onfocus

I've been silent on this blog lately, and it's only been alive thanks to the steady drip of my del.icio.us links that are posted automatically with a Perl script. I was joking around on Twitter the other day that I'm having a blogdentity crisis (ugh, sorry) and it's definitely true.

The last burst of activity here was in February when I did a series of posts about Going Off the Flickr Grid. I haven't done much since then with the project, beyond another implementation of the code (with heavy modifications for group posting and commenting) over at ORblogs: ORblogs Photos. (By the way, ORblogs turned four years old yesterday.) I still have a long to-do list for OTFG, but now that the code is working well enough for me to share photos here, I'm not as motivated to continue developing it.

At the beginning of May I started more sustained work behind the scenes at Metafilter, and that's going well. I don't want to blog about all of the nitty-gritty details of what I'm doing there, so I haven't been posting about that. But in the past month I've been able to help build some new features for the site, and I've learned more about ColdFusion than I ever thought I would. I still have to look up little syntax things, but I noticed the other day that I'm thinking in CF first.

The real reason this site has been so quiet is that sk and I are morphing from normal people to parents. Our due date is in October, and I've been working on Figuring Everything Out before then. I'm not going to turn onfocus into a parenting blog, or even an expecting-parent blog, so I'm afraid the silence will continue for a while. I'm reading/learning about pregnancy and birth with its own vocabulary, culture, and mountain of knowledge to absorb. And looking ahead to post-birth has me re-evaluating myself, the world, and my relationship with everything in it—not the kind of stuff that's easy to convey in the short space of weblog posts.

So even though things are quiet here, this is an exciting time for both me and sk. And I'm sure I'll be able to blend my new parenting role with my old (ugh) blogdentity eventually. It'll just take some time.

For those of you who might not know, Metafilter is a community weblog where members discuss stuff they've found online. Matt started the site in 1999, and I signed up as a member at some point in the early days. (I'm user 191.) I only participated a little at the site during the first couple of years.

Matt and I worked together at Pyra (makers of Blogger), and during that time Metafilter lived on a single desktop tower under Matt's desk. A lot of the early members of Metafilter were also early bloggers, and it became sort of a central "hang out" for people interested in weblogs. Often it was one of the only sources covering and discussing what was happening with blog-related topics. At Pyra, we often asked ourselves, how will Metafilter react? when contemplating changes—because we knew any announcement would show up on the site.

Matt's been running and growing Metafilter ever since, with the addition of several Metafilter sites including the insanely useful and popular Ask Metafilter. I've been a regular reader and fan of the site despite my lack of conversing there, and I've gotten to know various MeFites, both through the site and through conversations with Matt. The community there is definitely unique (in a good way), and I'm constantly surprised at the depth of knowledge members have on any given topic. Though every site has its share of arguments and name-calling, I'm also continually surprised by the level of civility for such an open community. (Which I think is a reflection of the crack MeFi moderation squad, and the community norms that have been established.)

For the past year I've been working with Matt on Metafilter behind the scenes one day/week. I helped Matt launch MeFi Music, Metafilter Jobs, and some new features across the site. It's been great working with Matt regularly, and having instant, massive feedback to changes from lots of, erm, passionate users was a good change of pace from writing books.

In about a week, I'm going to be spending most of my time on Metafilter. I'm excited about this change, and I'm looking forward to helping Metafilter grow with a more sustained effort. Matt has some cool stuff coming up for the site, and it's going to be great to help him build it. The only remaining question for me is, how will Metafilter react?