I think I’m done bouncing around now, though: As you may or may not already know, I’ve started working for the Mozilla Corporation—I’ve got a username and everything! I’m a little overwhelmed at the moment by changes and drinking from a new firehose, so my enthusiasm may not yet be readily apparent. But, remember that I’m a complete web geek—and it’s hard to get closer to web geekery than this.

But, one of the nicest things about this new Mozilla gig is that I’m going to start telecommuting. And the reason that’s nice is because—and here’s the next big thing—my wife and I have bought a beautiful house in Livonia, Michigan, and we’re moving back to the Midwest in a month and some change.

Why? Because, after almost two years out here in the valley, we’ve discovered that being away from family and old friends while trying to make new friends and adjust to a very different locale was a lot harder than first imagined. And, well, it would’ve been much longer than we’d've liked before we could have afforded a house at all—let alone something anything like what we’ll be enjoying back in Michigan.

The thing is, though, I’ve still got a lot of love for the Bay Area and its goings on—I’ve been pining for this place since at least the age of eight, after all. And, we have made a few good friends out here, despite the difficulties we’ve experienced.

So luckily, this Mozilla gig looks like the ideal thing. I’m hoping it will ensure regular return visits to enjoy SuperHappyDevHouses, the scent of star jasmine in the summer, and amazing cloudless skies lasting for days.

But, on the other hand—although I’m certainly not relishing the thought of readjusting to cold, clouds, and snow in a few months—I’m getting excited about the prospects of being back in southeastern Michigan. Our house will be pretty close to both Ann Arbor and Detroit, and it seems like some interesting things have started warming up since we left. Also, I suspect (and hope) we’ll discover a lot of friends and like-minded associates in short order upon our return.

Lots of change. Very busy. Not a little exciting. But, I’m hopeful that things are going to get a lot better very soon.

So, blogging, I thought, would give me a real or imagined motivation to finish some projects. The difference between writing a blog and working alone in the basement, is that there’s a chance someone outside my physical neighborhood might catch a few mutterings and knock on my door to have a chat—rather than just walking a little faster and avoiding my house in the future, like the local neighbors usually do when I find myself really going off on a tear.

Thus if someone, somewhere showed interest in things I was doing and describing—then maybe I might just stick with one or two of them long enough to declare a version worthy of a freshmeat.net release. (It’s been awhile, but that used to be my gold standard for Real Software.)

However, I’ve realized that occasional visitors won’t magically help me finish software. I’ve come to accept that I’m far too much a serial enthusiast to release much at v1.0 without a paycheck or some other substantial incentive. But that’s okay, because tinkering with unfinished software still seems to attract occasional visitors. And, where there are visitors, there are contacts and conversations. And, where there are contacts and conversations, there’s learning and fulfillment—two of my favorite things.

Apropos of conversations, though, I’ve gone habitually quiet in the past few years. I’ve gone from claiming that hacking is my World of Warcraft to just getting sucked into WoW proper. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve wondered what I ever talked about here. Yeah, I’ve written this kind of entry many times before—but I don’t feel it’s gotten better.

I’m really out of the flow here, but I don’t think giving it up is the right thing to do. I’ve been doing some retrospection (in volumes one and two), and have been reviewing what I’ve done here. I’m getting some ideas, and hoping I can get myself back into acting on them.

It might be a little while before I produce anything on a regular basis, because I’m currently working on a third book, entitled Professional JavaScript Frameworks. And, on top of that, I’ve got a bit of a transition going on in my life right now.

But, waking things up here is something I’d like to make part of that transition.

