For a time now, Ive been posting things on flickr, vimeo, this blog, twitter, archiving projects in various ways, and using tools like delicious and (recently) ffffound to keep track of things that come to me through the tubes. My stuff, like many other peoples, exists in a lot of places on the internet, and it became far too many to continue to tack onto an increasingly tall sidebar. So I stripped everything out (pretty much), and replaced it with a new website.

(#more-353)

The goals of the new site–consolidation, clarification–are fairly obvious, although the need to build it myself isnt. A number of other projects satisfy the need to bring a bunch of sources together. Lifestreaming services like SweetCron help to aggregate information. However, SweetCron, like many tools for aggregating/streaming information, is too focused on chronology as the criterion for determining hierarchy (not a problem for everyone, but tweets are less important to me than blog entries, and shouldnt be allowed to bury them). FindMeOn , a service Im not very familiar with, allows people to manage their identity across social networks and the internet as a whole. This seems awesome, but I wasnt ready to join another service (where would it have gone in the sidebar?). By independently maintaining my web identity, I have more control over displaying what I think is important and organizing it as I see fit. If youre interested in bringing together some of your web identities, but dont quite love the thought of spending your free-time collecting all your things and sorting them yourself, I recommend giving either of the above services a try.

At this point, you should check out the new sansumbrella.com . I concurrently launched a new site to document my projects at projects.sansumbrella . Sketches, concept development, and finished work will be displayed there. I built it in part so I could grab a feed of selected work for the new main page. Having that dedicated site is already proving to be a more enjoyable way to keep track of things Im making.

This site (things.sansumbrella), will continue to be a record of things I see, read, participate in, and otherwise experience.