We recently decided to clear out old comments on blog entries on one of our WordPress sites. We have almost six years worth of comments and data on this particular blog, most of it pertaining to old news items. While the discussions were interesting and engaging in their day, they now represent tens - maybe hundreds - of thousands of lines of database entries.

Lisa and I have been talking quite a bit lately about the impact of Facebook and Twitter on other areas of the internet - specifically forums and blogs.

I installed a dual-boot configuration during a system rebuild recently and stuck the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu 8.10 on a sizeable partition. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I'm constantly questioning whether Ubuntu Linux is a viable Windows replacement.

One of the key things for me in making a transition of this magnitude is finding a desktop blogging client compatible with Linux and it also being as fully featured as Windows Live Writer - my blogging client of choice and perhaps the leading blog client software. The thing is, the latest version of Live Writer Beta has some pretty hot features, including a link gloassary which allows you to autolink to a page previously linked to: you enter the last anchor text as previously and it automatically creates the link for you.

There isn't a single other blog editor that I know of that can replicate that functionality.

I’m doing a little blog consolidation work at the moment. Maybe I mentioned in the last post that when I started blogging, I went to town registering domains and starting random blogs.

That’s a rookie mistake that I don’t intend to make again. For a start, maintaining all those separate WordPress installs at once, is a lot of work. Even with a dormant WP site, I still feel compelled to apply security updates in case there’s a chance the site gets hacked.

Plus, I can’t stand owning so many ghost town blogs. So, I’m working on a masterplan to consolidate all those blogs and domains into a manageable block of 3-4. For example, I’ve migrated all the posts from an old tech blog of mine to this one, and then finally redirected the domain so that all the traffic comes to this site.

I know it's been a while since I posted on here. I've been slowly updating the photo gallery, but rarely finding the time to cobble a few words together. Hell, I've been to Italy for a fortnight, started working on a Windows Vista course and am undergoing an intensive but interesting audit at work.