6th July 2007 Themed Login
Here’s a useful idea: get your blog login page to look like it’s part of your blog. It does work well on my hillwalking blog but you do have to watch how it behaves with whatever theme you are using. Strangely, I couldn’t get it to work on my offline blog, the development mirror of what you see online. The ability to set what page is displayed after logging in or logging out is an especially useful inclusion.
My Category Order
My Link Order
My Page Order
These sound like really good ideas: being able to control the running order of things on your blog sidebar is a good thing. What scuppered my using them is that you need widgets turned on for the effect to work and i have seen issues with how ID’s have been set when things are widgetised.
18th June 2007 The last week on WordPress.com has featured decisions that some may question, to say the least. For instance, the death of Feed Stats was something that I saw as a retrograde step. Next, I saw a slight change to the appearance of my blog that led me to take full control of the situation; a previous discussion with WordPress.com staff about changing a theme to the way that I wanted it to be got me nowhere so I wasn’t about to try again… I might miss having advance notice of where WordPress goes next but I am not sure that I want to be a guinea pig either.
So, you now find this hosted by Streamline.net and, apart from a lengthy hiatus (at least, it felt like forever thanks to recurring thoughts of PageRank loss; yes, I know that sounds silly…) spent awaiting FTP access to be sorted out, the set up ran smoothly enough; I think that my request for transfer from a Windows server to a Linux one might have been the cause of the delay. Setting up a MySQL database was a breeze and it’s part of the package too. In fact, the Pro package that I am using is £31.99 ex VAT per annum, not bad at all, and, teething problems out of the way, it’ll be interesting to see how things will fare from now on.
Having a self-hosted WordPress installation is nothing new to me since I do it for my hillwalking blog and everything came together very quickly this time around. knowing what plug-ins add real value was a definite help: Bad Behaviour and Ultimate GA headed the list but a Spam Karma 2 is another option. Feedburner integration is another potential item on the configuration list. I have stuck with the Andreas09 theme but am unsure as to how far I will take customising it; it’s not a high priority right now. In fact, I may find another three-column layout that takes my eye now that I am not limited to the offerings available from WordPress.com.
The posts from the old blog have arrived over here and that seems to have worked fine first time around thanks the WordPress’ import/export functionality. I still have to get the images over but there’ll be time for that yet. Another thing on the to do list is to transfer over the links and set up any text and RSS widgets that have been a feature of the previous rendition of the blog. That means linking to wp-links-opml.php on the old blog using the import links functionality. There is no other link export function and you can only import into a single category; a link import/export plug-in that retains the link category information would be a bonus.
While I wonder if I have made a rod for my own back with my having two self-hosted WordPress blogs, it does feel good to have more control and it’ll be interesting where where this journey goes next.
14th June 2007 WordPress.com has retired its Feed Stats feature. While there might have been problems with it for some, I do find it a strange decision not to spend some time on it. After all, given the existence of Google Reader and its kind, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that more people read blogs with RSS readers than by going to the sites themselves. In fact, I peruse blogs more often with Google Reader than by visiting the websites themselves. It’s enough to make me wonder if I could use FeedBurner with this blog.
To follow on from this, I am beginning to wonder if that Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, seems to be a quirky company that makes decisions that are questioned by its customers. After all, they did remove the post preview functionality from blog post editing screens and that has generated a good deal of comment. On self-hosted WordPress, you can add a plug-in to correct this but that option is not open to WordPress.com users. The answer that I got to a theme change request earlier this year adds to the impression as does seeing a company having staff apparently work from home all over the world.
Automattic seems an unconventional beast alright; could that lead to their undoing? It is king of the hill with blogging world for now but there is nothing to say that will last forever.
23rd May 2007 Having two blogs allows me to stream my content; I doubt that many visitors to my hillwalking blog would appreciate seeing posts on, for example, the minutiae of UNIX shell scripting. However, as disparate as these worlds are, there is something shared between them and it has started to cause some cross fertilisation between them: blogging itself. Rather than being too self referential on my hillwalking blog and preaching to the choir, I have taken the decision to muse of blogging and its progress right here. There is also some escape in the opposite direction too: technology does get used on the hill too. Examples include GPS receivers and digital mapping and my hillwalking blog is definitely the place for them. It is all very much audience driven and this consideration of content is the sort of thing on which a posting on The Blog Herald has been musing.
