Pie Palace

Observent readers of Blogawa will notice that I’ve added El Maks (of swapbox fame) to Blogawa. El Maks, (no relation to the awesomeness of Maki), is, well, awesome.

As always, suggestions for new blogs can be made to erigami@piepalace.ca.

I’m back. My wrists aren’t 100%, but they’re much better than they were. To prove it, I’ve squeezed another feature into Blogawa: events. Our friendly events robot reads OttawaEvents.org daily, randomly picks some upcoming events, and posts them to Blogawa.

The events are currently jumbled together, regardless of category, but that may change with time.

As alluded to last week, Blogawa is undergoing a reskinning. The new site will be pretty much the same in terms of functionality, except that it should look a bit nicer. The only major change will be the use of Gravatars to provide avatars for authors.

The URL for the RSS feed will change. I should be able to set up a forward to send your RSS reader to the appropriate place, but I may not. So if you find that your feed reader breaks, come back to blogawa and resubscribe.

Aaaany day now…

Blogawa is ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. So I’m redesigning the look. As part of the redesign, I’m putting together a wordmark that will be shown on the mast head. Here are some of the possibilities:

(The source HTML is available as well)

What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Constructive criticism?

I’ve added Ken Yam’s blog to Blogawa. I’m starting to wonder about the mix of blogs that I’m feeding from. If one extrapolates the population of Ottawa from Blogawa’s contributors, there would be something like 400,000 transit officianados in our city. I think I’m going to have to go on another recruiting binge.

Triple Beaver winning (and donut eating) blogger Zoom has joined Blogawa! If you would like to join Blogawa, fill out an application.

I’ve added two new contributors to Blogawa: Jen Gilbert and Transit Ottawa. Welcome aboard! If you want to get your blog added to Blogawa, hit the add form.

Blogawa.ca welcomes 18th Best to its blog-roll.

I’ve added http://geemoo.ca to Blogawa. Why? Because Jean’s photos look great.

On the off chance you’re interested in the RSS feeds that I read, here’s a quick rundown:

Local

Blogawa.ca

Blog aggregator for Ottawa-related blogs. I wrote the aggregator, so you should read it. =)

Runesmith’s Canadian Content

The rambling of Jennifer Smith. I enjoy her ongoing outrage at the Conservative government.

Ottawa LiveJournal Community

It’s more of a “where can I get X” listing, but it’s sort of interesting to see what the kids are up to.

THE CANADIAN DESIGN RESOURCE

A near daily listing posting of random bits of Canadian design from the past hundred or so years. I have no idea why their name is in ALL CAPS, but that’s the way it’s presented in their feed.

Geekery

Lila’s Dreams Blog

Lila’s Dreams is a dev blog for an upcoming web-based MMOG. The setting is inside the psyche of an 11 year old girl. I’m not sure what the game is going to end up being, but it sounds like gardening should be a large part of game play, which sounds quite neat.

Dubroy.com/blog

I went to school with Pat, and he’s blogging as a grad student, which is a lifestyle that’s dear to my heart. He opines about usability, the evils of hierarchical filesystems, and difficulties installing stuff on Macs. I disagree with most things he says, but he’s well read and he comes at problems from the right angle.

datalibre.ca

Breathless open data zealots who think freely available data is a really good thing. They don’t trouble themselves with the hard questions of data ownership (curation, metadata, dealing with licensing/access restrictions) but approach the problem from a public interest standpoint. I’m not sure why I read this blog.

The Online Photographer (TOP) and Photoborg

I’m not sure why I read these sites. They’re kinda/sorta about photography. I’m looking for something with a few more tips, but I do enjoy the opining.

Funnies: Defective Yeti, xkcd, I Can Has Cheezburger?