Loving this P2 theme – I can see a lot of application for it. Although on Skewster, there’s no toolbar above the status update area – whereas on WordPress.com, there is.
I wonder if it’s smarter to link Skewster to this WordPress account rather than doing another self-hosted option? I’d like to change the design though, so that might be a consideration…
I abandoned this blog a while back, but the account exists to provide me with awesome Akismet keys. Anyway, I used the microblogging themes in order to test cross-posting from Twitter and Facebook via Ping.fm.
While it all worked rather well, it resulted in a pretty cluttered interface that looked rather crap. So, I’ve mixed things up a little bit, decided to use the P2 theme which allows for rapid input as well as threaded responses from commenters. I’ll probably just add my thoughts and links to stuff I’ve written around the web for the moment and we’ll see how it goes!
I’ve been mucking around with a domain for a while now, somewhere I can build a collaborative blogging effort for people like myself. It’s not ready for primetime just yet, but its getting there. PopOpinions.
Two big things about PopOpinions that I want to share:
Anyway, that’s all I’m saying for the moment. If might accept beta testers if anyone’s interested. Drop me a comment on this post and I’ll get in touch.
Unreality TV has been going great guns for the last 6 months. SEOmoz (a huge Search Optimisation company in the US of A) recently published their monthly stats and I was overjoyed to discover we were whomping them month on month!
I love the SEOmoz blog, by the way. 
Anyway, we’ve been toying with other blogging ideas and the most likely at this juncture are blogs on music and regular telly. So let me introduce you to two of our works in progress:
You can conclude from this that Lisa has definitely got square eyes. As do most of our readers! But we love them all and they love us back!
There will be boards on the Unreality Forum to support all of the new areas we’re covering.
We’re excited about how the Unreality blogs are unfolding. We’re going along to press conferences, working with production companies, getting 300,000+ eyeballs on our blog each month, not to mention the thousands of comments people have been compelled to leave for us and even for reality show contestants. These additional blogs will hopefully complement what we already have while creating a spot for people to discuss different types of music and television.
If you want to become a contributor to Unreality, please do get in touch with me.
Well, after my well-documented gripes with Dreamhost, I’ve started to pull the plug. I’ve signed up for the Media Temple Grid Server service, which will comfortably combine all my domains (up to 100 sites, actually) under one account.
Fantastic!
Anyway, I’ve taken the liberty of writing up a little instructional for those who are considering moving away from Dreamhost too.
Finally….I get my own domain.
Actually, I’ve had it for some time now, but I’ve been sitting on it without any idea what to do with it. Now, I’ve moved it to my new Media Temple account and I’ve done an installation of Drupal. I came across Drupal at first on the Performancing site, and I’m intrigued at the mix of forum/blogs that it allows you to create.
So, as a long time WordPress aficionado, I’m crossing into uncharted territory with this labyrinthine content management system.
I am grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat this evening, for earlier today I did my first ever interview for Unreality TV, with Lucy, one of the singers from The Unconventionals.
Initially I tried to record it so that I could do a podcast, but I had such a small timeframe between setting up my computer and starting the interview that I couldn’t get it right. I’m using a combination of Skype and a program called PrettyMay, which helps you record Skype conversations among other things!
The lesson to be learned is to prepare for this in advance. Although I was given a remarkably quick timeframe today, I’ve wanted to look into podcasting before now, but haven’t bothered. I’ll have it nailed next time!
Anyway, the interview was great fun. The Unconventionals were one of the finalist acts in this year’s X Factor, and they were booted off last night’s show by Simon Cowell. I thought they were very original and was disappointed they went out of the competition so soon.
Lucy was great to interview, very chatty and natural and more than a little surprised in the interest in her and the group. I hope they go on to better things!
I love this part of my job!
(satisfied sigh)
I notice that Dreamhost is still having trouble bouncing back from their recent network troubles.
Reading the comments in their blog post, I was surprised by the number of people who were sticking up for the company on the strength of a couple of blog posts issued after the disaster. Some folks seem oblivious to the fact that downtime of the sort Dreamhost has suffered recently is actually unacceptable.
I wonder if some of these people are blog kiddies who don’t appreciate the importance of uptime for a business website. Who ignore the issues of lost revenue and reputation an online business can face. Dreamhost didn’t deal with these issues in their blog post. Apparently belated openness will soothe the complaining customers!
The reason I’m writing this post is because I tried to post a comment on the blog today and received a message that I’d triggered a spam filter. Bizarre? You bet. No profanity in my post at all, no links, nothing that I can think would trigger a spam filter.
