Month: March 2016

Spring Cleaning, Digital Style

Spring cleaning, digital style. I’m reducing my digital footprint a bit, but really consolidating it into a single site which I own and control. I was doing basic cleanup on Twitter this morning: removing people I’m following who have been completely inactive for more than three months. Then I decided to really prune the tree, and get rid of nearly all the people who don’t actually follow me back. Then I decided it made no sense to have tweets out there from years ago. So I removed everything from before 2016.

I tried to do the same thing with Facebook, removing old posts. But they make it much more difficult and slow. It would have taken hours to click, wait, click, wait…and I really don’t use FB for anything anymore. So I deleted my account.

I’ve had dozens of blogs over the years, under dozens of different domain names. In late 2014 I started using WordPress for my personal blog, and then I added an EnvHist blog. Each of them has a premium hosting plan and a special url. Between now and the renewal date of the plans (this summer), I’m going to transition the content back to my own site, danallosso.net.

I haven’t decided how I’m going to organize the info on my site. The blogs will all become part of a single megablog to start. You can find what you’re looking for using Categories and Tags, and there may even be some interesting cross-pollenization between different things that interest me. There’s also a cool rotating tag-cloud on my home page that you can spin to find what you’re looking for.

I’ll leave recent (2016) posts up on WordPress until the accounts expire. But if you’re following me here, consider visiting and rss-subscribing or bookmarking my website.

Ciao!  –Dan

da.jpg

Spring Cleaning

 

My goal for the spring and summer is to spend at least 8 hours a day working outside. The gardens need to be prepared for planting, the chicken area needs to be fenced, the fields need a spring mow and maybe a bit of alfalfa seed. My tomato seedlings are nearly all up and peppers are starting to peak out. And the woodshed needs to be cleared out.

This year’s new chicks

new_hampshire_reds_main.jpgbuff_orpingtons_main.jpgmodern_bb_red_games_main.jpgaraucanas_americanas_main.jpg

Later this month, I’m getting a new batch of chicks to begin a new sustainable flock of layers. We have a batch of four-year old layers now. We’ll keep many of them, but weed out a few. I’m adding New Hampshire Reds, Buff Orpingtons, Araucanas (Chilean Easter Eggers), and some Old English Game Birds. I’m trying out the Old English because they’re closer to the original ancestor of the chicken, and I thought that would add some interesting DNA to the flock. The objective this year is to keep a few boys, and start letting the birds reproduce. With luck, I won’t have to buy any more chicks after this, at least for the layer flock. I’m still going to get a batch of broilers at the end of April, this year. But if the breeding programs go well, maybe we’ll be able to make do without hybrid birds, going forward. I’m kind of interested to see what might result from crossing the Old English with my Jersey Giant hens…