Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
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.
Following my change of WordPress theme, sensible headings are beginning to return to its summaries of my posts. Interestingly, it would appear that Google‘s BlogSearch has been unaffected by the glitch.
I have had a look on how the posts from this blog are listed on Technorati and most if not all of the titles are coming through as “Permalink”. I was going to try WordPress.com support but they are off for the weekend. A trip to the WordPress.com forums was then in order and a few helpful folk put me right on this one: apparently Technorati uses the permalink titles when extracting post summaries from WordPress.com blogs and in the Andreas04 theme that I am using, these are all hard-coded as “Permalink”. I have left the theme’s author in on this and going to try WordPress.com feedback tomorrow. In technical terms and from what I can see, the fix needed is as follows: change title=”Permalink” to title=”Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>” in the single.php, page.php and index.php files in the theme.