I’m not here anymore, now I’m over here! With an (almost) brand new name too.
Things aren’t completely ready over there yet, I’m still making some additions and tidying up here and there, but it’s habitable enough. 
I’ve just upgraded WordPress (yeah I know I’ve been too slow to do that, but I’ve been busy), and put up a new theme to play around with. Hence, lots of stuff is broken and will probably remain so for a day or so.
One thing that’s broken is the OpenID login, and I honestly don’t know why. It was broken before I did the upgrade, so I can’t blame that. If I can’t fix it, it’ll have to go, because I really don’t have oodles of time to spare on fiddling with plugins. Hope I can fix it though, I’d miss the ability to use OpenID on here. Ho-hum.
*edit*
On second thoughts, I’m leaving the theme as it is for now. I’m in the middle of doing a design for another site and don’t want to be distracted from that for the time being. Plus, I kinda like it the way it is.
Yep, it’s true. Even no-life little ole me sometimes has busy periods. During those times I’m less inclined to blog, though I do have a nagging little blog voice at the back of my head telling me to go write something. So here I am.
What have I been busy with? A number of things really. My personal life has had a few ups and downs over the past couple of months, which has left me a little stressed out. But it’s not all bad - on the 8 July I’ll finally be realising an ambition that I’ve had for a couple of years now, I’m doing a one day course (along with lots of ‘homework’) to get my first degree Reiki certificate. I realise a lot of you don’t even know what that is (go here for more info if you want to find out), and those who do often give me a sidelong glance as if to say I’m nuts - but hey, I’ve been used to that all my life and I no longer care! Suffice to say it’s made a huge difference to my life, and I’m really excited to be finally completing the first stage.
I’ve also been attempting to learn Ruby on Rails, though I’ve gotten sidetracked a little with that. It’s been great fun so far, and even though I’m nowhere near having a clue what I’m doing yet I’m determined to persevere. I doubt I’ll get to a professional level with it but I love learning new stuff, especially new geek stuff. Though if by some miracle I did become a RoR expert I wouldn’t object to being paid to do it of course.
I haven’t been completely inactive around the web though, I’ve just been using different mediums. My latest obsession is Facebook, and since they brought out their applications platform I can say for definite I’m not alone. If you’re also on there feel free to add me as a friend. Just do a search for Jackie Plage, I’m pretty sure I’m the only person with that name on Facebook. Twitter posts from me also appear semi-frequently, though in the last few days I’ve been exploring - and loving - Jaiku. There’s probably a post about the differences stored up in the depths of my mind somewhere which I may do in the next few days. Despite outward appearances, they’re actually very different.
I’ve been neglecting my blog I know, but I’m not going to promise it’ll get any better in the near future. I’m having far too much fun doing other things right now.
My favourite music site has just introduced some nice new features.
Widgets
You can now use last.fm widgets on your blog / website. The widget choices we have are recently played / top artists etc., a quilt made up of the covers from your most listened to albums, a playlist player and a radio player. You also get four colour choices - last.fm red (which looks pink to me), black, blue or light grey. You can see the ‘recent tracks’ and playlist widgets in action on my sidebar. I was thinking of adding the album quilt too, but decided that might be slight overkill.
Playlists
Playlists themselves have been around for a while, but whereas previously they only played snippets of a song, they now play the full length tracks (providing they’re available in the last.fm catalogue). Using the aforementioned widget, that means you can easily share your taste in music with your site visitors. The only ‘catch’ is that your list will play in shuffle mode - this is presumably to get around licensing restrictions.
Charts display
It’s now possible to select different periods of time for the charts that show on your profile page. You can choose between your overall charts (as it’s always been) or 3, 6, or 12 month rolling charts. We’re also told that more customisation is on the way.
You can view the official announcement here.
The latest version of the Opera browser brought with it a great new feature called ’speed dial’. What that does is allow you to bookmark 9 sites all within the speed dial tab, and Opera gives you a graphical representation of those sites that you assigned to each ‘dial’. There’s a screenshot here. It looks very slick and is a great tool, very handy for keeping those oft visited sites at your fingertips.
Firefox obviously lacks this feature, but not any more! Firefox users now have the speed dial addon. Though not nearly as well presented as it is in Opera, it does what it says in the tin. It’s been working well enough for me anyway. I do use Opera too (it seems to perform a lot better on my iMac for a start), I can’t get away from Firefox and all its addons, so it’s nice to be able to use this whichever browser I’m in.
Me @ Pownce My Tweets Listening to... del.icio.us links