RSS is back, or "a brief history of EricMartindale.com"

Hello there, adoring internet-stalkers! (I'm kidding. ~_~) You may have noticed (if you were loyal, that is ;)) that my Feedburner-powered RSS Feed has been lacking in activity lately. There's a reason for that.

Recently, I got rid of WordPress and Sweetcron in favor of a new CMS platform, Chyrp. I had been running Wordpress for a long time, using it to share my thoughts with the general internet populace. However, it had become a bit of a chore to maintain, and it really felt like duplicate work on top of all the other content-generation I was already performing (i.e., forum posts, blog comments, Last.fm "Loved" Tracks, Google Reader shared items, etc.), so I began to look for a way to aggregate this content into a central place.

For a while, FriendFeed served this purpose well, but I didn't like the lack of control I had over the source. Facebook also filled part of this gap (and it still does, to a point), and they've even purchased FriendFeed, but I was looking for something quite a bit more customizable and self-hosted. Through various referrals, I came across Yongfook's Sweetcron project which was a new platform designed specifically for this new thing they called, *le gasp*, "Lifestreaming".

However, after fighting with Sweetcron and its aggregation methods, particularly its lack of support for various service feed formats; I decided to look into something else. Initial searches landed me upon Tumblr, who had conveniently announced a feature that syncs comments across multiple services (or aggregates). Sadly, I didn't want to get back into a world where all my code was hosted by someone else, and I had no control over it. I kept Sweetcron running on my site under lifestream/, but I continued searching for a better solution.

I then stumbled across Bazooka, which was billed as "the first free PHP tumblelog engine". Thanks to Bazooka developer Evan Walsh, who alerted me to a more up-to-date and current replacement called Chyrp. And I was sold. I immediately spent a few hours converting my existing content from WordPress and SweetCron over to a test installation of Chyrp, and then took the next night changing my site structure and 301'd all my old links to the new URLs.

That's where EricMartindale.com stands today. I've spent a few weeks getting my stream set up the way I want it, and I'm turning the RSS feed back on. Posts should begin flowing into your RSS reader very shortly. Post comments, feedback, and questions here!

Edit 10:13 PM EST: It looks like Feedburner is having some trouble parsing my new RSS content. You can subscribe to my direct feed and it will always work.

Edit 10:58 PM EST: I've fixed the problem and committed the patch to GitHub.

Today's My Birthday. Want A Link?

Yep, this April 22nd, 2008 is my birthday (credit to the intro goes to sXePhil), and I'm turning 21 today. However, due to the upcoming MMA fight that I've got at Dorton Arena on April 26th, all mandatory 21st birthday celebrations will be postponed until after the fight.

For those of you who aren't already aware, you can pick up tickets at Carolina Fight Promotions. I'm going to be fighting Andy Teague, a well-versed jiujitsu competitor, and the match is scheduled for three rounds at 3 minutes each.

So, today being my birthday--and as such, I've received tons and tons of birthday wishes--I thought I'd give some shoutouts to everyone who has done so. It's pretty simple, all you've got to do is write a "happy birthday" post somewhere on the web, link to me, and then show me the page you want me to link back to.

My twitter friends have had an early start, and it's already the afternoon - don't procrastinate, I'm ending this at midnight tonight!

Thank you guys for the happy birthday wishes!
Martin Bowling
Michelle Reno
Brian Mark
Rae Hoffman
Dave Rohrer
Alex Simpson
Heather
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