27 months

I made a couple of enhancements to ye olde blog worthy of mention. First, I finally got around to retroactively tagging my posts with keywords. This may sound like drudgery, but it was actually quite easy with the help of Simple Tag, a WordPress plugin which has a feature that allows for tagging posts en masse. What’s the point of this? Beyond providing another useful layer of descriptive, non-hierarchical metadata, it enables the sort of oh-so-trendy tag cloud (see sidebar) popularized by sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and others. As the blog continues to grow this provides a means to visually track popular themes.

Secondly, after a month-long hiatus from posting I decided it was high time I added the Twitter Tools plugin to bridge the gaps between full posts with micro-blog updates. Twitter, with its 140 word updates called “tweets”, is the sort of emerging web app that people either love or hate. Critics who denounce Twitter and its ilk as hipster narcissism often argue that it’s impossible to express in a 140 words or less something that is not stupefyingly banal. On the other side, proponents like Clive Thompson see Twitter as a tool for enabling “social proprioception”—that is, the sixth sense of knowing where your friends are. Still others, such as Dave Parry, have found innovative academic uses for it.

More recently, Steve Jackson, a VSO volunteer due to arrive in Bamenda, suggested using Twitter a means to connect the expat community in Cameroon. I think it’s a fine idea, even if Internet or SMS isn’t always reliable enough to enable a sense of where my expat pals are at the moment. For me, a quick micro-blog (while it’s also been argued that Twitter isn’t a micro-blogging tool, strictly speaking) is a good stand-in for when I don’t have something worthy of a full blog post. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m here. If you’re new to it, here’s a newbie guide.

Okay, enough blog-speak for awhile. I’m off to find some goat pepe soup. Perhaps that last sentence should’ve been a tweet.