The Unnecessary Webpage
For awhile I had messed around with making a personal webpage (ThinkTankProject.com, and currently allantan.net) but with the advent of the blog, its become practically useless. There's simply so much cool stuff out there. Here's a breakdown of my current setup:
At the base of it all I use Google's Blogger.com to host my blog (which allows anonymous commenting, and you don't need a blogger.com account to come see unlike services like facebook, hi5, etc). There's tons of templates to choose from, and with a little HTML I customize colors, layout, and add my own thingies ^_^. Made the move from Xanga to Blogger about a year ago and its been great.
Then I add on a few free services (all of you can see I've integrated into my blog along the right hand side):
Del.icio.us provides a way for me to share all my links out there. You'll see my tags under "
my del.icio.us tags". So i.e. you can see my saved links related to literature by clicking the corresponding tag. It's a great service to share the most popular links out there. If I had to name one site that's revolutionized my surfing, this is it. When first looking for sites to help learn Cantonese, all I had to do was go to http://del.icio.us/popular/cantonese and I was able to benefit from all the best sites that others had found. A must-join site for the web savvy (in my humble opinion).
Flickr.com to host my pictures and give me a snazzy flash badge showing a random selection of my latest pictures. Again no membership required to see the pics, and has a nifty, ajax-powered interface. Other good alternative services include yahoo photos, fotki.com, etc.
LibraryThing is a new social book management site. You create an account and enter books you have, or want, and it organizes them all into a shelf for you. Searchs Amazon and other major libraries for book info. So as you can see on the side, I chose to have a badge that shows 3 random books off my librarything shelf. This site also has all the social networking niceties - tagging, ability to see other users that have books in common, ratings, etc.
StatCounter.com offers a no frills simple web counter. Can be set to visible or invisible.
As for me, I may finally give up on working on my own private website. I still am looking for a way to somehow have "articles", which are clearly differentiated from blog posts, and then have them tagged, organized, and linked on the side as well. Something tells me I could somehow superimpose another blogger.com page with its dedicated del.icio.us account to achieve this.. hmm.. *trails off*
1 comment:
Blogger is SO much better, eh? I try to explain to all my friends still on xanga how much better it is, and they don't get it. They're all into the community at xanga, but it's full of retards nowadays anyway. Blogs hosts like google and wordpress are totally built for people who want complete freedom with design. If I don't like my template, I can easily download a new one or make one myself. And with blogger's nifty tags, it makes things even more simpler. I think xangans don't switch because they find it too complicated, but in many ways, it's WAY more simpler. You don't have to wrestle with java to make your page work. Anyway, I'll stop ranting. I'm glad you posted this haha.
As for articles... you can always make a post and just link directly to the post... And the template will remain the same if that's what you want. Or, alternatively, just host the articles yourself?
I'm not sure what you mean by "clearly differentiated".
Post a Comment