About a week ago there was a pretty wonky glitch on the site and I rolled back code a bit to solve it, so a few of the changes I’d made the past couple months got stripped back off or broke, and I’m sorry about that. As for the why I haven’t fixed them yet, or why the Masaccio Exchange has been so quiet, well, I’m starting work on this year’s revision to the site, and I don’t think it’s worth fixing the glitches on the current one at the cost of slowing down the rollout for what’s shaping up to be a much more streamlined version of the site. If you’re into mockups, check out the mini-gallery below of mockups for different parts of the site as they’ll (cross-browser compatibility willing) look by the end of next month.

So, just today I installed and began putzing around with a new and exciting (to me) browser: Flock.

At it’s heart of hearts, Flock is just Firefox. It’s built on the Mozilla code, afterall. It does have the clear advantage of not chewing my computers to a grinding, chugging hault– a problem recent builds of Firefox seem to have developed much to my frustration.

But, what makes Flock exciting is how it deviates from Firefox. Flock, you see, aims to be the social browser. To that end, it calmly integrates Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, Picasa, Photobucket, YouTube, WordPress, Blogger, and a bit more into it. Once configured, all of your buddies from each service and their most recent updates show up in a side bar. You can quickly add links or images to your own feed with a click, or drag-and-drop.

Or, have the sidebar show you feeds. Or your Gmail. A togglable bar above the tab bar can load media feeds, letting you view all of your buddie’s vacation photos at once without having to deal with Facebook’s AJAX galleries.

Heck, I’m writing this post from Flock. Not from my admin page loaded in Flock, but from Flock’s built-in blog composer. I right-clicked on their logo there, chose “Blog This” and it got me started.

Flock is a pretty busy browser, so minimalists need not imply. But, with the increasingly social nature of my site and mingling, this might just be the thing I needed to streamline my eternally-connected life.