For anyone interested, I have started another blog (oh no!) with my friend, occasional Reinvented Software helper and User Experience Designer, Hans Kim, called CocoaDust.

The idea of CocoaDust is to cover more technical things such as Mac and web software development, industry commentary, software we use, what it’s like being an indie Mac developer, etc.

I’ll still cover various topics specific to Reinvented Software here as they arise, it just feels better talking about the more hardcore things somewhere else. If you’re interested, check it out – the first post should explain the idea in full.

You might have noticed the sidebar on this blog change lately. Now there is a calendar, the latest three items from my product news RSS feed and generally it’s been tidied up.

If I wanted to, I could completely rearrange the sidebar in a minute without needing to hack any code. That’s because this blog is now using the WordPress Widgets plugin that has been trialled on wordpress.com blogs since earlier in the year.

Using these widgets is really simple: you just drag and drop them into the order you want. The best part is that you can customise widgets to your liking.

There are many more widgets than the ones you see on my blog, such as Recent Posts and Comments, Free Text widgets for adding any sort of text to the sidebar, Links, Archives and so on. Plus, anyone can create widgets to do other things.

My favourite is the RSS widget (obviously). It allows you to incorporate the content from another feed into your sidebar. You can set a title for the feed, choose how many of the items to show, etc.

If your WordPress 2 blog uses the default WordPress theme, or a theme based on it, chances are the Widgets plugin will just work. All I had to do for this blog was tweak the HTML generated for the search field. Widgets are cool.

And if you ever want a free, hosted WordPress blog I can fully recommend checking out wordpress.com and if you want to host a blog yourself, wordpress.org.

I thought I’d upgrade this blog to WordPress 2, released a few days ago. You shouldn’t see any difference, unless it’s a bug or I’ve screwed something up.

There is a new WYSIWYG editor that is quite cool, but I probably won’t use it much as it doesn’t work in Safari. Here’s a screenshot of it in Firefox, click to see a full-size version:

Also cool is that you can rearrange those sections in the sidebar by dragging them around. I dragged the Categories section to the top, since I probably use that more than all the others.

I also like the new preview, which shows how the post will look on your blog. For some reason I only ever seemed to notice errors after posting before, maybe because the sans-serif font on the blog was easier to read than the serif font of the old preview.

This also makes it a good time to somewhat belately mention that if you fancy a WordPress blog, but don’t want to host it, you can get a free hosted WordPress blog at wordpress.com or check out the WordPress hosting page for other options.

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about starting my own blog, or rather I’ve been thinking about not starting my own blog. Friends have convinced me that somebody will read it. My only remaining concerns are whether I have enough time to write anything for it and manage comment spam. We’ll have to see.

Besides, there are reasons to blog regardless of who is reading. I love writing, and the older I get the more I love ranting. I also enjoy other developers’ blogs and since working on Feeder I’ve gained a real interest in podcasting. I don’t think I’ll ever be a podcaster myself, but the whole concept really excites me. Whether it’s a podcast about something or a podcast about nothing it seems much more free and intimate than traditional media and, of course, you don’t need no stinking transmitters. When professional journalists and broadcasters snipe at bloggers and podcasters for being amateurs, you get that sneaky feeling they’re just a little envious.

My intention is for this blog to be mostly about Reinvented Software, things related to Macs and other such geekery, although I’m sure it won’t be limited to that. Eventually I will get around to tweaking the design of the blog into something more personal, but WordPress 1.5’s Kubrick-based theme is good enough for now.

To get this whole blog thing started, here’s a quick introduction to me.