to struggle though my exams without studying and we can see the results (or lack of) from this exercise. Lets hope I managed to fluke everything again like last year.

At the end of March this year, I left a service called Twitter. Today marks the day I return to the service because a lot of my online contacts use it and I have been following them for some time now. I feel it is time for me to participate with them on the website so tweeting commences on my original Twitter profile. I hope that this time I can stay a little longer, just long enough for the service to capture me in its net and not let me leave. We will see how this turns out.

Well last time I tried to post, this time last week, something when wrong. I can’t explain what happened and never got round to re-writing the post. I  decided I would take a week off from blogging and in that time school has ended, study hasn’t started, life continues and I think its a holiday. This is going to come back and bite me in the arse, mark my words.

Tuesday was the last day of classes. It was a good day actually. Surfing the internet first period in ICT because I had long finished the assessment that at least two thirds were still trying to complete. Then I had a period of absolutely nothing. Then my final period of 2007, Electronics. Yet again I just wandered around, somewhat pleased with myself for being the only person to complete the course with two periods to spare. Then someone came along and managed to finish aswell, just in the nick of time. Two out of thirty of so people doing electronics actually completing the course in time is an extremely low number. Then it was lunch time and home time.

Prizegiving was also that night. I hadn’t expected to get anything because I have been extremely slack this year and hadn’t achieved very much to be honest. Anyway, I managed to slip in to get a certificate. Surprised me. Wasn’t happy to be there though, would have preferred to be home watching Heroes, Prison Break and Chuck instead.Managed to fit them in the night anyway so I was pleased.

Generally through the week, the TV shows, podcasts and video podcasts stack up for me to watch in the weekend. Since I have been home, that hasn’t happened. I have many hours free and I try to find ways to fill in the time. I should probably be studying instead of checking things off my media list, I’m afraid that the next two and a half months are going to be long, very long. I should probably spend that time watching some of the TV series I have downloaded and stored somewhere else to watch later.

I am running out of ideas on subjects to post about so if anyone has any ideas for me, *cough* Peppery *cough*, they would be greatly appreciated. I can’t wait for November to end so I have that free time to myself and school and exams out of the way. Next year, my final year, is going to be a strange and tough year. I don’t know whether to be scared or happy about finally leaving school.

And this is the first week of term four over. I though I wouldn’t be able to fit everything into my week but somehow I managed, even with the many obsticles. I have two more tv shows to watch and one more podcast to listen to for the week that that all my media consumed, for this week at least. Having no laptop and having a lot of other events, such at my other commitments as well as my grandmothers 80th birthday,  have been some distractions of the week and I will easily fit everything into a regular week. Because of the week, the posts here have been a bit weak. I promise a couple of post with more in them next week.

Onto another subject, I want to remind you all that this is a personal blog. No news here, just me and my life. If you are not interested in this, please do yourself a favor and unsubscribe from the feed. It sounds odd that someone is asking for people to subscribe, normally people are harping on for people to subscribe and such. To be honest, I don’t care about how many people read this, how many people subscribe here or how many people comment here. If you want to, you are most welcome. I don’t need people to criticize my posts , especially about spelling and grammar. If it bothers you that much, refer to what I said a few sentences back, I don’t need you commenting on grammar errors. If you don’t want to get over it and really must say something that is irrelevant to the topic of the post, email me.

With that out of my system, I will continue to do what I normally do. I hope to get my laptop back before Heroes, Prison Break and Chuck on Tuesday. I hate watching these widescreen shows on a standard monitor. Its amazing how much I miss my laptop. You don’t really realize how useful something, or someone is and how much they mean to you until you do not have them. This is how I feel about my laptop and I hope that she never has to part from me ever again. I miss you lappy!

A couple of days ago, Digg rolled out its new profile page on Digg. There are heaps of differences and everything has changed in a way that you can get a little confused when you first use it but quickly find your way around. The main goal to this is to make the site more social and not just a bookmarking/news finding site. Now let me talk about the new profiles as well as give my opinion on them.

As soon as you enter a person profile page, the changes become apparent. First off, up the top we see the 3 newest favoured stories from the user followed about ten of the users most recent activity, including stories dugg, commented on, submitted and even new friends added and shouts. Under that is the last ten shouts you have received. Down the right hand side is a little about section which includes a space for your bio as well as links to your other internet services, photos, friends, and the usual statistics about your digging habits.

The new profile page is really nice looking and smooth. Having more than just the most recent stories you have dugg and one favourite is really what your profile page should have had from the start. It is also nice to see all the types of activity that a person has recently done on the site, it really shows that there is more to Digg than just digging the stories. Shouts are not a feature I think is that great. It is very similar to Pownce, I wonder why. This feature is a little unneeded in my opinion and if they really wanted to do this, they probably could have integrated it with their Pownce service instead of making it individual to Digg. I don’t use the feature because I don’t see any reason to, it doesn’t add anything and is really not worth using.

