My friend Amy came over from the UK for a nice long weekend – mostly for Fasnacht, but we also managed to fit in a trip to the spa and into the snowy Bernese Alps. She also got me to finally sign up to Instagram. I’ve set up DsgnWrks Instagram Importer, because I figure this might be a nice way to share a bit of my day-to-day life here on my own, forever-neglected blog… Enjoy! 🙂
Category Archives: Site
Housekeeping
Being something of a pop culture geek and avid media consumer (seriously, I spend waaay too much time on my couch *g*), I read and watch in a wide variety of genres. I love fantasy, cosy mysteries, science fiction, romance (straight as well as gay) and crime procedurals as well as non-fiction about history, science & culture. I have recently started to use this blog to post reviews for these things and try to keep to an (at least) one-post-per-week schedule.
You can find additional information as well as links to the places where I keep track of the things I read and watch on my About page.
Tinkering…
I’ve been kind of wanting to do something, anything with this blog for a while now, and in the past couple of days I’ve been considering writing more review-type posts, like the one about Pacific Rim or what I occasionally post on BookLikes/GoodReads.
I have opinions, why not share them? 🙂 After all, I’ve been rating (almost) every movie I’ve watched for over a decade on imdb. As for books, I only recently migrated all my reading lists – which I’ve been keeping since 2004 – to BL because of my dissatisfaction with GR policies. (They allow automatic crossposting, so I’m not losing my GR connection. Reminds me a bit of the Livejournal/Dreamwidth situation.) Only today they launched Blogger crossposting, so I’m hopeful WordPress isn’t far behind.
So I installed a couple of useful-looking plugins and tweaked some minor things in the sidebar – now I guess only time will tell if I’ll actually stick to it. I was thinking of doing about 1-2 posts per week, that seems doable. If you want me to ramble about a specific book/movie/tv show, just give me a shout. 😉
Social media integration
Having never been entirely happy with spamming this blog with tweets I decided to forego the digest posts. You can find recent tweets as well as Flickr & Youtube posts in the sidebar, as before, but now there’s also a Social Stream page, powered by RebelMouse.
Quick layout change
In honour of the beauty that is Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers dancing, I decided to change my WordPress theme. The image is from their 1938 movie Carefree, from the delightful The Yam, one of only four musical numbers. They’re well worth it, though, and the rest of the movie is thoroughly enjoyable, too, showing off Ginger’s comic talent at its best and poking fun at Freudian psychoanalysis.
I also switched from daily to weekly Twitter digests, because the blog felt unnecessarily cluttered.
Okay, that’s weird…
For some reason comments on my entries show up as closed, although I’ve enabled them. I have no idea why – maybe a problem with the new theme? I might change it and see what happens…
ETA: Okay, that didn’t help. So annoying!
ETA2: So I disabled Disqus comments and suddenly comments work again. Weird!
Well, finally…
Tonight I felt like doing something “webby”, so I finally went looking for a new Twitter plugin, because Twitter Tools no longer supports daily digest posts since its integration with Social. I feel rather awful about the flood of separate tweets that were posted – but thanks to Twitter Digest, this is a thing of the past (I hope)!
I also changed the theme, just because I was bored of the old look. I might change it again if I ever find a theme that seem appropriate for a rarely-updated blog like this one…
In other news, the year has started, my birthday has passed, and with some new meds I’m hoping that 2013 will be decidedly more cheerful than 2012. Last Saturday I invited a bunch of friends (and their kids, because that’s how old we are *g*) on a very Swiss outing: first the cheese making exhibit in Gruyère (my favorite cheese!) and then the chocolate factory of Cailler. It turned out to be an excellent day, especially the chocolate exhibition was very well done and exciting. This is my new favorite picture of myself:
The handful of other pics I took can be found, as always, on my Flickr.
Amusing little tool…
It analyzes your writing on your blog. Apparently I come across as younger – I can live with that. 🙂
Vidcast #3
Testing the Youtube webcam interface and rambling mostly about my planned London trip:
In other news, as I write this, there have been 999 visitors to this site since I installed the counter at the end of May – no comments still, but definitely more traffic, so that’s cool. Also, I’m kind of tickled by the almost-1000… Whoever completes the number, I hope your day is lovely! 🙂
Moving things
Now that I’m actively trying to create actual content for this blog, the daily Twitter digest posts were getting on my nerves. So now you can find them in the sidebar, along with all the other clutter. Also new in the sidebar is ‘Question Time’, where I might ask you your opinion on stuff every now and then.
In other ‘moving’ news, there’s a first open viewing of my flat next Thursday, so today my mom came by with my aunt and uncle’s car, and we ferried a carload of stuff from my shelves to my parents’ basement (books, DVDs, paperwork, stuffed animals and assorted knickknacks). I just couldn’t face having a bunch of strangers judge my clutter, and I have NO SPACE to store boxes here in my shoebox of a one-room flat. Since I was in New Zealand when my parents moved away from Basel (where I’d been living with them), I actually have my own storage room in the basement of their apartment building, so that’s very handy indeed.