According to some input from my users, I've created the shlomif-tech community for my more technical (about software, computers, and possibly other realistic science) posts and ramblings. I, or a different future moderator, need to approve all posts, but everyone can comment.

From now on, this blog will be dedicated to less technical stuff. I hope to maintain a good signal-to-noise ratio here, by only blogging about events or thoughts I think may be of interest to the general readers, rather than only to me.

If you're interested in vim tips, software thoughts, solutions to software problems, etc. please subscribe to its RSS or Atom feeds. shlomif-tech will also be aggregated into my aggregated blog.

The old technical entries of this blog will remain here, though and will not be moved.

Some people believe writing a weblog is useless. However, in the past week I've encountered a case which disproves it. A while ago, I ranted about my failed attempt to get the sound to work on my work's Windows system. Well, someone replied to it. It took me time to digest his message, but a few days ago when I followed its advice, I was able to get my sound to work.

So posting this rant on my blog benefitted me in helping me resolve the problem. And this is not including the times when I found answers to problems I had on people's blogs where they posted after resolving them and helped me as well (but probably not directly themselves).

So if you have a technical problem - blog about it (not before some due-diligence of course). Who knows, maybe someone who reads your blog will know the answer.

Today I again tried to sign up for Blogger after an attempt I did a few months ago, resulted in my browser being too unresponsive to fill in the form. This time I was prompted for my gmail account details which I entered, and was able to create an account. I also set up a blog there, but I'm not planning to make use of it. But it cannot hurt.

Anyway, now I can use my Blogger account to post comments for people blogs on blogspot.com, which is why I wanted to register in the first place. Thanks Google!

I've started blogging on Advogato. (Here's my first entry). However, starting a year or two ago, I've been cross-posting my entries to LiveJournal as well, and I also found it has some other advantages. Lately, I've been having second thoughts about whether to continue doing this. Here are some of my reasons:

1. Advogato is full of spam. I've been certified as Master by a bootload of spammers. And because Advogato does not have a rel="nofollow" attribute to external links, and other spam protection, we cannot expect this spam to stop soon.
2. Advogato has no comments for blog entries. Instead, people comment to what other people say in their blogs by writing new blog entries. However, I don't read them, and they are also not associated with the articles in any way (except perhaps by a back-links search). This is not good. On LiveJournal, I have comments, which people can use to write their entries for me.
3. The HTML support of Advogato is very incomplete. Moreover, it tends to mangle my XHTML into strange HTML.
4. My blog has received a low interest ratings. Such ratings simply don't exist on LiveJournal, nor shouldn't - they are anti-social. Most Advogato'ers probably don't bother rating other people's blogs.
5. Some resources in Advogato are not easily discoverable by the web interface.
6. Most of my friends moved their blogs elsewhere, anyway.
7. Advogato discourages short, timeful entries. If two mostly consecutive entries are published, one of them will be lost. This encourages me to publish monolithic entries on several different topics, instead of small short entries.
8. Abandoning Advogato will allow my LiveJournal blog to be syndicated in the Über-cool Planet (Former) Advogato.

Obviously discontinuing publishing my blog at Advogato has some disadvantages like not being in the Advogato recent log, etc. but I think the advantages outweigh them.

So unless someone changes my mind, I guess it's goodbye from Advogato.