So I, with my infinite capacity for continued procrastination, have recently added some new features to the site.

If you direct your attention over to the left, you'll notice some new items in the sidebar. Under the "Status" heading, you'll see that there are two sections: The first (very nerdily I might add) displays my current standings on the world-wide ladder for the real-time strategy game Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath. Wow.

More interestingly (maybe) is the next section, which displays my updates from the site Twitter. If you don't know what Twitter is, it's basically the same thing as the "Current Status" feature from Facebook... and that's it. Pretty lame if you ask me, but I guess the appeal is in the simplicity of posting short messages from your cell phone, etc. They also make it easy to post updates like that on blogs and websites.

However, there is practically nobody in my age group on Twitter, so it would be completely pointless except that I found a Facebook application that posts Facebook status updates to Twitter. So... in a very round-about fashion, my Facebook updates are now posted to my site.

The coolest new feature is found under the "Now Playing" heading. A small plugin for Winamp (Brandon Fuller's Now Playing app) pings my website with a basic POST HTTP request containing information about the current song every time I play something. On my end, some basic PHP scripting updates a database with the song info, current date, and play count. The songs under "Now Playing" currently just reflect the most recently played songs.

Eventually I will expand this feature, to display maybe the top songs played this week or something. I also will have a dedicated page that will show more info about what I'm listening to on Winamp.

Last but not least, I now am officially using the AMAZING Flickr API to interact with my photo site. The front page now uses this to display the first 60 or so recent photos instead of bastardizing multiple copies the frail Javascript Flickr provides to show random pictures.

Now that I'm using the real API, the photo page will eventually come back online in a MUCH crunker form that shows my favorite pictures and SHOULD integrate everything into my site.

Fun stuff... and more to come! A real update should follow in the next few days I'm sure, but with my last (3) projects of Junior year due this week and finals approaching... the outlook seems grim.

Of course, whenever there's a shit ton of stuff to do... procrastination becomes even more alluring...