Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

I’ve been plugging away with the SevaTeem theme off and on over the last month or so and it’s now complete enough to let me try it out on various blogs that I run.

Obviously since I designed it mainly for me, it runs quite nicely on a number of those blogs but one or two have highlighted little things that I’d like to do with it. For instance, An Age of Magic uses a dark background therefore I needed to be able to change the colour of the various fonts used so that added a few options. That sorted out a lot of stuff at a stroke as it also lets me change the background image and not need to dive into the stylesheet to change colours as they’re all laid out on the options screen now.

One or two little “funnies” turned up when I tried to add in various bits of HTML in the sidebars by way of widgets so I’m going to be adding one or two options along those lines or perhaps buildin a widget that’ll deal with those issues.

This blog uses a fixed width so I’m currently working on adding that as an option. SevaTeem is a fluid width theme but I want to be able to use a fixed width as well.

Why all the options? Basically because I want SevaTeem to be the only theme that I ever need.

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.

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.

One of the problems that you find when you’re blogging quite a lot is in keeping the quality of the posts up.

Many bloggers seem not to bother with quality and end up producing a steady stream of short posts that are barely in English and often total drivel. OK, I’ll admit that the “drivel” comment is a subjective one and some of those that write what I’d call drivel seem to have quite substantial readerships so clearly there’s a market for that out there.

What I try to do is to write about a number of separate themes that are intertwined here in the one blog. So you’ll see posts about finance, travel and daily happenings with very little linking them apart from them having been written about by me. That lets me write about three separate topics in a day and keeps things relatively fresh.

On a separate tack, I also have a separate blog over at The View from Arnold which has a similar mix of things but which treats them in a more indepth way and I’m currently limiting myself to five posts a week. What would appear here as two or perhaps three posts appears there as just one. I’ve also adopted the policy that every post will have a photo there which is turning out to be harder to keep up than expected: quite how the daily photo blogs manage it year after year I don’t know.

I’m thinking of doing a creative writing course next year so I’m also toying with adding a “writing” strand to the topics here but haven’t really got further than thinking that I’d like to do that so far.

We had quite a busy weekend pretty much filled with shuffling the websites around which is always a depressing thing to be doing as you spend hours moving things and at the end you’re hoping that it all looks the same as it did to begin with.

First off was the establishment of our foothold in America which currently consists mainly of our French vacation listings site, our French B&B site, our global accommodation site and our global travel guide. That’s our initial collection and we’re hoping that over the next few months the traffic on those will start to catch up with that on their Europe counterparts.

Next was an upgrade to the new version of the listings which gives the property owners a little six page website instead of the previous single page version. That’s phase one of a more significant upgrade which’ll let us offer to build custom websites for vacation properties.

And finally, now that we’ve a proper American hosting service it was the turn of a couple of blogs to head west as their content is more appropriate for an American audience.

Where does all this stuff live now? Well, to give us a bit of contingency we’re using Lunarpages for most of the sites but have kept 3ix for one site as a backup in that one thing that was very clear when we read the various reviews of sites was that it was always prudent to retain a second hosting service. For that purpose, 3ix seems ideal in that their base plan is all of $12 per year which is comparable to the monthly charge of some services and frankly seems the ideal service if you’ve only got one site and don’t mind that it’s hosted in America.

That’s us basically settled down now though I see that WordPress have yet another new version out so we’ll be moving onto that with the various blogs over the next few weeks or so (no big rush though).