Blog Maintenance

Ring out the old and ring in the new! The start of a new year is always a good time to take care of housekeeping. A year ago I documented this partially in Gone Fishing and Fishing on the River Chess. This year I have another batch of small projects to look after.

Blog reader: As important as keeping up with other blogs is to me, I've never paid much attention to the tool I use. Until now I've relied on the same blogger.com tools that I use to maintain this blog. On top of being able to follow the blogs, my blog list was available via the profile widget on the right side of all my blogs. When Google forced me to migrate to Google Plus, a process I documented in Google Is Big Brother (July 2013), I lost the blog list in the new profile. This week I lost the reader itself, rendering the blog reader tool completely useless. After a little investigation I decided to replace the tool with Feedly.com.

Bookmarks: Keeping track of web sites and their most interesting pages is another ongoing task. Lately my browser-based bookmarks have reached the point where they were becoming a burden to use. I went looking for a cloud-based bookmark tool and decided to use Diigo.com.

Labels: The labels listed on the right of this blog are important to maintain continuity of the content and to locate an old post vaguely remembered. I had three separate labels for endgames -- 'Endgame TB' (24, the number of posts with that label), 'Endgames' (49), and 'Fortress' (7) -- where 'TB' stands for 'Tablebase'. I consolidated these into 'Endgames' (73). You can see from the numbers that there was already some overlap across the three labels.

If I think it's worth noting, I'll report on the progress of those first two items.