Over the past 6 months I’ve simultaneously been managing two blogs - a personal one, amyallcock.com and a work one Amy@MEdTech. At first it seemed like a good idea to separate the work stuff from the personal stuff, but I soon began to realize that the distinction wasn’t as clear as I had anticipated. Often times I would write a post that was relevant to both sites and be very conflicted over where to post it. It became clear that I could not easily separate who I am and what I do, and I began to wonder why I should enforce this distinction in the first place.
So, in order to resolve my identity crisis I have accepted that who I am and what I do can co-exist in peaceful blog harmony and merged the two blogs on amyallcock.com. Not only will this help to provide a more unified sense of self, but managing one blog is much easier than managing two. All previous Amy@MEdTech posts and future work-related posts can be found under both the MEdTech or the Work categories.
I just updated the WordPress theme from a modified form of Kubrick template to a modified form of K2 template. Both themes are by Binary Bonsai with K2 being the latest and greatest offering. K2 is more than just another pretty WordPress template though, as it has a bunch of great new features including schemes (which is an easy way to modify the K2 theme) and plugin support. I’m currently using the del.ici.ous cached plugin to display my del.ici.ous bookmarks and I’ve implemented the fantanstic Flickr RSS plugin on my personal blog.
Originally published December 9, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I’m writing this post from the blogging interface of Flock, a new Mozilla-based web browser which integrates social software technologies like blogging, RSS, Flickr and del.icio.us right into the browser interface. Not only can you write blog posts directly from the browser, but you can use the browser to post and view your del.icio.us bookmarks as well as read your RSS feeds.   Although you can do some of these things in Firefox using Bookmarklets and their RSS subscription feature, the added features and seamless integration that Flock provides makes these technologies that much easier to use.
Originally published October 21, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
A really nice theme to the WordPress admin interface inspired by OS X Tiger, which is huge improvement over the defalt interface. This theme is very slick - not only is easy on the eyes but it’s a breeze to navigate.
The theme was created by the very talented CSS designer Steve Smith of Ordered List and it can be downloaded here.
Originally published June 17, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
This is my first post from the WordPress Dashboard widget. I also just set up the Google Maps widget and the Marquee widget which displays local showtimes.
I must admit, I haven’t used the widgets as much as I intially thought I would. This is partly because I already have some of the functionality offered by the widgets in my Firefox search toolbar - it’s a lot easier to search Wikipeadia from within the browser than to toggle back and forth between the browser and the dashboard. However, given how easy some of these widgets are to configure and access, I can see myself using them a lot more for applications where they decrease the number of steps involved. This is especially true in the case of the Marquee and Wordpress widgets as now I have one-click access to view showtimes and post to my blog.
Originally published June 14, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