21st May 2007 Looking at the visitor statistics for both this blog and for my main website, I have noticed a definite dip in visitor numbers at the weekends, at least over the last few weeks. Time will tell as to whether this is a definite trend but it is an intriguing one: less people are reading blogs and such like when they might have more time to do so. It would also suggest that people are getting away from the web at the weekend, not necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, I was away from the world of computers and out walking in the border country shared by Wales and England yesterday.
Speaking of walking, it does not surprise me that my hillwalking blog received less attention: many of my readers could have been in the outdoors anyway. And as for this blog, it does contain stuff that I find useful in the day job and it seems that others are looking for the same stuff too if the blog statistics are to be believed. Couple that to the fact that technology news announcements peak during the week and it seems that the weekday upsurge is real. I’ll continue to keep an eye on things to see if my theorising is right or mistaken…
11th May 2007 I have been tweaking the widgets in this blog and the thought has crossed my mind that purveyors of open source blogging and CMS’s may be overcomplicating matters with the CSS that they are writing. Using inheritance without much thought as to others having to pick it up is one irritation but bunching styles together can confuse too. For instance, you can draw from from two different styles for the same HTML element (it’s what’s going when you see class="class1 class2" in a tag definition), which is OK if done simply but can confuse matters when customisation is attempted later. Drupal particularly suffers from this bugbear but it’s their in WordPress too, though not to the same extent. Using a hierarchy to define and attach your styles (#id1 .class2 tag1 {style definition…} is the kind of thing that I have in mind), can also confound but I admit to finding the approach very useful for myself. I think that I know what’s driving this: the need to cut down the bulk of CSS files but using the advanced features that I mentioned above without clear commenting and other documentation hampers later efforts. It would be nice if every developer of a theme for use blogging or CMS software was forced to document their work extensively and share that documentation with interested users. After all, sharing is the whole purpose of their endeavours…
10th May 2007 What we call walking or hillwalking in the U.K. goes under the banners of hiking, tramping and yomping in other parts of the world. One term that we share with other parts is backpacking and this is much bigger in the U.S. than it is in the U.K. My hillwalking blog has come to the attention of members of the hillwalking and backpacking community and WordPress’s logging of who visited my blog has alerted me to this and allowed to find other similar blogs.
Why have I mentioned this here? The reason is that it has allowed me to see what blogging software others have been using. Blogger seems to be a very popular choice with a number using Windows Live Spaces, in the process making me aware that Microsoft have dipped their toes into the hosted blogs arena. Other than this, I have also seen Typepad being used and one or two self-hosted operations to boot, mine included. Intriguingly, I have yet to encounter a fellow hillwalking fan in the U.K. using WordPress.com to host a hill blog but I do know of a German backpacker having one. Videoblogging is used by some and the ever pervasive YouTube seems to be the staple for this, at least for the ones that I have seen.
It’s an intriguing survey and it will be interesting to see how things develop…
4th May 2007 I was away in Ireland last weekend but a pleasant surprise greeted me on my return when I checked up on the welfare of my blogs: my Firefox Google toolbar was telling me of a jump from 0 to 4 for this blog, good news indeed. My hillwalking blog also benefited from such good karma; its PageRank has increased by 1. This is where I like to see things going…
22nd April 2007 Going through the stats for my other blog, I noticed some activity from Google Reader and decided to investigate. what I discovered was a very capable feed reader, much better than Technorati’s equivalent. The interface feels a little like an email client with a different entry of the sidebar for each feed. It also gives you full text and pictures for each blog article that it picks up, though it messes with my hillwalking blog for some reason… As a feed aggregator, it performs very well and makes my blog surveying a lot more effortless. I know that Outlook 2007 has aggregation functionality too but the portability of Google’s little online offering makes it worth taking further, especially as you wouldn’t need to pay for it anyway.
Update: Google Reader also allows you to share items from your feeds; you can find what I am sharing here.
21st April 2007 On a recent blog hopping excursion, I spotted a mention for no frills hosting by Streamline.net by a satisfied customer. I’ll stick with Fasthosts for now because I have what I need from them in terms of features and uptime, even though I am paying a bit more. the Streamline package looks interesting though…