Being able to see a little About section about a user is good. It gives you a little background information on who the person is and a little bit about their life outside of Digg. Links to peoples Pownce, Facebook, Flickr, Blog or whatever else they have signed up to is nice. It may be a bit creepy if you have a stalker but otherwise it is a nice feature so you are able to follow your fellow Diggers around other services, not only Digg. They also have the ability to upload pictures to the site for other people to see. This is another useful feature which I think should have been cut. They could have found a way to integrate with a popular service, like Flickr, that everyone already uses instead of making a cheap one themselves. It is also great to be able to see a few of the users friends on this page too.

The profile statistics are really interesting. They have added on the page a space where you can see the most dugg topics the person has dugg in the past 30 days. This is cool because it allows you to see which section and which types of stories the user likes to digg and can help with finding new friends on digg with similar tastes to your digging. It still has the same stats from the old profile page with total stories dugg, commented, submitted, the percentage of your stories that make the front page, friends referred and the number of profile views (that number should start to rise with it being more social and profiles more appealing to look at.)

With the profile pages done up, they haven’t gotten rid of your history page, as well as your friends history page. They are still there but the big difference is that there are now useful filters. You can now filter down to the thing you are looking for, whether it is stories dugg, submitted or even comments and shouts. These filters are on both of these pages and make it much easier to filter through the content. You can always view all activity if that is what you prefer.

With these new features, I have been noticing more people adding friends, including people adding me. They have email notifications for activities you select which has allowed me to follow who is adding me as a friend. It seems now that it is so easy to do and follow people, it is becoming more social and randoms are adding randoms, just like of other social networking sites. I personally won’t be adding randoms because I plan on using the site for what it was primarily set for, news and articles. I am only friending my friends and the few people that digg similar stores as I would.

I think it is nice that they are taking a step into trying to make the site more social but I personally could do without it. I think that they should be concentrating on the news side of things and strengthen there instead of moving in a different are, one which is being done so much that they can really succeed or grow because of it. I am going to stick to doing what I do best, digging, and they should do that too!

If you don’t already know, I have a Tumblelog hosted by Tumblr. I follow other peoples good tumblelogs, and people who have similar interests to me. I have recently been so annoyed and frustrated by two people I follow that it has resulted in me unfollowing them.

The first person I unfollowed annoyed me by spamming his twitter posts in his tumblelog. This results in about 20 post a day that consist of short messages taken from his twitter RSS feed. It is annoying because now my Tumblr dashboard is full of spam. Why would someone put spam in their tumblelog. If someone wanted to see your twitter posts, they would follow you there. There is no reason to move that into your tumblelog.

The second person annoyed me because I would see posts that they have reblogged off my tumblelog but they never sourced me. Everyone who has any kind of blog, whether its a full weblog, a tumblelog or even a microblog, they all source where they get things from. Its etiquette as well as common sense, well so I though. Unfollowing them isn’t going to stop them from not sourcing the people he gets content from but it mean I don’t have to see it, therefore can’t be that bothered by it.

So if anyone does these things, I am going to stop following them, whether it is on Tumblr, Twitter, a Blog or any other place online for that matter. Its annoying and frustrating! Don’t Spam and Source your posts! These things are so obvious but yet there are people that do it. I wonder how they would react if they were the one reading spam or the one that was having something they found or wrote and have that content used without sourcing!

Well if you are reading this, you are obviously aware of the changes. First off, the blog has been moved off Wordpress MU to an independent blog, it is still hosted my Word Dissociation though. It should look and work exactly the same as it did before with a few minor changes.

The theme is the same as well as most of the plugins. All the posts and comments were imported here so they aren’t gone either. The feed was changed so the Feedburner feed was pointing to the right place. This shouldn’t have effected you but you may have noticed previous posts appearing in your readers.

The only differences are the URL. It should be slightly easier to remember at http://yum9me.worddissociation.net. I am currently working on getting a dedicated domain for this blog and my Tumblr to make it easier to access my sites. There are also two new plugins for comments, Gravatar, which is a avatar service. You can sign up and assign your avatar at their site. The second is Firestats, which shows your country, OS and browser along with your comments.

It was extremely quick migration and would have been unnoticed to a lot of people. I would like to thank Peppery for providing this service to me and for his help with the blog, and other things online. Cheers to him!

This blog is attempt number five of doing the blogging thing. So far I end up doing if for a week and then either republish others content or just leave it because I can’t be bothered. Let see if this time is different.

Suggestions welcome to keep this one alive!