On Blogging

I know it's been a while since I posted on here. I've been slowly updating the photo gallery, but rarely finding the time to cobble a few words together. Hell, I've been to Italy for a fortnight, started working on a Windows Vista course and am undergoing an intensive but interesting audit at work.

Mozilla FireFox and Opera both have a nifty bookmarks feature which allows you to give a bookmark a shortcut, sort of like speed-dial for websites.

Here’s how it works: Browse to a website you visit often, say this one. Bookmark the site by either pressing CTRL+D or going to Bookmarks / Bookmark this page.

Lifehacker has a post about dragging unlinked URLs to the address bar to navigate.

Let’s say you come across an URL that hasn’t been linked. Select it (careful with spaces at the start and end) and drag it up to the address bar. Release the mouse and FireFox will automagically jump to that page.

In fact, you can even drag regular links to the address bar for the same effect.

WordPress‘ default theme (Kubrick) is great, but I’ve always had a problem with the title tags that the Kubrick theme generates. They could be so much more search engine friendly, don’t you think?

<title>

	<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?>
</title>

This usually results in the title reading like Interweb World » Perfecting WordPress Title Tags, which is fine.

When I started blogging, I wrote using a pseudonym.

Not that I was focussing my writing on fundamentalist ramblings or anything to be ashamed of. I just appreciated that being anonymous afforded me the ability to write honestly and without fear of reprisal. I didn't have to worry about friends, family and colleagues reading my innermost thoughts.

I'm messing about today with doing podcasts. I recorded an interview the other day with the producer of Sofia's Diary on Bebo and here it is.

Unreality Music is currently experiencing a massive traffic spike courtesy of the StumbleUpon community. It's all centered around a post I wrote almost a fortnight ago after Dr Pepper publicly teased Axl Rose about his ability to release an album.

When I first decided to launch a personal blog, I made it my mission not to perform any optimisation on this site.

At the time, my thinking was that I would just run entirely off the Garland theme. I got tired of that pretty quickly, just as I couldn't stand the Kubrick/K2 theme on WordPress.

I switched to the Zen theme for Drupal, but to be honest, that's not personal enough either. I'm starting to hanker after a theme for this site that gives it a personality. Or gives me a personality.

After my rant last month about the scope and limitations of a personal site, I've thought long and hard about how my website should represent me. And probably the best way to do that is to treat myself like a client.

Ouch. Collis from PSDTuts (a Photoshop tutorial site) mentioned a while back that there was going to be a premium subscriber area to the site. I don't think anybody batted an eyelid at the time.

However, today a post appeared in the RSS feed advertising a premium tutorial. I think like a lot of people, I didn't mind the premium area when I could ignore it. But to dangle it in our faces like that? That's a different story.

There's been a fair bit of buzz in the WordPress community about the hotly anticipated WordPress 2.5. I've only ever downloaded stable releases of the software, but being impatient tonight I decided to install the WordPress 2.5 release candidate. I backed up one of my less important blogs and went for an upgrade.

From Dougal Campbell's blog, the major new/upgraded features are:

• Faster load times.
• Multi-file uploads.
• New "Media Manager" for images, audio, video, etc.
• Built-in gallery function.
• Built-in (and pluggable) Gravatars support.
• New backend design.
• One-click auto-update for plugins.
• Reactivate plugins after a 'Deactivate All Plugins' action.

There are a few things I want to look at. Load times, Gravatar support and deactivating plugins aren't of interest to me. I've got stuff to say about the other features though...