Blog updates and a new look

I'm making some retroactive updates to the blog and adjusting the date of each entry so that it appears in the correct place chronologically. Some of these entries correspond to events from days or weeks ago. You might have to scroll down a bit to see them.

Also, I have finally switched to a sans serif font for the blog's main text elements. I have always preferred sans serif fonts for their greater legibility, and this change is long overdue.

More updates are coming soon.

Can the rest of us have our planet back?

No, I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth. In fact, I’m alive and well. I’ve been busy lately though, and haven’t had much time to post updates to the blog. I’ve been doing lots of climbing and dancing as usual, and lots of other fun stuff as well. If you look at my flickr photo stream, you’ll see that although I haven’t been making regular updates to the blog, I have been posting photos. Hundreds of them, in fact.

I’ll try to catch up with my blog postings soon. In the mean time, I wanted to share this little gem with you: Can the rest of us have our planet back?

Do I need more than one blog?

I've been a busy little bee. Check out my other weblogs too see how I've been climbing, dancing, and partying.

This is not the first time I have chosen to post a short summary here that links to updates I have made to my other blogs. This raises a topic that I've been meaning to discuss for a while now. Specifically, I am trying to decide whether there is any longer a need for me to maintain so many blogs.

As my regular readers know, I have several weblogs, each devoted to a different topic:

• Veritas — my main web log
  
• Hit the Rock — rock climbing
• Pedal Power — cycling
• Stockholm Dance — dancing
• Eat, drink & be merry — partying
• Cygnus — nature photos
• Janus — designs & ambigrams
• Michael's Archives — older photos

The original intent of starting multiple blogs was to separate posts by topic. This was necessitated by the fact that I often posted many photos in a single blog entry, and not all of my readers are interested in all of the topics on which I write. For example, a reader most interested in my nature photography might not wish to wade through three dozen climbing or dancing photos just to find the few nature photos that interest him.

However, nowadays I don't usually post more than a couple of photos to my blog in a single entry. With the demise of BloggerBot at the beginning of this year, it became too time-consuming to post many photos at once to my blogs. I signed up for a pro account at flickr and have been posting my photos there ever since. I categorize the photos into different sets, and also and tag them based on date, place, and subject. The sets and tags mirror to a large degree the subdivision of my blogs: biking, climbing, dancing, partying, and so forth. When I have uploaded a new batch of photos to flickr, I usually create a new entry in the appropriate weblog, with a single photo and a link the the whole batch in flickr. On rare occasions I'll include more than one of the photos in the blog entry; but flickr's system does not make doing this very easy, so I usually just post one photo to the blog.

To summarize: the photos already organized by topic on flickr; the original reason for creating multiple blogs (segregating large posts of photos by topic) is obviated by my new habit of posting only one or two photos per blog entry; and lastly, it's more trouble to check multiple blogs than to be able to find all updates in one place. Considering all this, I wonder whether my system of posting to blogs has outlived its usefulness.

Should I post everything to a single blog? Should I continue my current practice of posting to each blog based on topic? Or should I strike a compromise, posting to each blog based on topic, but including the most interesting posts, and an occassional summary, here?

What do you think?

Update 2007-02-23 – On the advice of my readers, I have begun to consolidate my posts on this blog.