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Archive: WordPress
Hi everyone, and welcome back to my blog! This is it — it’s official. This is a proper relaunch. And to prove it I have about a dozen posts already prepared, ready to be whipped out whenever I hit a dry patch.
I was actually hoping to launch it a few weeks earlier. But the process of redesigning the blog took much longer than I had anticipated. I must have had the original ideas for this design way back in September, and I have been working on it on and off ever since. Obviously it went on the back burner when I moved into my new flat, which took up a huge amount of my time between December and February.
Nonetheless, I expected that I would be able to put together the design quite quickly. One of my original intentions was to do it properly, with good accessibility, a mobile stylesheet, and some HTML5 and CSS3. I saw it as a good learning experience, and an opportunity to learn about the sort of code I will have to start using at work.
In the end, I have ended up having to basically re-learn how to develop a WordPress theme, due to major changes in versions 2.7 and 3.0. That was much harder than I anticipated, and it was only after borrowing a book from my colleague Gareth Saunders that I finally cracked it (sort of)!
It got to the stage where I have just had to work as quickly as possible to get the theme finished and ready for public display. As such, most of the fancy stuff I wanted to implement has not been started on, never mind finished. And the theme lacks the final polish. You will probably notice a few inconsistencies in the way some elements of the design work. I will be hoping to iron this all out in the coming weeks.
Content-wise, I anticipate that the blog will be quite different to what has been here before. But I knew that all along. That was part of the reason for my hiatus over the winter. But you will see what’s in store later on.
In the next few weeks there will be a few posts that would normally have appeared in either November or December. The normal sort of end-of-year stuff. For instance, I never got round to writing about the end of last year’s Formula 1 season (!), nor did I write a music roundup, which I have done every year since I started blogging way back in 2002.
Please let me know what you think of the design. As I say, I’m still working on it and am open to any suggestions.
I have spent a chunk of this evening getting to the bottom of what was causing comments to go wonky. I have now tracked down the problem so now submitting a comment should not take you to a 404 page. Nice!
I have also now paginated the comments sections, for those posts that have an especially large number of comments. So now there is less scrolling, although there is more clicking!
I am planning on implementing a new strategy to re-ignite the blog, with plans on redesigning and getting into a position where I am happy to post more often here. This blog has been a shadow of its former self, and although I no longer have the time to dedicate to it that I used to have, I don’t want to see it wither away either.
But that will come later, when I get the time. Just now, working on my blog feels too much like a busman’s holiday for me to want to do it!
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Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I have been mad busy.
To compound matters, when I had a spare bit of time I decided to upgrade to WordPress 3.0. This broke comments on the blog. (My fault I guess — I have been meaning to update the code for comments for at least a year, but never got round to doing it.)
So for the time being I have put up a quick fix so that comments just about work. It just doesn’t work quite as nicely as I’d like.
On the plus side, this is forcing me to have a look at recoding / redesigning the blog, which I have been thinking of doing for a while now. I have a bit of extra spare time next week, so I may get it done then.
In the meantime, please excuse the slight flakiness. I will try to continue posting so keep your eyes peeled.
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You may know that I run a Formula 1 blog called vee8. It’s just one of a number of websites I am now running. It’s a lot to have on my plate and recently I have been looking at ways to save time.
Last week I asked my readers if they thought I should continue with the daily roundup of F1 links. I was bowled over by the overwhelmingly positive response. But I was still unsure about constantly using the same few sources all the time.
Websites dedicated to Formula 1 tend to be very good for day-to-day gossip and news. They have a very good feel for what is going on generally in the F1 world. But occasionally a major media company, which doesn’t necessarily churn out a great deal of F1 content, will get a big scoop. In fact, I can’t think of a quality or mid-market newspaper which doesn’t, from time to time, have interesting stories that the dedicated F1 sites have missed.
In an attempt to try and catch these stories before reading them elsewhere, but without getting overwhelmed with boring, samey or irrelevant stories, I decided to try and construct a Yahoo! Pipe. My idea was to pull in the F1 feeds from a wide variety of media websites, but filtering out stories containing words like ‘Hamilton’ or ‘Button’ so that I didn’t get overloaded with nationalistic puff-pieces.
Unfortunately, this is proving difficult. Most media websites are simply unwilling to supply me with the content I want. Honourable exceptions are guardian.co.uk (which even has a feed dedicated to Lewis Hamilton, for all your stalker needs), the Telegraph and (amazingly) the Daily Express. Other websites’ approaches towards RSS are disappointing.
Times Online doesn’t appear to have a dedicated Formula 1 or motorsport feed. It has a Sport feed. Confusingly, rugby and tennis get their own feeds. But no other sport does — not even football. The rationale behind this isn’t very clear, and having seen that two sports do have their own feeds, I feel like going on the hunt for the others. But they aren’t there. Strangely, the rugby and tennis feeds are displayed completely separately, not as a sub-category of sport.
FT.com doesn’t have any sport feeds at all. I suppose that is understandable in a sense, as the FT is due to cut back its already rather scant sports coverage. But it does mean that I will miss out on the F1 stories it does have from time to time.
The Daily Mail website lumps Formula 1 content in the ‘other sports’ section. This has its own RSS feed, but unfortunately it is shared with tennis, horse racing and, er, yet more ‘other sports’. I somehow doubt that fans of any of these sports will find this RSS feed particularly useful, unless by some fluke they are a fan of all of them.
The paper is, however, happy to cater for the niche needs of football fans. 28 separate football clubs have their own RSS feed. More creepily, the Daily Mail offers dedicated RSS feeds containing the latest news on a number of different celebrities, for the stalker in you. Quite good for stained raincoats, but not so good for anoraks like me.
These websites are surely missing a trick. It shouldn’t be a problem to provide RSS feeds for any topic, no matter how niche. WordPress certainly offers this functionality, and every category and tag has its own RSS feed. But some websites’ approaches to RSS feeds seem arbitrary at best. It seems particularly inexcusable in this increasingly long tail-aware age.
Presumably newspapers want people to read their content. But some of their websites are sticking to the old model of content delivery — chucking it all in one place and making its readers browse through everything until they come across an article they’re interested in. That was all very well when the most efficient way of disseminating news was to print it on a dead tree. But that was last the case at least ten years ago.
Now we have more efficient and cost-effective ways to get to the information we want, but newspapers seem dead set on not offering them to us. Bandwidth isn’t an excuse. guardian.co.uk not only offers RSS feeds for a huge variety of topics, it offers full RSS feeds for them. Plus, with a nifty bit of URL hacking, you can access highly specialist RSS feeds that aren’t even advertised at all.
So why are some websites still asking me to subscribe to an “other sports” feed filled with a baffling mish-mash of unrelated stories? What makes the editors of these websites think that I am going to hunt down their F1 content by spending my time trawling through their badly designed website all the time, or read through a thousand RSS items that don’t interest me?
The thing is, someone looking for niche content is probably more likely to subscribe to an RSS feed. This is specifically because they don’t want to go through the entire site’s content. Yet these websites only supply RSS feeds containing a large range of the content. For the content consumer, this doesn’t save much more time than visiting the website.
If these websites offered an RSS feed for F1, they would be guaranteed at least one reader — and then more when I link to interesting articles from vee8. As it stands, I am tearing my hair out and finding it easier not to think about these websites at all.
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