Just discovered what looks like a useful online photo editor, could be just the thing if you have a few photos to tweak. Hopefully it’ll give me the rounded corners I’ve been after for some of the images on the site. Much easier than firing up an editor on my already overtaxed laptop.

Images on site draw the eye much better if they have solid colour all the way out to the edges, those with white round them blend into the page too much. So eyes right for the rounded corners. (I know it’s not exactly new, but it’s a new trick for me to be able to do it online…)

Just noticed something in the RSS feeds that surprised me, if you go back and edit the original post, the changes are reflected in the feed. I’d assumed that once you’d posted and the feed was in place for an article, it was permanent. At least I know I get more than one chance to get the spelling right.

If you’ve been paying attention you’ll have noticed the site looks a little different from how it did in the beginning. It’s mainly tweaking the text colours and changing the background to white, but all in all it really lightens the site up a bit.

I only noticed yesterday that this WordPress theme had been released under a Creative Commons - Attribution/No Derivatives licence. Basically that means you can’t change it without permission from the author. So I got in touch with him and asked him if he minded the alterations I’d made to it. He very kindly said no, so I don’t have to find a new theme to use, or even more time consuming, write my own. You can visit the theme authors site by clicking on the Bogart link in the very right-hand corner of this page.

Also installed yesterday was the popular pages plugin. This involved two installations, one of Alex Kings back-end, which keeps track of posts popularity, and Just Add Waters popular posts widget, which drops into the sidebar and provided you with a nice little ranked list of a sites most popular articles. Not bad for an afternoons work. The instructions for the JAW widget could have been clearer, as it’s not at all apparent as to exactly where the widget should be uploaded to. Trial and error sorted that one out.

Alex Kings popular posts plugin also comes with a wealth of data provided from blog admin pages, everything you could possibly want to know about the popularity of your posts. Trends over time, pings,track backs , views, everything you could imagine. Details that could help you fine tune a sites content in the future. An indispensable tool in my view.

This has nearly brought to an end the testing phase. All that’s left now is to register a domain, get it hosted somewhere and get the finished site set up. Hopefully my experiences doing the test site will mean that the main site goes up faster. Now I have a fair idea what I’m doing.

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time looking at the blogs and sites I visit on a regular basis. The one common detail I’ve noticed as far as the content is concerned, is that it’s all done in little chunks, quite often only two sentences at a time.

In an attempt to emulate this, I’ll be trying hard to stick to this commonly observed rule of thumb. It does break the text into nicely readable chunks which don’t seen to form great big blocks on the screen. Some of my previous posts look decidedly lumpy in comparison.

What I was aiming for in the beginning was a 500 word post split into three roughly equal stanzas. This, I now realise, was not a good yardstick to aim for. Constant incremental improvement is the way to go. Change one thing at a time and see how it affects everything else.

The one downside to having such an open layout is it makes it harder to write each post. You have to think about each sentence, because you’re aiming for a specific look, it makes you a lot more succinct, which I suppose isn’t a bad thing.

This is just a brief test post to see what the quoting system looks like when it is rendered…

These clever theories about death have a strong flavour of truth about them when contemplated at a comfortable distance.

Joe Simpson - This Game of Ghosts

Some filler text after the quote to see what happens as the rest of the article fills in underneath a quote. Yes I know I’m repeating myself but I just want to put some words in here. That’ll do for the moment. I apologise to everybody who has subscribed to this feed that so far it’s been full of dross, but it is a test blog after all. I’ll comment more about the site design changes in my next post.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, when I dropped that simple little tag in I didn’t realise the ramifications.

On the plus side, it forces people to the website, which increases the chance of them clicking on the revenue generating links displayed there.

On the down side, if you come to the site directly, rather than thru a feed, it means you have an extra click to read the article. This would annoy me in the long run. If you’re gonna post articles for people to read, then don’t make it harder than it has to be. Once they’ve followed a link to the site don’t make them do more clicks just to read the article. If there were some clever way to convert the <more> tag into a bit of hide and reveal css code, that would be a much nicer solution.

So say goodbye to the <more> tag, you’re probably not going to see it round here again.

Unless I change my mind again.