• 2007 Sep 25: l.m.orchard’s OPML blog: Tuesday, September 25, 2007
  • My dad passed away, and I tried to take something positive away from it.
• 2006 Sep 18: Just call me “Crash”
  • The conditions for my hermitage in Silicon Valley were established early.
• 2006 Aug 09: Hacking del.icio.us is out and about!
  • Wherein I celebrate my second book appearing on store shelves.
• 2006 Jun 24: Go West, Young Man!
  • The one where we pack it all up and head to California.
• 2006 Jun 09: Wedding Day is Today
  • An announcement of becoming the luckiest man on the planet.
• 2006 May 26: Confessions of a Serial Enthusiast
  • An analysis of my inability to finish anything on my own site.
• 2006 Feb 09: A Long-Tailed Creative Yawp
  • A celebration of the long tail and befriendable creators.
• 2006 Jan 27: Don’t Pee in the Potato Chips
  • Wherein I try to acknowledge some of the things I owe to Dave Winer and be nice in the future.
• 2006 Jan 01: Look, Mom, I’m on the radio!
  • I got interviewed on a radio show about my first book, yay!
• 2005 Sep 13: Hacking RSS and Atom is out!
  • Wherein I celebrate my first book hitting the shelves.
• 2005 Jun 17: We’re engaged!
  • An announcement of intention of becoming the luckiest man on the planet.
• 2005 Jan 07: Beginner’s Mind versus Teacher’s Mind
  • Cultivating an open mind and an attenuated ego.
• 2004 Dec 03: If you snore, get tested for sleep apnea. Now.
  • Sleep apnea sucks. If you snore, get checked out.
• 2004 Nov 02: I ran out of costume ideas
  • The one where I dress up like an iPod for Halloween.
• 2004 Oct 11: All Growed Up as an Info Freako
  • A reflection on how I grew up to be this odd and information addicted.
• 2004 Oct 07: Falling for the Podcasting Hype
  • Wherein I express my early interest in podcasting, despite or because of amateurism.
• 2004 Jul 14: Dork Funk
  • Another periodic navel-gaze into my life as a blogger and a dork.
• 2004 May 25: I was a pre-teen Transactor author wannabe (and still am!)
  • A declaration of what my perfect blog might look like.
• 2003 Jul 23: This evening’s sleep brought to me by science
  • Wherein I first start using a CPAP machine and treat my sleep apnea. Go get tested if you snore.
• 2003 Oct 16: Seeking Out Opposites
  • Another way to keep forcing brain expansion.

Why? Because I’ve been using WordPress for a few years, and I felt like a change. Maybe in another few months I’ll convert over to Blosxom again, or try ExpressionEngine for the first time. Now, if only I could get all the timestamps right so some of my late-night posts don’t have broken permalinks due to day changes. Maybe I’ll end up just sticking with WordPress after all.

But anyway, I’m also having another bout of periodic existential doubt about what I’m doing here with a blog. So, in navel-gaze mode, I spent time a few nights ago skimming and reading through all 1000 or so entries I’ve written here. I do this periodically with the scores of paper journals I’ve accumulated to recenter and reconnect with myself, but I’ve never done it here.

So, for my own reference more than anything, here’s 0xDECAFBAD Greatest Hits Vol 1, the Tinkery Bits.

It may be presumptuous to ask, but if anyone actually reads through this list and thinks of something worth surfacing that I missed—by all means, let me know. I’m trying to remind myself what I started this thing for.

• 2008 Jan 31: Metablogging
  • A look at all the different tools I’ve tried using for blogging lately.
• 2007 Dec 24: An Accumulator for all my stuff
  • About building my own lifestreaming thingy.
• 2007 Oct 17: OPML reading lists in FeedMagick2
  • More work on OPML reading lists and merging feeds.
• 2007 Jul 23: A Curmudgeon Playing with the CodeIgniter Framework and OpenID
  • Reporting on learning a new PHP framework.
• 2006 Apr 21: An S3 AJAX Wiki
  • Building a wiki based on Amazon S3 and client-side code.
• 2006 Mar 25: About XoxoOutliner
  • Building a browser-based outliner that deals in XHTML and XOXO.
• 2005 Dec 13: FeedMagick, the feed filter that doesn’t know much about feeds
  • Munging, converting, and merging feeds without destroying content.
• 2005 Oct 05: FeedSpool is progressing nicely
  • Fetching, caching, and spooling up feed updates without destroying content.
• 2005 Jul 12: In-browser XOXO Outliner Experiment
  • Early experiments in microformat-based outlining.
• 2005 Jun 08: Magic Microformat Forms Redux, Now with GreaseMonkey!
  • Expressing my enthusiasm for microformats in code.
• 2004 Dec 12: Building an Address Book as a Modern Web App
  • An unfinished attempt to demonstrate what everyone would soon be doing with AJAX.
• 2004 Nov 30: Next generation web apps using REST, XML, XSLT, and XmlHTTPRequest
  • Wherein I try to talk about AJAX before the the name was coined.
• 2004 Jun 16: Wish-of-the-Month Club, Part 1 of 3
  • The first in a series of articles building a wishlist project atop Amazon web services, an attempt at writing something publication-worthy.
• 2003 Sep 02: Using web services and XSLT to scrape RSS from HTML
  • Progressing from perl scraping hacks to cleaner XSLT-based feed scraping.
• 2003 Aug 31: Bookmark Blogger in Python
  • I would later abandon this entirely for del.icio.us, but I’ve been bookmark-blogging for awhile.
• 2003 Aug 22: Scraping HTML with curl, tidy, and XSL
  • Trying to bring some cleaner approaches to web scraping beyond regular expressions.
• 2003 Jun 19: Desktop server + Flash GUI?
  • Eventually, things like Adobe Air would fill this niche, I think.
• 2003 Mar 06: Building Pipelines with Web Services
  • I still haven’t seen much work toward using pipelined HTTP-based web services.
• 2003 Feb 15: Say hello to Agent Frank
  • This project got abandoned, but I did release this overly-complex Java-based personal HTTP proxy.
• 2003 Feb 04: Bookmark blogging from Safari via a quick hack
  • Prescient of my eventual extreme enthusiasm for del.icio.us, I started blogging my bookmarks.
• 2002 Dec 28: Universal personal proxies & agent companions
  • Initial thoughts toward Agent Frank and filtering / analyzing my own web consumption.
• 2002 Nov 26: XML-RPC, a mini case study
  • Wherein I talk about how XML-RPC has worked for me.
• 2002 May 31: RSS autodiscovery via the HTML LINK element
  • It’s the orange feed button everywhere now—here’s how it started.
• 2002 Apr 18: Auto-backlinks from blog entries via referral logs
  • Building backlinks from referer logs to help weave the blogosphere. It was great until the spammers ruined it, though Sam Ruby has a neat implementation.
• 2002 Apr 18: Pipelining the web makes for messy URLs
  • It’s awkward to express pipelines on the web using URLs.
• 2002 Apr 17: REST. What is it good for?
  • At one point, I was pretty dubious about this REST thing.
• 2002 Feb 26: Almost done with another implementation of the Wiki XML-RPC API
  • I was working on XML-RPC APIs for various wiki installs at one point.

