Well, it has been difficult staying on top of the various online communities that I’m part of during the past few days, but last night, I did manage to finish off dropping my 300 EntreCards for the day. Today has been a quiet day getting going, and I’ve easily met my quota.

Many of the blogs that I visited today have various things up to celebrate Independence Day. There are pictures of flags and fireworks, many of them sparkly. Quite a few blogs have posted the Declaration of Independence. I really like that, and have been talking about Independence Day with Fiona a bit today and Kim is showing Fiona a Schoolhouse Rock video about the forming of our country. Other folks have been talking about Canada Day, which was on the First. Many of my ancestors come from Canada, so it is great to be in touch with a little of their history.

I stumble across a lot of Philippino blogs and everyone there is talking about the Manny Pacquiao David Diaz fight. Other blogs are still chattering about Spain’s victory in Euro 08.

On my own blog, I’ve been continuing to add tweaks since upgrading to Drupal 6.2. I’ve mostly swapped content from the left column and the right column. The layout looks better that way. However, it makes the ads load faster but my content load more slowly. Oh well.

I also found the bug with OpenID. It should be working now, however, if you’ve signed up before, it may have lost your information and may add you as a new user.

You now have three different ways of adding comments. You can add them via Disqus, FriendFeed or directly to the site. What are the advantages? Well, FriendFeed ties in nicely to all kinds of other content, but can lag a little bit. Disqus seems like a good shared comment system. However, like with FriendFeed, the comments reside elsewhere. I have some control over the comments, but if FriendFeed or Disqus go away, so does the content.

In terms of Microblogging, I’m still very interested in identi.ca. I haven’t made any more progress is setting up my own site based on their software, but I’ll get back to that. I was pleased to see that ping.fm added the ability to feed identi.ca. However, it requires that you use a userid and password. However, I use OpenID to authenticate with identi.ca, so I don’t have a password to give to ping.fm I’ve tried a few things to tweak that, but no luck yet. Ideally, ping.fm should start supporting OpenID, both for logging in as well as for authentication with sites like Identi.ca. Somewhere in there OAuth fits in, but I haven’t looked at OAuth closely enough yet.

With all of that, I am managing to spend time with family and friends. Last night we went to see fireworks. Today, we’re going visiting, and I’ll be back online sometime much later.