With the new year, I am planning to move my "social" blogging to my LiveJournal account (rjray.livejournal.com). Thus far, I've just been using it to enable my LJ-using friends to include me in filters they create for privacy. But it has a lot of features, as any die-hard LJ user will attest, and it just makes more sense to use them than to keep trying to hack Blosxom to add the same basic functionality as already exists. Perhaps one day I'll get around to writing a nifty, pluggable, slick package of my own. But for now, LJ will fill the space just fine.

This site is not going away, though, just changing in its focus. I will be making this domain a portal for the varied blogs I keep (most of which update far too rarely, an issue I'll probably set as part of my New Year's resolutions). Specifically, I will be aggregating all of these many and varied sources into this blog. So if you prefer to read from here, not only will you not miss anything, you'll be getting more than before. Well, you may actually miss some things, because LJ will allow me to create filters for friends which will allow me to write about things that are more personal, things that I currently don't write about here because I have no control over the readership. (I could add more Blosxom plugins or write my own, but that goes back to the previous argument about using LJ instead of reinventing it.) So, you may still miss things, but you wouldn't have seen them anyway so does that really count as missing them?

At present, I plan to be collecting the following here:

• LiveJournal - http://rjray.livejournal.com
• use.perl.org Journal - http://use.perl.org/~rjray/journal
• Java Eye for the Perl Guy - http://jroller.com/page/rjray
• This Week in Warfare - http://www.thisweekinwarfare.net

The last item is a podcast that I started back in May, but which I've only managed two installments. That's also on the resolutions list.

Should I (foolishly) add any other journalling to my pantheon, those too should get reflected here. When I make the switch-over, odds are that the others will initially show up here as a flood. In the case of the LJ, Java and podcast streams that won't be too bad; the LJ account has fewer than 15 posts in it at present, and neither of the Java or podcast blogs has yet reached double-digits. The Perl blog, though, I've been using for quite some time. Whatever the limit of entries it returns in an RSS feed, expect them all to land at once. These things, they happen.

And speaking of RSS (and/or Atom) feeds, if you use them then the one from here will just be that much more useful, since it will encapsulate the whole mess. Currently, there's a syndication channel on LJ that reads the RSS feed for this site. I'm hoping to have the current one removed so that I can re-create it under my ownership (the existing one was created by a friend, but as such my ability to monitor/control it is essentially nil). I may even go so far as to customize a feed specifically for LJ-based syndication (for those of you who read this via that channel, and might be thus interested). Otherwise those who are LJ users already and have me listed as a friend will end up seeing my LJ posts twice, which is not a good way to keep people interested and reading.