I started with the website I use as portal to all my services. It is still something very simple and straightforward and beside the graphical redesign the real change is the platform behind it: on the previous incarnation I have used Drupal as platform since I wanted to experiment with it, but now I switched to the “old” (as figure of speech since I am using the latest 3.0 version) and known Wordpress; the reason of the change is that while Drupal has the potential for creating feature-rich websites, it is very complicated at first, especially for the newbies and since the portal to all my services was (and is) a simple website (a front-page mainly) it was both a waste of potentials and a pain in the back to keep it updated. Nevertheless I haven’t given up on Drupal, probably I will test it again when I get an idea for a website that will take advantage of its resources.

The next website I am counting to update is Silicon Gadget. It was my first (major, as there was many minors first) website and for many months it was very active, but it is suffering too by the long hiatus. It will take time to refresh it since over the time I added several plugins and custom code changes to extend its functionality. I hope to complete it by the next week.

What about this one? Well … I still like the graphical template and with the original experience of Silicon Gadget I have been able to build it up as I wanted it without many plugins and code changes so any change that will cross my mind will be minor; the only thing it lacks it is content.

Said that, what will happen then? As I said I got a sparkle of good will in working on my websites, but will it last? How soon will I fall to another long hiatus? Only time will tell.

Nova Squadron: Italian guild on Star Trek Online

“The Nova Squadron” is part of a bigger community called “Dark Sith Lords” born five years ago on Star Wars Galaxies (damn NGE for ruin the game!) and that encompassed several games like Star Trek: Elite Force II, RF Online, Counter-Strike Source, and World of Warcraft with the currently active guild “Genei Ryodan” on Hakkar-EU server.

“The Nova Squadron” will look forward to play guild organized events like away team missions, raids, and PvP events; these guild events will be held approximately between 09.00 pm and 00.00 am GMT+1.

Star Trek Online has not been launched yet, but the guild is looking forward to join in the upcoming Closed Beta; still, since it is part of a community, “The Nova Squadron” is already using some services like the forum and a dedicated TeamSpeak Server.

“The Nova Squadron” is mainly looking for Italian players, but it is open to English-speakers too; they’re actually looking for nice people who want to enjoy the game and like to play in a friendly environment.

If  you are looking for more information, you can visit the Nova Squadron’s forum and if you are interested to join, you can register to the Nova Squadron’s forum and post a presentation of yourself.

Over the last few months I started to explore the various services to see if and how they are useful to broadcast whatever message I want to communicate.

The experiment of course started on my main blog, Silicon Gadget, with the RSS Feeds managed by Google FeedBurner, a service that allow to easily set up the RSS feeds stream on any major RSS reader. Than I opened a Twitter account so my readers that love to follow tweets can be informed from that platform when I publish a guide or a review on the blog. Of course Silicon Gadget has its own page also on Facebook, so people on that platform can receive the updates too. Finally I have activated Google Friend Connect, the bar on top of the site and the box on the right sidebar; this last service not only allow the readers to comment on the specific guides and reviews, but also on the whole blog in general and additionally they can see what other sites the other members like.

Of course such services are available for this personal blog too. I have the RSS Feeds, a Twitter account, a Facebook page and I am offering the social tools of Google Friend Connect (see the above bar and the box on the right); additionally I have a LinkedIN profile where I keep record of my resume.

Is it worth to be present on all this services? Since all the tracking services are opt-in anyway (so people have to decide to follow me on these platform and I can’t push them to) I think it is indeed useful to whom is interested to listen what I have to say; eventually the true question is if it is possible to keep all these fronts up-to-date to be indeed useful.

The RSS feeds were the easiest to keep updated since Wordpress, the platform I am using on both Silicon Gadget and here, automatically update its internal feeds and Google FeedBurner automatically pick them within minutes. For the Twitter accounts I had to install a plugin for Wordpress, Twitter Tools, so whenever I publish a post on any of the blogs a tweet will be automatically generated on the relative account. The Facebook’s pages are more particular: on my personal Facebook page I can automatically import a RSS Feed (for months it was the Silicon Gadget’s feed, but now I am automatically publishing the feed of this blog), but for the Silicon Gadget Facebook page I have yet to find a way to automatically import the feeds; actually in this last case is good that I have to update the page manually since I want to keep it clean and show only the guides and reviews that merit to be read (while on Silicon Gadget blog itself I may also publish some collateral post like the news about my updated PGP keys). Google Friend Connect is a case apart since it is you readers who have to interact with it.

So, is it all good? Well, it depends … on you. Do you find useful to be able track my posts from different platforms? Do you still prefer to pay a visit directly on my blogs? Is it there any other platform that you use and that you would like to find me there?

Anyway, I am making this post to let you know that I made some update to my PGP key. The ID, fingerprint, and main e-mail address are still the same, but I revoked some subkey related to old e-mail addresses and added some subkey to new addresses.

You can find more info on the PGP key page.

You probably know me for my main web site: Silicon Gadget, a blog dedicated to both news and guides about computers, software, and tech gear in general.

“Why make a new site if you already have one?”, you may ask. Well … behind the simple and short articles I post on Silicon Gadget there is a lot of time spent on reading materials scattered all over the web and often I think: “uhm, this is a nice topic to speak about … to bad it is not on target for Silicon Gadget”.

So here I came with a solution: why not open a new site where I am free to speak about anything not related to electronics?

Probably I will not be able to update this web site as often as I wish, but you are more than welcome to come as often as you want to visit it directly or you can subscribe to the RSS feeds to track the updates from your reader.