Anyway, I’ve decided to repost my entire comment here, lest Dreamhost conveniently delete it from their filters instead of allowing free speech on the blog:
I’m surprised at the immaturity of some of the people posting here. Attacking Karen for expressing her point of view is wrong – she has perfectly valid points.
While I applaud Dreamhost for their blog updates, they’ve conveniently sidestepped the issue of compensation for business customers who’ve lost income through this downtime (and my sites were hit hard).
And yes, there’s a veiled admission of incompetence in this post that doesn’t give much confidence in how the network will be rebuilt! There’s a group of DH users running around with rose-tinted specs on when it comes to this!
And you can make all the claims you like about ‘getting what you pay for’, but when I signed up I didn’t see any warnings on the front door saying “Not suitable for business users” or “Unreliable uptime – non-critical sites only”.
I do hope you get the problems ironed out once and for all, but like others I’m shoping around.
Update: I actually forgot to post this a couple of weeks ago, but checking for my comment as detailed above I notice the Happy Dreamhost Sneaky Comment Deleting Team have sneakily deleted my comment. So much for opening conversation in the blogosphere between customers and suppliers!
What would Mr Steve Rubel have to say about that?
Brian asked me about the number of blogs I had the other day when we were out visiting him. It got me thinking I’ve been using the Interweb for over a decade now and my various profiles are all over the place.
So, in an effort to rein in some of my online activities, this is the big list of me…on the web:
Late last August, totally on a whim, Lisa and I threw together a reality tv blog called Unreality TV. I did a quick WordPress theme and some cartoon-type illustrations and we were live within a couple of days.
From September onward, Lisa spent her evenings blogging about the 2005 series of X-Factor. I approached the site as an experiment in Search Engine Optimisation, dividing up categories and giving pointers on how to make best uses of keywords in each post.
From these inauspicious beginnings, we continued to put on new posts diligently and keep the site up-to-date.
Now, almost a year later, it’s high season for reality tv shows in the UK: Big Brother is in full swing and Love Island has just started. Unreality TV has taken something in the region of 114,000 hits in June and at this mid-point in July, we’ve had 64,000 visitors. Traffic has been building month upon month and we’ve just opened the doors on our long-awaited reality tv forum.
We’re interested in taking Unreality TV to greater heights. Two things we want in the immediate future:
This part of things is definitely outside of the old comfort zone: getting this amount of hits so far has been amazing, but pushing it further is new territory for us. It’ll be exciting to see how things progress!
I was over in Downpatrick recently and visited the talented and aspiring media mogul Brian Mullan. I’ve known Brian for just over 10 years now, and we played in a band (Outhouse Cookie) together for what seems like a lifetime. I’m not sure how long the band actually lasted for.
Anyway, Brian kept plugging away with his music and recorded new material with Gary Connolly back in March, in a studio in Dublin. He’s posted two of his Outhouse Cookie-era songs on MySpace along with one of the new tracks on which he sings.
The two Outhouse Cookie songs are Love Declared and No Guarantees, featuring a guitar solo from Seamy “Asmodean” Meredith that still gives me goosebumps today. I wish I could conjure up Seamy Meredith one last time and tell him that. He seems to have disappeared from the Internet, though…
Anyway, check out Mullan’s music over at MySpace and let me know what you think. Whenever I get a moment, I may post the other Outhouse Cookie songs here.
Lisa and I have been talking about doing a guide to Northern Ireland for the last couple of years now. We’re out and about most weekends seeing what the province has to offer.
Contrary to popular belief, Northern Ireland is a fantastic place to live! I personally don’t think there are enough websites spreading this message. We are not oppressed, repressed or depressed people, so don’t listen to what you hear in the news. Take it with a pinch of salt!
So, without further ado, we present to you The Northern Ireland Guide – our journal of everything Northern Ireland: culture, events, tourist attractions, things to do and place to eat, sleep and party.
The site has only been live for a couple of days now, but we’ve had a positive response from quite a few people who’ve come across the blog and want to help out, either by way of providing backlinks or submitting material to the site. I’m glad, and I hope the support continues.
I think I’m starting to get bitten by the Squidoo bug. I’ve created a couple of lenses for different things I’m into like Reality Television, Northern Ireland and Web Design.
Interesting to be able to pull together content from across the web and have it display on one wee portal page. Seth describes it as a starting point for your topic – people get the real information by following through the links from your lens.
Anyway, cool idea.
I’ve been messing with this blog for a while now, and it’s been a lot of fun! WordPress.com has been fantastic and it’s been a great experience to play with this hosted version of my favourite blogging tool.
Yes. I’m moving elsewhere.
