I wonder at the naiveté of people who publish material to the web, and then spit and scratch if it appears somewhere else ‘out there.’ I also think people who cut and paste clearly private or sensitive material from sites to other more public forums deserve all the un-friending they get – a sort of
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It’s summer outside and lots of other people are out there enjoying the joys of the great outdoors … hitting the surf, strolling the countryside, and just hanging out as you do on these long, sunny days. It’s an outdoorsy time for most, but not for me. I’ve been hanging out at my desk, and for a lot of the time, staring at a screen.
Since making the big move from Wordpress.com across to my own domain using Wordpress.org, I’ve been steadily tinkering away under the hood. I now have some idea of what it’s like when people get caught up with reconditioning things: clocks, cars, and other sundry ‘machines.’ It’s what goes on underneath that makes the outside … eventually … work so well. Well of course, anything to do with machines, engines, algebra, coding and anything vaguely associated with mathematics has guaranteed a vertical learning curve for this non-DIY little arty. I’ve had the smile wiped off my face more than a few times along the way, but right now, I’m feeling pretty darned pleased with myself. As a result, I wanted to write about how I got from where I was to where I am now blog-wise. If and when you decide to make the break to your own domain, you might find this longish post useful. You might also find some nuggets here if you’re thinking about making a move from another blogging content management system (CMS) to Wordpress.
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It’s blog makeover time I declare. I spent a good deal of last Sunday afternoon doing a tidy-up of the blog. The sidebars were starting to flow over, and I was particularly unimpressed with the way the category cloud looked totally useless … a mass or mess of words which I reckon would be daunting for a visitor to say the least. Time to sort things out.
Wordpress 2.1 now supports tags, and those of us who had been organising our posts using both tags and categories, tossing in every possible relevant key-word, were faced with tag and category clouds which looked like a storm about to break. It’s nice now to be able to get some organisation into the blog, and to ask what use tags and categories serve. At the end of Sunday I felt good, like you do after a big clean out of a messy cupboard or file system. I’ve lost the tags … well, I hadn’t been using them for ages, not since I migrated from Blogger. My category cloud has reduced itself down to the lean animal you can see on the right. In fact I have only now got 8 parent categories, with the kids nestling underneath. What does this all mean?
Continue reading ...Image: Expectations dcjohn Looking back over a year or more of blog posts, I can see a profound change in my blog’s focus … for the better. Back then it was a collage of the personal, professional, and even a smattering of the political. Now it is focussed on the by-line which guides my writing:
Continue reading ...Yesterday was the first anniversary of my niece’s wedding. I’d been feeling guilty about the dozens of digital images I had lurking in iPhoto and my tardiness in getting them out there for sharing as I’d promised. Truth is, I was looking for an app that would make putting a slideshow together quick and easy.
Continue reading ...The UK-based Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies is worth a visit, and Centre Director Jane Farmer’s ‘Learning Tip of the Day’ definitely worth subscribing to. Right now there’s a call out for educators to contribute their current favourite top-10 tools. The lists get boiled down at year’s end, and the top 100 for 2008
Continue reading ...And of course this post from 2007 which was prepared on Spinning’s former incarnation (on WordPress.com) had gently falling snowflakes across its face. Not any more, sadly. We’re now in WordPress.org and the snow has melted. If you do have a WordPress.com blog, lucky you for this sweet little festive feature. Somewhere up there, it’s
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Comment as a sigh: over to you
Today’s 31 Day Comment Challenge asks that we turn the blog over to our readers. OK. I’m up for it. Here’s the task. I’m a voice coach a lot of the time. When I’m working with a class of actors, I’ll often ask them to ‘drop in a breath and to sigh out how they
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