Any time you have an unplanned outage for your site, you might as well re-think what you really want to do with the site. However, I don’t really have time to do that right now, so things will probably continue mostly as they are now for the forseeable future. Currently, I write for and maintain several websites. You can read about them if you wish.

However, there is one small change that I would like to announce. As most of you know, I’m an avid reader. I read books, academic papers, news, and all sorts of other things. However, one of my favorite things to read over the last couple of years has been a great essay. I’m not entirely sure why, but I have a few theories I won’t bore you with.

Because of my growing appreciation for essays, I’ve thought about linking to some of the great essays for a long time. I’m not thinking about it any longer; I’m going to start linking to some of them in this category. Now, there are several sites out there that exist solely to aggregate longer form, essay-style writing. I won’t pass along nearly that volume of essays, so if you find that yourself loving the art of the essay, you should investigate those sites.

Today I would like to pass along an essay I read this past summer. It’s by Paul Ford and it’s titled “The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” It’s an extremely well-written essay about Ford’s personal experience with in-vitro fertilization, and definitely worth reading. I’m passing it along today because I’ve learned (through Daring Fireball) that there’s a short post-script on his personal site. Don’t read the post-script first. There are spoilers there that could ruin the essay for you. Enjoy!

First, I have redesigned my academic website. If you’re interested, here’s some more information on the redesign.

Second, I created a blog focused entirely on security, privacy, and technology policy called Six Lines. There were primarily three reasons for this:

1. I wanted a somewhat more serious place to post thoughts of a somewhat more serious nature than “Blayne Sucks.”
2. I wanted to talk about more than just “academic privacy research,” which is what The Privacy Place is designed to be.
3. I didn’t want my academic website to get too cluttered or unfocused on my research. If you’re interested in Six Lines, you can subscribe to follow my posts.

Third, I’ve created a new aggregated feed that combines every post from Blayne Sucks, Six Lines, my academic site, and all my posts at The Privacy Place. This feed is updated on a slight delay from my other feeds, but it is comprehensive. I wrote more about the rational behind this on my academic site.

So what is the future of Blayne Sucks? In short, it’s going to live on. (Sorry Blayne…) I’m going to continue posting thoughts on life, culture, religion, sports, or politics here. Blayne Sucks will be a better traditional, personal blog if I put my more academic posts on my academic site and my security, privacy, and technology policy posts on Six Lines.

If you, like me, were disappointed at the total lack of any interesting content in this post: hang in there. I’ll have something new and interesting up tomorrow before lunch. Promise.

This means that you can log into BlayneSucks and comment on posts using any of the following popular blogging credentials:

• AOL — openid.aol.com/screenname
• Blogger — blogname.blogspot.com
• Flickr — www.flickr.com/photos/username
• LiveJournal — username.livejournal.com
• Technorati — technorati.com/people/technorati/username
• Yahoo — http://openid.yahoo.com
• WordPress.com — username.wordpress.com

All you have to do is put the URL listed into the OpenID box on the BlayneSucks log in page.  Furthermore, I have enabled Gravatars for users.  A Gravatar is a globally recognized avatar.  Basically, it’s a picture that follows your comments around from blog to blog.  You can sign up at http://en.gravatar.com/.

I hope you enjoy the new site look and feel as well as the ability to comment!

Now, I have seen a lot of similar pages on other sites that contain long lists of links to things that I’ve almost always seen before. Thus, I have specifically tried to avoid two things with this: Stating the obvious and Verbosity. I will try to maintain this set of links over time given those objectives.

For those interested in the technical details, I added Gallery2 and the WPG2 plugin to WordPress. I have made a few changes to the style when viewing pictures, but it’s not quite as perfect as I would like, but it’s definitely usable.

There are several older posts here. Despite the unwritten rule of bloggers to not modify posts after they have been posted, I may have to make some changes that involve these older posts. It’s likely that I will change some of the categories under which they were originally posted. Any changes I make to posts would consist of some minor cosmetic editing, but the actual text of the posts will remain the same.

I’ll try and post again when I am happy with the changes and I am willing to pronounce things as “stable” once again. In the meantime, hang in there and trust that things are going to be much better in the (hopefully near) future.