Tinkering

Since I started this blog an eon ago (Actually last August but it feels like an eternity) I have become an obsessive tinkerer. I probably spend more time futzing with the right hand column than I do actually posting. It's a little like the daunting prospect of a blank piece of paper when I had to write an essay. I could spend an hour finding the right pen, making a cup of tea and some toast, etc, anything to postpone actually writing anything. But I digress.

In the last month or so I have added and removed a variety of widgets - clocks, sphere and a bunch of other things - that just made my typepad blog even slower than it already is.  The ones that seem to be sticking other than the blog roll, category cloud and other basic hygiene, are the platial map of "Great Places to Sail", which is now at 43 places, and the Project Beagle donation link.

My latest piece of tinkerage is a rip-off from Ant's Soulsailor blog (thanks Ant!). It's a nifty little Google thing called snippets. Basically if you use the Google reader to aggregate your feeds you can tag articles as shared and then feed these into a widget on your blog.  I was a bit skeptical at first but I thought it was pretty cool when I saw that Ant reads a lot of the same blogs I do like gaping void.

Ant recently did a great post on all kinds of new social web services including a totally bizarre one called Twitter. I'm with Ant on this one - I don't get the point. Either that or I am too old to get it. Basically it allows you to let people know what you are doing at any moment. Right now I am doing a blog post. Who freaking cares.

Anyway, lets see if this snippet thing sticks.