Tag: blogging

On long posts

Looking at my recent posts you might be thinking something like “What’s wrong with these guy? These are like paragraphs and paragraphs of text. I can’t even be bothered to read all that crap!”. Well, if you do, I’ll tell you that I am surprised myself.

I tried to analyse this change of my writing habbits and pretty quickly I realised that it was the migration of my blogging software to WordPress that triggered that change.

As you might remember, one of my main dissatisfactions with Nucleus CMS was the editor. WordPress provides an excellent editor, which is fast, comfortable, and easily extendable (quicktags are easy to add and edit).

With editor hussle out of the way, nothing stops me from writing more, and thus I am free at expressing whatever I feel like and freeing my head from thoughts that would stay there for ages. The more I dump, the more space (or rather thinking power) I get. And the more thinking power I get, the more thoughts I get again. As you can see this is the vicious circle, that I can’t break. And even if I could, I woldn’t do so just yet.

So, for all of you out there who like short posts – my temporary appologies. I will try to put some short items here too, but they will be mostly in the Links category. That’s my educated guess. :)

P.S.: 5 paragraphs to say a simple thing… that’s graphomania or some other disorder.

On web design and my blog

Once in a while I stop and think about the reasons for changing the design of my blog.

My first reaction to such self query usually results in insults to myself. It has been some time since I noticed the design of any other site. This is mainly caused by me using RSS aggregator to read most of the websites on my daily menu. And with RSS the design of the actual site does not mean much anymore. All of them appear the same and exactly I want them to.

But I wouldn’t have had a blog if I’d only insult myself. Thus I continue.

I am updating and improving the design for a few reasons actually.

  • There are still a whole lot of visitors here who don’t use RSS at all or use it to get the notifications when I post new items. They all come to the site with their browsers.
  • First timers. Almost half of all the visitors on this site are coming here for the first time and will not return.
  • Historical reasons. There are some services, like archive.org which store the pages as they are. It is interesting to compare different stages of my blog evolution after some time.
  • Themes and perfectionism. I always wanted a professional website. I couldn’t make it myself because I am simply not a webdesigner. And I didn’t want to pay for it. Yet. Modern CMSs allow me to use themes developed by other people, who know what they are doing.
  • Boost of activity. Every time I play around with the maintenance part of my blog, I tend to use it more afterwards. I start posting more often and my posts get longer. I generally consider this to be a good thing.

Resume: as much as RSS is important in my daily surfing and in the lives of other people, there are still reasosn to pay attention to the look and feel of the website itself.

Where all the free images are hiding at?

I came across a really nice article titled “Where To Find Great Free Photographs And Visuals For Your Own Online Articles“. As the name suggests, it describes a number of websites that provide free images that can be used in online publications.

It is much better to use resources like those described in the article than Google Images, because it will save lots of time on getting the legal permission.

Migrated to WordPress

I have finally managed to migrated to WordPress. Database statistics inform me that:

There are currently 1,884 posts and 479 comments, contained within 22 categories.

As of now I am still fixing minor glitches here and there, but major things work. Just to let you know what is broken:

  • Permanent links. They are not working yet at all. Fixed.
  • Old links. None of the old links are working. Partially fixed. All of them won’t work anyway. Let me know if you find anything that I missed.
  • Users. I haven’t created any except for amdin account and myself. Feel free to register though. Not a bug. My brother managed to register all by himself, thus there is no problem.
  • Thumbnails. Some pictures come out in their original size and thus really mess up the look and feel. I will attend to this problem shortly. Too much editing required. Only new posts will have proper thumbnailing. And those that I will fix manually. Please complain.
  • Google Ads. I don’t yet have it installed. I will fix the temlate very soon. Fixed. Google Ads will now appear only on full item pages. This should improve the click-through ratio due to better ad suggestions. Keep clicking.
  • Blogroll. WordPress has an excellent tool for maintaining a blogroll, but it is not very useful to me, since I have mine at BlogLines. I’ll fix the exporting script shotly. Fixed.

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