I’ve registered the domain Interweb World and with immediate effect, I’ll be blogging over there. I’ve ported across most of the content from here, but I’ll leave the duplicates on here for a while too before I eventually delete the account.
Come and visit me at Interweb World!
Gotta love this. Two juicy Google-related pieces out over the last couple of days:
Now, is it just me, or does this lend serious weight to the argument that Google is planning it’s own OS? Let’s face it, with Gmail, a calender application and now a word processor, all they need now is a spreadsheet program and something to manage tasks and that’s Microsoft Office effectively replaced.
And guess what, interoperability issues (in documents) would fly out the window, because everyone would be using (X)HTML. And platform would be irrelevant, because it runs via your browser! Of course, you’d be completely screwed if you ever lost your Internet connection…..
I’m not going to go down the “Microsoft should be quaking in their boots” route, but since Office is a bread and butter product for Microsoft, an essentially free alternative via the web is an attractive proposition. It might also be attractive to those millions out there currently using hacked versions of Office!
Bozpages aren’t unique. A webpage that displays a list of recent posts in RSS feeds? Why not use Netvibes? Or the Google Personalised Homepage?
Well, the Google IG page is as ugly as hell, for a start! Personally, I swear by Netvibes, because it gives me my Flickr galleries, my del.icio.us bookmarks and my gmail as well as the ability to add RSS feeds.
There’s no reason at all, really. Technorati have just launched their favourites service which does pretty much the same thing – a river of posts syphoned off your favourite blogs. (Mine’s here)
Having said that, I love the design of Bozpages. Good whitespace. The page isn’t too cramped, and the title elements use some fresh colours.
I’ve been using it for a couple of days as a portal for some of my own blogs and sites I look after. It’s definitely a nice interface, although it needs some work on the usability front, as it’s severely lacking in on-screen documentation! You need to visit the Bozpages Wiki for more information. My Bozpage is here.
technorati tags: RSS, bozpage, Web2.0, Technorati, Netvibes
Christine Davies has announced a new ‘vanilla’ version of Ultimate Tag Warrior for WordPress.
UTW is possibly one of the most useful plugins for tagging your blog content. For the uninitiated or the ignorant, tags are like keywords on steroids. They add another dimension to how you classify the posts on your blog. Sure, you can use categories, but too many categories clutter up your sidebar. Categories are broad.
Tags are specific to the post. They don’t show up in the navigation, but you can create a ‘tag cloud’ which shows frequently used tags in larger type and less-used tags in smaller type. They also tie in with the new breed of Web services like Flickr, Technorati and Delicious, all of which use tags to organise content.
Tags can offer a richer user experience whether linking back into the blog to display related posts, or linking out to Technorati to find additional material on other websites.
I prefer to use tagging internally to provide an alternative means of navigating the blog. I’ve used this recently on Unreality TV and will be using it on a forthcoming website, The Northern Ireland Guide.
technorati tags: WordPress, Tagging, Tags, Web2.0, Technorati, Flickr, Blogging
On first glance, the Flock web browser only seems to allow you to set up one blog account. If you’re like me and you manage more than one blog, this is a big limitation!
Fear not, there’s another way to add extra blogs. It’s hidden away in the options, but it’s there!
I’ve been meaning to play with Flock for a while now, but never quite got around to it. I’m using it to generate this post and it’s all going swimmingly.
One of the big benefits of not being in the wp-admin area is that I’m not tempted to check my stats, comments and all that stuff that distracts me every day.
Anyway, more on Flock later.
technorati tags: flock, blogs, blogging, wordpress
…but apparently only from the WordPress.com community!
I got a weird message in my Gmail that someone had added me to their wordpress blog. They must’ve been testing of made a mistake, because they promptly removed me again!
Anyway, this prompted me to check in my own wordpress.com blog (the one you’re reading) – and the screenshot below is what I found. This feature seems to have appeared out of nowhere on the Authors & Users tab. Basically you type in the username of the other person, allocate the type of role you want to give them, etc and they get a confirmation email when you’re done. After that, you can log into the blog and add posts, or whatever your permissions allow you to do.
I’m probably nitpicking, but I’d have preferred to add users from outside the community. Surely an existing member already has a blog? Anyway, I don’t see much benefit to that! I’d like to add someone who’ll contribute to my blog rather than someone who’ll have split blog loyalties!
Anyway, I just checked the WordPress.com blog, and nothing’s mentioned there, so this is either in stealth mode and just been released, or it’s been available for ages and I’ve just not noticed. What do you think?
Bet that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and it’ll be gone. Things like that always happen me….
X Factor Latest Gerard on Unreality Shout Unreality Shout
