Archive for category Blogging
Adding a bit of community to your own WordPress blog is easy with Google Friend Connect.
I just completed adding it to this site and it took about five minutes.
Adding Google Friend Connect in a few easy steps
- Go to Friend Connect at http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/ and click on Get Started
- Agree to the Terms
- Fill in the short form (Website name, Website URL, Website Language) and press continue
- Get the code for the “Members Gadget” – tweak the colours to suit your site
- Go back to your site and login to – WordPress Admin -> Design -> Widgets (if you are using a widget enabled theme)
- Add a Text Widget, give it a good title (I called my ‘Friends’, and insert the copied HTML code from step 4. into the the Widget.)
Job Done.
It sometimes seems impossible working on websites. I am sure you know the feeling, the non-existing brief, the ever expanding fixed price brief and then the worst in my opinion is the charity help-me brief.
I think I have done my final favour piece of work. I spent about 4 days all in all helping a charity design a website and due to health issues in the family, I couldn’t do the build. So I received a quote from a developer that I have worked with for years. The quote came in “too high” for the charity. So in the end the charity got one of their own friends to build it.
Now this is great for me. The thing that really niggles though, is the guy who built the site has now credited himself with designing the site. In the standard bottom right hand corner of the website, he has put a link to his portfolio site. I would be deeply embarrassed to do such as thing. His words are:
“Working from an initial colour scheme and rough front page layout plan I put together a website to meet their requirements with social networking links and a live twitter feed.”
The rough front page layout was a fully designed site with more than one template provided in a photoshop PSD file you little dork. The site was updated and there were some tweaks but on the whole the layout is exactly as I provided. The reason this irks is for many reasons.
- In general if you do ‘free’ work for people, it is less appreciated. Also the cheaper a piece of work is, the less it is appreciated in my opinion. Just don’t do it unless it is for your wife/family etc.
- Actually claiming something is your work when it isn’t is such a strange thing to do. Sure we all look to others for inspiration, sometimes a little more but to pass off work that you didn’t do as your own, it a strange form of self deception.
- We went back to the guy who set up the charity and his response was “The design came from lots of place”. This is true and often is, he proved me with a paper and pencil sketch of what he wanted on the homepage and I used that. I think he thinks therefore he designed it.
So in future when someone says “can you just do this for me…”, think hard about it before hand.
I have held off naming the charity as I feel slightly petty about this but somehow it really narks me. I am tempted to load up the paper sketch I received, my final design and a screen shot of the final website but I don’t want to name the charity.
You can easily add your blog posts to twitter with Twitter Tool… Just do a google search and download the plugin. Bit of a hoo ha to get it installed and you need the be on php5 but when it is installed you can just click Send Post to Twitter once you have written your blog post.
Works a charm.
I gave up on the official wordpress iPhone application. It wouldn’t accept my username and password. The same information I have just put in via safari.
In fact when I returned to try again the application crashed and the next time it would not let me click on anything. Massive fail on the wordpress iPhone application. I will try again sometime or see if an alternative application exists.
I generally hate typing from my iPhone. My fingers are too fat and find the predictive text mixed with my huge amount of typos too fustrating. On the bus and train with bumps it becomes silly.
As I had a flat tyre on the bike and a long slow bus ride through south London I would test putting up a post via safari on the iPhone and through the iPhone wordpress application.
So far on safari this has taken me 10 minutes and I had to turn the iPhone keyboard into landscape mode to make t bearable.
Next the wordpress app.
If you host your own wordpress blog, you can easily set it up to automatically send a link of your new blog posts straight to twitter. Not new but very easy to do.
I downloaded Twitter Tools and uploaded it to the wp-content/plugins folder on my hosting with dreamweaver. Use the free fireFTP plugin if you don’t have a ftp application.
Once you have uploaded, login to your blog admin area and go to Plugins and set up Twitter Tools to suit how you would like it to work.
When thinking about setting up this blog, I looked through many other good examples but it seems we live in platitudinous times.
I have gathered my list of the most unoriginal blog related words:
- Musings
- Rantings
- Web 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.35
- Meme
- Space (as in my space to vent, to muse, to rant)