Garoo

Yeah, the Garoo doesn’t know what it wants. A few months ago, I closed all my ancillary blogs, because I thought my postings were too diluted, and I wasn’t writing very regularly and it was such a mess to maintain a dozen blogs at the same time; today, and now that the few readers I had on #FF00AA and Beware The Frog have definitively left the building and nobody cares what I do anymore, I’m reopening all the sites (a good thing I renewed the domains just in case — both out of nostalgia and because unique domain names are becoming the most precious merchandise of the 21st century).

The reason I’m reopening my blog network is that having to publish everything on garoo.net was paralyzing me: every time a news article or an image captured my attention for ten seconds (which is pretty rare, statistically), I asked myself: “Can that be of interest to people who read garoo.net?” And the answer was always “No,” so I ended up posting a link only one tenth of the time, just so I could tell myself the blog wasn’t completely dead. But, if you replace “garoo.net” with “#FF00AA” or “Beware The Frog” in the question, the threshold to publication is much, much lower.

Now what’s to say I’m not going to close all the Garoo Network blogs again in two months? Well, nothing. That’s how blogs work, anyway. But I’ve changed the odds: instead of having a database and a set of PHP scripts per blog (only the Regarde tumblelogs shared a code base; I’m not that big at factoring), this time everything’s using the same base as my personal blog — so I get to use the same shortcuts to publish a link or photo in a couple clicks.

If you’ve subscribed to the garoo.net RSS feed, you’ll get an entry each day summarizing everything I’ve posted on the other blogs, just like I already aggregate all my Twitter entries; if you want to subscribe directly to a specific blog whose topic you’re interested in, just go to the site and click the RSS button. (If there’s no RSS button, then you’re using a prehistoric browser and you should update. But is there anyone using an RSS aggregator yet running IE6?) The old thematic RSS feeds should redirect smoothly to the new addresses.

By the way, what is the Garoo Network?

• #FF00AA (RSS): technology, a lot of Macintosh, and some web 2.0

• Beware The Frog (RSS): video game news, with a slight bias toward the Xbox 360

• Regarde La Route (RSS): pretty cars

• Regarde La Vitrine (RSS): pretty objects and design

• Regarde L’écran (RSS): pretty images, CG, photoshops

• Regarde Le Mec (RSS): pretty boys

• Regarde Le Clown (RSS): funny stuff

More will come later. Or maybe not.