Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

Outdoors enthuasiasts blogging in the U.K.

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…

WordPress.com and user registration

1st May 2007

I don’t know if it’s me or not but I seem to remember there being a Register link on the Meta widget that you see here. Anyway, its absence prompted me to go doing a spot of fiddling to (re)introduce it. My motivation for doing this is my preference for allowing only registered users to post comments so that I don’t encounter too much comment spam.

Speaking of widget functionality, it did take me longer than it should for me to work out how to configure widgets; the button in the widget with lines in it does the trick. Once this twigged, I built a register widget from a text one so that you can get an account with the WordPress.com empire and use it for blogging or commenting as you choose. Registering here allows comment posting on any WordPress.com blog.

Speaking of widgets, latest WordPress.com allows bloggers like me to use tag clouds and even convert archive and category lists to drop down menus. I am not sure about tag clouds but making a drop down menu of the monthly archives certainly took my fancy, as you can see here.

New theme

31st January 2007

After trying to get WordPress.com to amend the Andreas04 theme and getting nowhere, I decided to jump ship and try the Andreas09 one instead. The permalink titles are more sensible on this one so I’ll see what Technorati makes of them. Even though I have had to change theme, the wonders of CSS have allowed me to carry over elements of the colour scheme from the old to the new. If you really want to witness the raw power of CSS, pop over to CSS Zen Garden where the same HTML code is rendered in extraordinarily different ways thanks to CSS. There is even a book written by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag to go with the website.

Post titles on Technorati

28th January 2007

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.

New domain name

25th January 2007

I have registered the domain technologytales.com for this blog yesterday and have since got the DNS configuration completed. I used Easily.co.uk for the registration; they also host my other domain name and have done so since I first registered it. Easily allowed me to transfer to the WordPress.com namespace servers and $10 secured the rest of the setting up and $10 every year at renewal time with keep things in place. There is more about doing all of this on the WordPress FAQ.

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