I am proud to officially announce OggCamp 10 today. The second OggCamp will take place in Liverpool in the UK on the weekend of May 1 & 2 to be preceded by Rathole Radio’s first ever Rathole Roadshow on April 30. That event will include live concerts by David Rovics, Attila The Stockbroker and my good friend Dan Lynch among others. But mainly, this year’s OggCamp1 will be even bigger and better than the original: There will be two full days of content, including another joint Ubuntu UK Podcast / Linux Outlaws live show, in a much bigger location — we are also discussing a possible exhibition space and much more. Since there will be no more LugRadio Live we are committed to taking up the torch and we’re running with it full tilt. Together, these two events will make a magnificent weekend of free software and free culture in North West England. So mark the dates in your calendar now! Here’s all the details:

• Rathole Roadshow: April 30 (20:00 - late) at the Bad Format Social Club in Liverpool (ticket prices TBA)
• OggCamp 10: May 1/2 (all day) at The Black-E in Liverpool (admission TBA)

For further information, keep an eye on the OggCamp website and our official identi.ca stream which will both have updates as the planning progresses. I think I can safely say for all of us who organised OggCamp 2009 that it was an absolutely amazing experience and we hope to see you all turn up again this year. See you in Liverpool!

Since I started to first set my foot on the Internet in 1998, I had many websites. I started with GeoCities, created several cheesy fan sites, ran something resembling what would later be called a blog (still written in static HTML), then a real blog, started several forums and other sites and eventually came back to blogging. But some time after I started the Linux Outlaws podcast with Dan I discovered that I couldn’t cope with regular blogging anymore. I just don’t have the time these days. I still like writing, but regular long-format posts are out of the question. That’s where micro blogging, or “micro messaging” as it has also been called lately, came to my rescue. I have been in love with it ever since I first heard about Jaiku on This Week in Tech and I’ve been madly micro messaging ever since. I later moved on to identi.ca where you can find me as @fabsh — so that is where my status updates reside these days, but while micro blogging is a great tool, sometimes you need slightly more space than 140 characters can provide to explain things. That is why I have decided to resurrect my personal page, not as a blog, but as somewhat of a cross between a blog and a static page. You are looking at the result right now.

I have decided to go with Drupal because of its exceptional stability and the fact that it provides the most flexible and powerful content management framework for creating a multi-purpose site1. Drupal can provide the backbone to anything, from a static website, to a blog to things like inventory-tracking applications. It might not be the best single-purpose blogging software out there (in my eyes, that’s WordPress) but it is the most flexible thing short of coding it all yourself and that’s exactly what I need for this site rather than just a blogging tool or a wiki (which I have also used for this site in the past). I hope you will join me in this new chapter of my journey on the web in 2010. I am planning to have reviews, articles, opinion pieces and all kinds of other stuff for you, some of it obviously to do with Linux and F/OSS2, some of it a bit further out there…