Failure is the Key to Success

I have been working over the last few weeks to migrate my blog from Thingamablog to WordPress. This is something that I had been considering for a while and then after Randa’s review of my blog, I started looking into it seriously.

I created a test install of WordPress at home to play around with and then started to look at the options for exporting my Thingamablog data. On the face of it, the data could be exported in XML format. However, the structure of the data wasn’t compatible with any of the import options. In the end, I imported the data into Excel, reformated it and created a new file in WordPress export format. This enabled me to import my posts into the test WordPress install.

Continue reading » Complete blog makeover

Tags:akismet,askapache password protect,feedburner feedsmith,FireStats,google xml sitemaps,myavatars,nofollow free plugin,now reading,subscribe to comments,technorati tags,weathericon,wp-cache

I had an email from Alan at WeatherUnderground thanking me for my post about weather stickers. To get rid of the annoying ads, he has sent me a 1 year gift membership, which allows you to see the WeatherUnderground site without any adverts. I didn’t even know they did memberships, it just looked like another ad on the site at first glance. Anyway, I’ve added the widget under the WeatherPixie one, which gives me temperature in Celcius and a clock, I’m not sure if the clock is picking up from the local system or displaying UK time, maybe you can let me know in the comments what you see.

With my membership, I get to give a gift membership to someone else, so what I’ll do is the first person to request the gift membership in the comments will get it, just drop me an email after leaving your comment so that I have your email address, my address is on my contact me page.

I’ve been thinking about adding a widget to my blog to show the current weather for a while now and have finally done it now.

I have looked at a few options:

Weather Underground

The WeatherUnderground widgets are clear and informative, providing the current weather and a link to check the forecast. If you click through to the WeatherUnderground website for forecasts, there is a lot of useful information, but the page also has a lot of adverts, it is annoying.

netWeather

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Weather
Forecast

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Weather
Forecast | Weather
Maps

The netWeather widget from Accuweather is nice, and reasonably customisable but relies on Javascript and sometimes is slow opening. Also, in testing it seemed to constantly contact the accuweather website.

Weather Pixie

While investigating another solution, I came across The Weather Pixie. It’s a bit quirky which I liked, and the figure I have used, Weatherboy6, looks (with a bit of imagination) a bit like me except he doesn’t have a beard and maybe he has a bit more hair on top. As the weather changes, the background changes and as the temperature changes, so do the clothes that the figure wears. The choice I’ve got to make is temperature, wind speed and pressure in imperial or metric. For me this is a problem, as I mentioned in my earlier post about UK weights and measures, I generally use imperial, so mph for wind speed and inches of mercury for pressure suit me best, but I use Celcius for temperature. I will use metric for the moment, let me know what you think. By the way, the time on the image is the update time, not the current time.

Tags:weather pixie,weather widget

I have changed the comments system that was in use on my blog today. I migrated all of the previous comments into the new system and believe it to be working fine. I have set the system to allow me to moderate the comments initially, but will turn this off in the next day or so when I know it is working correctly.

Let me know what you think and if I’ve really got it wrong and you can’t let me know in the comments, then you can let me know via my contact me page.

Thanks to David Airey for making me aware of a problem with my comments and suggesting the contact me page.

After looking at the list of categories in my blog, I decided that I needed to add a few more. I have gone back through the posts and added them to the new categories where appropriate. This in theory, would reduce my use of my miscellaneous category ‘General’, but just to prove a point my post about the 900 years of Dunstable is in General. Oh well, never mind.

Tags:Blog-design,categories

I had noticed about a week ago that my posts were not updating on Technorati although it was showing that my site had been updated. The problem seemed to be about the same time that I changed to using Feedburner and after searching on Google this seemed to be a known problem that Technorati had been made aware of, but were not responding to.

So, I placed a Support ticket with Technorati this evening not really expecting to get a response. While I was reading the automated acknowledgement, I got an email from Tonette Wong at Customer Services with the resolution.

It turns out that when I was making changes to the blog’s layout, I had made the entry title into a link and this was different to the link in the feed.

I have made the two links the same and now Technorati like me again. So, unlike many other people, it seems I got a very quick accurate response, Thank you.

Tags:feedburner,technorati,technorati support