As you can probably see, some new links have appeared below the title of this site. They were a bit of a hack to implement, and the thought of all the ugly bits of hardcoded site-specific HTML that now infest the template files of my modified Casper theme makes me feel quite faint. Don’t try this at home, kids.

In a more elegant move, I’ve purged the Facebook/Twitter/Google+ sharing links from the post pages. From now on, you’re going to have to inflict my posts on your newsfeed the old-fashioned way, by copy-pasting from the address bar. It builds character.

At the prompting of a friend, I implemented “Tumblr integration” – which is to say I made a quick and dirty tumblog and linked it with this site’s RSS feed via an If This Then That recipe. This post will serve as the first official test of that system.

A little more about If This Then That, for those who haven’t used it: it’s a site that allows you to link together actions from all your different accounts around the internet through if [some condition] then [do something] “recipes”, which could be thought of as simplified, web-based Unix pipes.

You can use it to send emails to yourself whenever a certain keyword appears in an RSS feed, or SMS you the weather report every morning, or add a row to a Google Spreadsheet when there’s a pull request on some Github repository, or tell everyone on Twitter when the eggs in your fridge go off. It’s almost more useless than useful, but certainly a lot of fun to play with.

The other element of my extensive Tumblr integration is a little link to the tumblog in the footer of the index page next to the RSS link, which is also technically new because I replaced the fancy RSS icon thingy this theme comes with with boring old text. The icon was snazzy, yes, but it was also tiny and almost invisible, and I’ve never liked the way some sites hide their RSS links in randomly positioned 1x1 px images.

I’m fairly happy with the site as it is now, but expect more changes as I think of more stuff to do, and of course as Ghost continues to get more features.