I’ve pulled together all my old Oscar gift basket posts into one page. When we moved this site off old Blogger to WordPress I made the difficult decision to convert my old static archive pages, losing all the valuable search engine indexing and incoming links. The search hasn’t recovered with how my archives are set up and I never took the time to cook up an incoming link convertor or other solution.  My most popular posts were about the crazy-stuffed gift baskets the Academy Awards gave to their presenters.  So I decided to catalog those and add a “Best of” link on the sidebar. It was a nice trip down memory lane.

When I read the phrase “old-school blogger Andy Baio” (in a Wii U article) I figured it was time for a comeback. After all, old school stuff is a favorite subject of this weblog, whether it’s typewriters or drive-ins, and if blogging is now a retro medium, well, all the better. While we’re on the subject of nostalgia, Gael Fashingbauer Cooper (another “old-school blogger” of Pop Culture Junk Mail) has a book out called “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops” (here’s the blog). But enough about other old-schoolers, where have I been for half a year? Well, I switched to part-time at work, got my kid through kindergarten at our public school, and haven’t finished that notorious “Tiger Mom” book yet. If you’re thinking “if you’re working part-time, you should have had more time for blogging!” then you’re smarter and more organized than I am. Now that our son is on a typical school schedule, I get to deal with playdates, soccer, packed lunches, and homework (yes, they give homework in kindergarten now). Also chess and piano (remember I haven’t finished the Tiger Mom book yet so I don’t know any better, but I do know that another Asian kid in his class has chess, Chinese school, piano, and violin, so I’ve already ruined his chances for the Ivy League). It has been a fun and valuable transition, but, if you’ve been paying attention, you know my postings are typically 1) well-researched and 2) not the same topic everyone else has already posted. That takes time. I might loosen up on those. I also remember Anil Dash tweeting or posting (see, I’m already letting the research thing go) something that I interpreted as: so many bloggers just link to other content and don’t create any new content themselves. That stumped me for a bit because while I enjoy pointers to other things (it’s the core of the Web), new content is where I want to add value to the Web. But, again, that takes time. So, I’m back, but likely not regularly, and we’ll see where it goes. Thanks for reading and thanks for waiting!

Welcome to the new digs!  We are on new software (WordPress) and on a new host.  Hopefully there aren’t any glitches but if you’re reading this then at least the most important thing is working.  All posts from the old site have been imported, and although that means old archive links won’t work (I decided not to attempt fancy rewrite rules to keep those functioning), there are better direct links and search. 10 years of complete disregard for post titles threw off my new permalinks though, so I’m stuck with numbers in my links instead of titles (again, I did not attempt fancy rejiggering to remedy that though I’m sure I could’ve instantly titled 4,000+ old posts through a clever SQL statement).  There’s a Twitter widget (it even loads most of the time!) on the sidebar and I have flexibility to add more fanciness as time goes on.  Readers who subscribed to the RSS feed before should not have to change anything.  Enjoy the new place!