The Modernish Father

For those of you who’ve been following my site(s) since I started “internetting” in 1994, I’m happy to announce the return of an old familiar site component, albeit in a slightly different (and hopefully improved) form. That’s right, kids – The Linkage is back and better than ever for 2008.

I know that some of you were hoping for a return of “Tony Danza: What’s He Good For?” or “Stupid Textbook Quotes”, but I assure you that they’re on the way eventually. I’m just waiting for some licensing deals to materialize first.

2.0? What are you talking about?

Back in the early days of the internet, when doing everything was a total pain in the backside and automating content delivery was just a crazy dream, I had a fairly regularly updated page on my site devoted to links that I found interesting. It was kind of a combination blogroll/personal newsfeed. And since it had to be manually updated, I abandoned it sometime around 2003. (Here’s one version of it from around 2000 that is still floating out there in cyberspace. I sincerely doubt any of those links work now.)

But now that we live in the fancy future with flying cars and online pizza ordering, the tools are available to resurrect The Linkage and make it a little more dynamic, much more flexible and completely automated. Most importantly, those tools are free. We’re pretty big on free around here.

I routinely use del.icio.us to bookmark and catalog articles and sites that I find of particular interest. Now, thanks to some scripts that have been available for quite a while and some random sudden inspiration on my part to do something constructive, I can share all of these things with you in a mildly annoying online capacity.

But what does this mean for you, the allegedly loyal reader?

Well, every few days or so, my trusty little LinkBot will take my most recent del.icio.us bookmarks and generate a blog post listing them for your reading pleasure. You can take a look at what I’ve been reading and see if it floats your boat too. Or you can just look at the list and realize that in social terms, I’m one step away from living in my parents’ basement.

The exact frequency of these posts will vary, as I’ve set a minimum of ten new bookmarks before a new post is generated. Sometimes it might be a week or two between them. Sometimes they might run on consecutive days. It all just depends on how many interesting things I find whilst browsing.

Why I am doing this? The reasons are threefold:

1. I think that some of you might actually find this stuff interesting and this allows me to share without any additional typing on my part.
2. It will pad my post count and make it look like I actually post here more often that I actually do.
3. There is no third reason. I just wanted to use the word “threefold”.

So, there you have it – two solid reasons and a bogus one. Mankind has gone to war, overthrown governments and made a slew of Police Academy sequels with less justification than that.

The first one should be coming down the pipe in a day or so. Since it’s all automated, I’m not exactly sure when the bot will kick in. You’ve been warned.

(P.S. – I’ve also increased the overall font size across the site slightly, so all you people with poor eyesight and/or pretentiously large monitors can stop complaining now.)