Foreign Perspectives

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After much tinkering around with other peoples’ Wordpress templates, I figured that it was time that I wrote my own one.

That sounds like it would be a major undertaking but in reality it’s not nearly as difficult nor timeconsuming as you’d think basically because a lot of the groundwork has already been done so it’s effectively tinkering around but on a slightly larger scale.

Anyway, I’ve been plugging away with that off and on for the last month or two over at SevaTeem and it looks like it’s getting close to the time when I’ll be able to release it on an unsuspecting public. As a bit of preparation for that day, I’ve started to roll it out on some of my little family of blogs with the one over at Our Inns probably being the closest representation to the final product although as it’s going to offer loads of options it could well look quite different and Personally Chosen is also using it.

What’s needed next is the addition of some options to avoid people needing to dive in and edit the code itself.

Popularity: 23% [?]

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Sometimes it seems like everyone who’s ever designed a website needs to run up a blog to write about it.

Most of the time they tend to fizzle out though or change topics so that they end up being a general blog rather than sticking to their original niche. One design blog does seem to be making something of a point of avoiding that degeneration through collecting rather meaty articles (also a pleasant change from the normal design blogs which generally end up having very short articles) and that’s Stylish (a very popular word to use these days).

What do I mean by “meaty” articles. Well, consider their recent one about the user accounts in Vista. That one is written mainly for techies as it goes on for quite a bit about a facility that you shouldn’t be disabling although, to be fair, many people would like to disable it. Why shouldn’t you disable it? Well, all those annoying little messages that Vista pops up about such and such an application wanting to run are there so that when a malicious piece of software gets installed on your PC, it too will have to ask.

Similarly with a high information content yet perhaps not so accessible as it might be is their article on the spyware community. Yes, it’s useful information to have, but I’d have liked to have had a paragraph saying why it was useful information for you to have and on the whole that’s the problem with this blog: they have a whole lot of really useful information in it but could do with adding a paragraph to each post saying what the information is for.

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For the first time we find ourselves splitting a blog in two.

The reason is simple really: a while back I started An Age of Magic for a bit of fun and some time later Wendy started writing some pieces on it too. Roll the calendar forward a lot of months and her stuff has ended up swamping mine so we thought that we’d be better splitting the blog in two with stuff she’s written staying in Age of Magic whilst my strand of the blog moves to A Time of Magic.

Taking the posts out of the original blog was easy enough as the Wordpress export facility lets you select by author and the import was easy enough. However, it’s not quite so easy to get rid of the original version of the posts as they were written under the admin user which can’t be deleted so I ended up having to do that in MySQL which means that the post counts still reflect the number of posts which I wrote even though they’re no longer in the old blog. Still, I imagine that’ll sort itself out at some point.

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