I needed a WordPress API key for an anti-spam plugin; signing up for that gave me a blog at mcwetboy.wordpress.com, which of course I had no idea what to do with. Seemed a waste to leave it fallow, but I really didn’t need it.

I have now found a use for it, as an off-site place to report on outages. Many web sites have an alternate address, hosted independently, where they can tell you what’s happened when their own network has gone blooey. It’s happened to me often enough that I can see the value of it; also, minor outages (like e-mail) can be reported there rather than be peppered over my network.

I have no illusions about my relative stature in the grand scheme of the Series of Tubes™, but if you’re sufficiently interested in one or more of my projects, you probably ought to bookmark mcwetboy.wordpress.com or subscribe to its RSS feed.

I also have a Vox account, though I’m still trying to figure out what use to put it to — after all, I already have a personal blog. The public/private blog entry settings are only useful if your network is already there — a problem endemic to every social network: you have to get all your cronies on it. (Only on Flickr have I managed to approach this.) And it handles photos less well than Flickr (with which it integrates), and books less well than LibraryThing (see Richard’s reviews here and here) — so far. It is, after all, in beta. I expect further refinements, and I’ll probably get the hang of it at some point. Meanwhile, I’ll probably fool around with it, answer its questions of the day, and so forth, until a use presents itself — i.e., until I figure out what goes here and what goes there.

I have Vox invites available, if you’re interested.