Every blog has its own rhythm. I believe there’s some common wisdom about defining your target audience, content guidelines and writing style. In my case I just started posting and the rest happened. But every once in a while you need a change of pace.

As a regular reader, you would expect opinionated posts about the REST/WS War of Attrition, the dynamics of meta-programming, and my aversion to Interchangeable Developer Encapsulation and “tooling”.

Recently, I tried adding some flavor to the blog, with a handful of short tech-less posts on whatever I felt like talking about, and … well it didn’t stick. It felt off, different, conflicting.

So I stopped and went back to the mythical drawing board. I tossed a few ideas in my head, but eventually all roads lead back to Tumblr. So I decided to give it a try. I’ve seen a few tumblelogs before and liked the format, but never seriously considered them. Well, add that one to the list of eye opening experiences.

I won’t try to define a tumblelog, just tell you what I like about it. The format is short posts. No archives, categories, sidebar, not even a way to leave comments on individual posts. Lightweight. These are not conversation starters, they’re pointers to interesting things that happen around us. Links to other sites, cool photos, memorable quotes, snippets of consciousness.

We rarely consider how much software design influences the way we operate. It promotes that which it makes easy and accessible. And I’m not above being influenced. I like the editing facility of WordPress with its WYSIWYG editor, but that which makes it infinitely flexible and capable, also renders it an obstacle. It’s too slow.

It takes me too long to format quotes, hyperlink text, position images and double-check that paragraphs don’t run into each other. That’s a filter. And a lot of short posts get filtered into oblivion.

Enter Tumblr.

Tumblr is a lesser known service that deserves much more attention. In two wrods: it rocks!

Tumblr has six types of posts: links, quotes, photos, video, conversation snippets, and anything-goes HTML. It’s that distinction of content types that makes posting so damn easy. Click the bookmarklet and pop comes a window for linking to the current page, just hit submit and you’re done.

Worth quoting? Select the text and click the bookmarklet for an insta-quote. Interesting photo? Hit the bookmarklet and you’ve made a post. Did I mention damn easy?

The pop-up window lets you tab between different post types, so you can go from quote back to link, or from link to photo (it even lets you pick an image without hunting & gathering the URL). Switch between the tabs and you’ll understand that there are nuances for each of these post types. Treating each type differently, and the single-minded focus on quick/short posts is the secret that will turn you into a speed-blogger.

So there.

Give a warm welcome to bytesized.labnotes.org, the lighter side of Labnotes. Just enough daily posts to help you procrastinate, or keep you company while you’re waiting for Eclipse to load up.

As for me, apparently I’ve been relegated into a machine for moving interesting posts from my feed reader to yours.

Update: The brains behind Tumblr are planning new features, which earned them a favorable writeup on TechCrunch earlier today.

This time, the theme is based on the excellent Simpla theme by Phu. It’s clean, simple and elegant.

Not only does it look good, but the code itself is simple and elegant, a pleasure to work with. Since I can’t just use a theme without tweaking it.

So, I went and added hAtom support. Didn’t take long, hAtom is much easier than writing RSS/Atom feeds. Just change a few class names, add a couple of spans and abbr tags. No XMLs to worry about, no namespaces, no content encoding (good luck with that). Your blog is your feed, there’s only one file to worry about.

I’m still on the fence about hAtom. I realize most people are too lazy to do their styling right, so getting the code to produce a correct feed seems easier. But it could change if there were some other obvious benefits to getting your HTML semantically rich and well structured.

Like, for example, using the wonderful WordPress Widgets. If your sidebar is a proper list instead of a kludge, you can add these Widgets with one line of code, or mix them with your own. It literally took one line of code.

And I also added MicroID. A lot of semantics in just a few hours. The beauty of Microformats.

Besides that, it now has its very own co.mments blog. So if you want to check out what’s new with co.mments, what features are coming, make your own suggestions, voice your opinion, etc, head over to the new blog.

This blog will now resume its normal scheduled programming. Ruby, Ajax, microformats, WordPress and my personal raves and rants. And some behind the scene discussions on the making of co.mments.

So bear with me one more day. Because tomorrow, Friday night at 11pm Pacific co.mments is going down for maintenance for a few hours. And when it comes back, it will be running on a new server. And the new server is FAST.

1. Multilingual support. This was a sore point and will be fixed in the new release.
2. Support for a few more blogs, MetaFilter and Upcoming.org.
3. Feeds will show number of unread comments in title and longer titles.
4. A few performance improvements.

Let me introduce you to co.mments.com.

It’s a simple idea. Bookmark a conversation you want to follow from your browser, and get all the new comments delivered to your feed reader. The co.mments server takes care of finding out new comments, grouping them by conversation and keeping track of the ones you’ve read.

Right now it will work with most WordPress and MovableType blogs, Blogger, Flickr and Digg. More coming up.

It’s the first release, so be patient. It’s rough around the edges, not all the features are there yet, and it’s not the fastest server in the world. But it’s functional and you can try it out today. And if there’s a feature you want, or an improvement you can think of, just let me know.

Update: I’m getting a lot of traffic from MetaFilter, so I went and added it. Now you can also bookmark MetaFilter discussions.

Update: We know have our very own official Tag Cloud(tm). I’m sure Limbo will be excited, now that the metadata is all meta.

I’ve also added daily links for stuff that’s just too short to post.

And while we’re still serving RSS with fries and a soft drink, it’s now officially buttoned ‘subscribe’, thanks to 9mmfilm.com.

Limbo and Ryan found out how to monetize on eyeballs by creating a new service that combines the best in Web 2.0 technologies, all with only $30 of VC funding. Best yet, their tagged, aggregated, syndicated user created content is funny and snarky. I bet it gets them laid.

Anyway, now that I boosted their PageRank and propelled them to the Technorati top 100, time for some self promotion. Yours truely has been promoted to guest blogger on supr.c.ilio.us. I’m still waiting for the business cards and company credit card to arrive, but I’m loving my new desk here at supr.c.ilio.us HQ. From there I will be reporting on the ever evolving English 2.0 language, and be ever so[self referencial.

Version 0.6 of [TagsLinks](http://trac.labnotes.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/TagsLinks) is a cosmetic update that uses the new TransOverlay library.

Earlier versions used OverLIB, a nifty library with a million and one options for managing tooltips, pop ups, etc. It made it possible to hack TagsLinks in a weekend. Now it’s time to move on. The new version uses TransOverlay, itself a weekend hack. I did some tests with FireFox and IE, and it works well enough to put it out there.

[TransOverlay](http://trac.labnotes.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/TransOverlay) has three things I like. It’s small. Owing to the small size, it’s also easy to extend and customize. Instead of options overload, you just plug-in functions to customize its behavior. And it does a nice disappearing act. Move the mouse over a link and keep it there for a second, and the tags links pop up. Move the mouse away and it goes transparent, so you can see what’s hidden underneath. Move the mouse further away and it disappears.

It’s also the first JavaScript I wrote that uses [namespaces](http://spaces.msn.com/members/siteexperts/Blog/cns!1pNcL8JwTfkkjv4gg6LkVCpw!1919.entry), making it easier to mix & match different scripts on the same page.

link: http://trac.labnotes.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/TagsLinks