Looking back on my last three posts – each of them an embedded video – I feel, as the last one’s title implies, rather lazy, even a little ashamed.

In addition to the video embeds, I’ve tried two gimmicks to makeup for my negligence of this blog: Ma.gnolia’s daily link posting job (imperfect, but still pretty top) and a Twitter plugin that publishes a daily digest of my (nonexistent) tweets. In the end, both were pointless – not their fault, but mine. Instead of fleshing it out, these tools diluted my blog and confused my intentions, vague as they may be.

The Twitter tool proved useless on two counts. First, I hardly ever use the tool. Second, I found that the digests produced during rare spurts of activity were embarassingly inane and, by nature, always out of context. So much for that.

The Ma.gnolia post job was more problematic. I had chosen Ma.gnolia because it didn’t truncate a bookmark’s description like Del.icio.us does. “Easy,” I thought, “I’ll just translate bookmarking activity into blogging.” I was wrong to confuse the two: there is a difference between simply pointing, and actually commenting. If I am prepared to write at least 100 words on something, shouldn’t I at least commit to giving it its of its own post? Conversely, why pressure myself to write about something I only find fun, or cool, or useful? There are better, faster tools for that.

Last night I reconciled myself to the fact that there is no technological way around the writing process. If I want this site to be a reflection of what I’m thinking or doing, a random video embed or a cronjob is not going to cut it. From here on out, I will only post here when the impulse to share something is compounded by the impulse to say something.

To divide the editorial from the curatorial, I have given in to that wonderful little tool that makes clapping up the tasty bits of the web I find very, very easy: Tumblr. Tumblr is a lightweight blogging platform that has received a good deal of praise recently. Its greatest strengths are its simplicity, ease of use, and it’s bookmarklet, which makes posting quotes, chat, video and photos quick and painless. No need to worry about tags, HTML hotlinks to external content, or attribution – Tumblr takes care of the last two, and doesn’t really care about the first. Click, click, done. Virtual pointing couldn’t be more straightforward.

My tumbleblog can be found at thelayenthusiast.tumblr.com. I will keep – and even maintain – this Wordpress blog for personal riffs. I expect that a handful of things I set aside for Tumblr will interest me enough to treat here, and hope that separating collection and commentary will give me more focus and drive for the latter.

In preparation for my new job I’ve been signing up with a bunch of video-sharing sites. Thing is: I got no video camera. The video on my Fuji F10 is busted, and my iBook predates those with pinholes. One thing I do have plenty of is old-fashioned digital photos. The question, then: how to turn my photos into video slideshows?
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an embedded slideshow of my Paris Scrawl set – photos of the capital’s street art

I just discovered Paul Stamatiou’s HOW TO Quickie: Embedded Flickr Slideshows, and I love it. When I first started using Flickr, I wanted it to serve as both a photo sharing/hosting service and as a remote backup. I often post photos that aren’t great in themselves, but which make nice kinetic sequences when used with Flickr’s slideshow tool. The problem was that I couldn’t make everyone view my Flickr photos as sets, much less my sets as slideshows. Thanks to Paul’s handy little bit of code, I can now choose between embedding static photos to illustrate blog entries, and displaying all photos from the relevant set within a blog post. Thank you, Paul!