Journalism | Technology Tales

My type of blogging

31^st August 2007

A recent article by Lorelle VanFossen on The Blog Herald got me thinking about my blogging journey and what I have learned about myself. My brush with reactive blogging has taught a number of lessons. The first of these is that I just cannot keep up with others; someone always gets there first. Another lesson is that taking on a topic of the day takes up loads of time when it lies outside my area of expertise, and I spend a lot of that time researching the topic. What follows from this is that if the post doesn't flow from me, it either takes up a lot of time or it doesn't happen at all. Yes, I have been known to bin stillborn posts due to loss of interest or where things just wouldn't come together at all.

Following all of this, I have come to the conclusion that I am a proactive blogger. That said, I still need to get some bursts of inspiration from somewhere. For instance, my hillwalking blog always experiences a burst of activity after I have been trekking in the outdoors; such encounters never fail to produce something that is worth sharing. In the same vein, anything you find here is likely to influenced by what I have encountered in the technology world. Yes, news items do provide ideas for posts, but it is in a more leisurely way rather than the frenzied approach of some. And like the hillwalking world, such inspiration does have its peaks and troughs.

A feast of plugins

6^th 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 make it 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 wonderful 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.

A case of cross-fertilisation

23^rd 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 about 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; this consideration of content is the sort of thing on which a posting on The Blog Herald has been musing.

Do we surf the web less at the weekend?

21^st 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 whether this is a definite trend, yet it is an intriguing one: fewer 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 my day job, and it appears that others are looking for the same stuff too if the blog statistics are to be believed. Couple that with the fact that technology news announcements peak during the week, making it appear that the weekday upsurge is real. I’ll continue to keep an eye on things to see if my theorising is right or mistaken…

New year, new blog

17^th January 2007

Hello and welcome.

This may be the first time that you encountered me in cyberspace, but this is not my first foray into the blogosphere: that is HennessyBlog. So why the new blog, then? The reason is that I fancied having somewhere to mull over computer technology, both new and old. And HennessyBlog is already devoted to the enjoyment of the great outdoors matters else, and I do not want to dilute that focus. While a technology fan, I also like going walking in the countryside and visiting interesting towns and cities, capturing any views encountered with my camera. From these photos, I have compiled my online photo gallery, and HennessyBlog also features news of updates to this.

So there you have it: this will be my technology blog. I do build my own PC’s, so references to computer hardware may appear from time to time. Even so, I am more of a software person and programming is a love of mine. Currently, we also are going through a period where there are a lot of new software releases: who cannot have heard of the forthcoming versions of Windows and Office? I have been having a look at some of these. Like anyone interested in computer technology, the Internet is also a big interest of mine, not least because I have been dabbling in web development for most of the last 10 years. I deliberately say development because, although I can probably do passable website interfaces, I am more technically adept than artistically gifted. I did mention programming earlier: this pays my bills, so it may feature at some point.