In December, I built 0xDECAFBAD accumulator in an attempt to automatically capture and accumulate in one spot all the stuff I leave behind on 15 services or so across the net. A month later, it’s still running. It’s filled with crap day after day. It’s all my crap, and I’m glad to have my crap all in one pile, but it’s very noisy.

Between recaffeination and accumulation, I think I’m bracketing the same issues. On one side, I’ve got John Henry hammering down the microcontent spikes, and on the other I’ve got the machine cronjobbing away. What I really want is something a bit in between: Maybe a crap pile for myself and an easy manual selection method that I’ll remember to use habitually for editorial control. It’s all really just attempts to try to reconstitute the diffuse spew that used to be more or less concentrated into one spot.

Twitter sucked the blogging out of Molly, but I was already well down that path long before I think Twitter was a glimmer in Obvious eyes.

Apropos of that, here I am back at my traditional blog. The blog where I’ve been hoping to get myself writing again. Maybe I’ll swing back this way and not make this the last post for another few months. I’ve certainly got lots in my head, and there’s certainly been lots going on worth thinking about out loud — but I’ve also got plenty I shouldn’t or couldn’t actually babble about in mixed company.

So, what to expect from me, then? Eh, who knows. This might be the last post here for another few months.

Not that it’s the fault of WordPress - I renamed my comment form on the filesystem and in my theme to obscure it from spambots, but then blew away the renamed PHP file with the SVN upgrade. Blah.

So, I’ve been basically hacking on nothing after work for quite some time now. I’ve had a few false starts, but have been finding it hard to get motivated to move on anything. There are a few things I’ve started, though, which might be worth returning to and finishing. If I were to do that - or start something new - which of these do you think might be worth my time?

• FeedMagick2 - web command-line toolkit for munging and filtering feeds, written in PHP 5
• XoxoOutliner - a browser-based outliner with a REST API, written in PHP 5
• Learn Django or Pylons, do social networky stuff and explore OpenID and OAuth?
• Explore CodeIgniter or Kohana further, do social networky stuff that can ideally be installed alongside WordPress and PHP 5?
• Something else? OpenSocial? Keep hacking on my Centro’s Blazer browser and do something silly and Web 2.0?
• Level my troll to 70 and work on getting sweet PvP gear?

That’s partially because it’s cheap, and partially because Palms and Handsprings have been my main mobile platform for almost a decade now. Seeing as my last one was a Treo 600, this thing is a big upgrade.

Now, let’s see how well this blog-by-email thing works.

Likewise, I’ve hopped from platform to platform in blogging and writing and generally emitting memelets from my brain. In contrast to Pobox.com though, anyone who could be bothered to follow me would have had to keep track of every new feed and site which happened to strike my fancy. Knowing myself, I don’t expect that my wandering ways to change — so the number of feeds in which my stuff lands will only increase.

So, I’d like to fix that. In case you haven’t seen it, I’ve started building an Accumulator for all the various feeds and accounts between which I’m distributing my attention and User Generated Content these days.

I’m hoping to make this the definitive one-stop-shop for following me and my crap, eventually offering feeds at the root of decafbad.com with facilities for picking and choosing what to include and what to leave out. Hopefully, this will leave me able to just simply point interested parties at decafbad.com, and let them explore from there — rather than wandering over to this blog that’s mostly quiet these days.

And, of course, if in the end no one actually cares about my spew anyway — at least I’ll have had fun with yet another new project.

Oh, and Happy Holidays to you and yours!