I've taken some time to improve my blogs' commenting systems to go beyond what your standard, classic, blog comments section does. Firstly, I finally implemented the front-end to a feature I had planned, and integrated into the back end, all along: threaded discussions. You can now reply to a reply.

More importantly, however, I integrated identi.ca and Twitter. I got this idea from Psychedelic Squid, who only supports identi.ca. My blog now automatically announces new posts on identi.ca and twitter, and periodically (half-hourly for now) checks those services for replies to the announcement that can be imported.

As you can see, I've added the appropriate reply buttons to the bottom of the post, so each user can chose completely freely how to interact with my blog. I'm speculating that this will increase the amount of comments very slightly every now and again. Yeah, right.

All this works better with identi.ca than it does with Twitter: with identi.ca, I can import a complete conversation tree, no matter whether the notices are addressed to me or not. The Twitter API, on the other hand, only allows me to read my own replies timeline, so there's a greater chance of missing replies-to-replies.

I haven't yet added the new buttons to the RSS feeds, or to the summary at www.jollybox.de. I'm planning to do that in due course.

On good old JollyBOX blog, I try to maintain at least a bit of editorial quality; you could say I like my posts here to be, in a way, “worth printing”. This means that every now and then, something springs to mind that I feel I would like to share, but that doesn't make for a blog post in the style and quality a reader of the JollyBOX blog might expect.

These days, tumble-blogging is quite en vogue, and I have finally found the time and energy to set one up within this my web flotilla (code name: JollyBOX v6), and I call it tjol.eu. It may or may not be the Next Big Thing™, and it is, emphatically, not a journal. This new blog-minor takes its place between the good old blog-major and the blog-micro, held jointly by Twitter and identi.ca.

I took care to implement this in a way that allows posts to be moved from one blog to the other without permalinks breaking, and even supports making selected posts, such as this one, part of both blogs, with a single set of comments and pingbacks.

This will be fun!

The original creation of this blog in April 2008 was the beginning of a JollyBOX.de renaissance. Maybe the key change was the usage of Serendipity, giving up on AFoC. Since then, I have created a new, simple and refreshing reference design with simple, regular logos for sub-sites. Nice.

Since not too long ago, the website has been hosted on an external server, meaning it's faster and more reliable than before. Finally, even JollyBOX code now uses the new design, and is based on PmWiki instead of simple HTML, which is a great help now that it's going to host information on software I write (previously at the now-dead zombieHQ). To celebrate this new splendor, the JollyBOX sites now all carry a bar at the top referencing each other.

Having finished the blog's style, it is now time to implement a common theme out of that for all of jollybox.de (except maybe the zombieHQ). The designs will follow a common scheme, but not be identical—the blog is slightly wider (due to the sidebar), and they shall have different Tango-based colour schemes. The root logo looks like this:

This uses the Tango Butter colourset, which was also used in the style sheet. Similarly, on this blog, the logo and style alike use the Tango Chameleon colours. I have created logos in all Tango colours, but probably won't need them all ;-) The images were created in Inkscape, the fonts used are Gentium and Century Schoolbook.

Just for reference, here is what I used as logo before:

Any comments are, as always, welcome.