You probably already noticed this, but I added Ben Wilson to the planet. Which is awesome.

I’ve been hoping that he (and Jen, hello) would blog for a while.

I’ve added people’s flickr photo feeds to Planet Mikix. Whoa!

Somerplanet was an interesting experiment, but I had difficulty keeping it up to date (in terms of finding good blogs to add to it). Now that I live in Arlington, doing so holds even less interest for me.

So I’m shuttering it. For the same reasons, I won’t open a Planet Arlington.

Planet Mikix, of course, is still going strong.

I’ve reorganized this blog a bit. Or at least, started to. The plethora of categories is now down to a few, designed to break into feed-friendly divisions. And I’ve converted the old categories into tags.

As part of this, my aging, custom theme didn’t really support all the fancy new WordPress features, so I updated to the default theme. So now this blog looks like every other blog ever. I may futz with this a bit, but whatever. Everyone reads this via RSS feeds anyway.

My brother Steve sent me a link to his blog. Nice to be able to keep tabs on him, since I’m atrociously bad at Old World methods of keeping in touch.

Of course, I added him to Planet Mikix.

I decide it was high-time I cleaned up the Somerplanet blogroll.

Removed:

• Liam Sullivan — He moved out of Somerville

Added:

• Dan Seitz
• Sameer Suhas Marathe
• Will Guaraldi

Changes will take effect next update.

Sigh. My long-standing support for XHTML has been slowly eroding. It didn’t do much for me, and it just caused slight oddities with the browsing world. My love of the bleeding edge tends to do me in.

Now that HTML5 is being supported by W3C, I’ve abandoned my stance, and jumped in with the WHATWG.

So mterry.name now is written in HTML again.

I’ve been meaning to add Elaine to the Planet for a while now, as we’ve been dating for over three months. But I kept delaying until I finally got her a hackergotchi.

Well, I’m just going ahead with it and we’ll set up the hackergotchi later.

Ever since creating Planet Mikix, I mentally toyed with the idea of other slices of virtual communities in planet form. One thought that stuck with me was a planet for Somerville residents. So I’ve finally gone ahead with it: I give you Somerplanet.

The shared culture and locale should make it interesting and relevant to people in and around Somerville. I’ve seeded it with a pretty random smattering of blogs I found out there. No endorsement or favoritism implied. If you belong, let me know.

I’d like to add hackergotchis, but obviously I don’t know most of you people. Please send some in!

One cool feature is a little map of somerville with dots for locations of bloggers on the planet. I only know a few, due to the scarcity of ICBM tags out there. But it would be neat to see the map light up.

Hopefully Somerplanet ends up being interesting or useful. I’m not sure how to keep the number of member feeds/posts manageable, but it’s a work in progress, so we’ll see.

I’ve just added Meg to the Planet. Meg is Dave‘s beaubird and all around rad lady.