So, first things first – out with the old and in with the new. It was a tough decision to ditch the Cordobo theme, which I’ve used since moving this blog over to WordPress, but I needed to do something positive to get myself back in the driving seat. I spent what felt like an age looking something fresh, light and clean and, after filtering out the search results for “ladies unmentionables”, I came across this theme by Adam Walker Cleaveland, which immediately pressed all the right buttons for me.

For the header image, I’ve used a picture that I took at the harbour in Nantucket while waiting for the ferry back to Hyannis, which I then cropped and flipped. I’m not sure about the font for the header text, though; it feels a little too clunky. Perhaps I need to add it directly to the image and use something with less weight? For the favicon, I cropped the header image still further, and used HTMLKit’s favicon service.

To display my Twitters in the sidebar, I’ve used Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin; I also use another of Alex’s plugins – Share This – which provides an elegant and unobtrusive way for readers to add a post to a number of social networking/bookmarking sites.

I’m far from finished though; there are still some further tweaks that I will make over the coming days:

I need to revise and consolidate my categories.

When I started this blog, I didn’t take the time to understand the difference between categories, keywords and tags (oh, my!); consequently I have a bunch of random/orphaned categories that need tidying up. I figure I can use a SQL query to rename them, but I wonder how that affects incoming links and indexes?

The categories list is dull.

The alphabetical list of categories isn’t as engaging as the tag-cloud I used to have; that needs to be put right.

I need to fix the sidebar and footer presentation on the static pages.

If you take a look at my Link Blog or Contact Me pages, you’ll see that the side bars and footer aren’t being rendered.

I want to change the sidebar widgets that present the RSS Feeds.

The default on the widgets doesn’t include the RSS icon; a small thing, I know, but it’s a daft omission.

I need to change the Search function.

I felt that the Search box provided by the theme interfered too much with the header image; on the other hand, the WordPress-provided Search widget is too “blah”. I need something that fits better with the crispness of the theme.

The presentation of the Technorati tags needs changing.

Like the Search box, the way these are presented now looks like an afterthought.

I’ve listed these things here because I remember reading a blog post some weeks back about publishing stuff that you want to get done; once it’s out there, it’s harder to procrastinate and put them off. (If anyone can help me out with that link, I’ll update this post.)

So, here’s the new look at andrewterry.com - this will be the catalyst for me writing about things other than tech stuff; stuff I want to get off my chest; stuff that I can share; stuff that I hope more people can engage with.

How do you like it?

I’ve got to honest here; if the link had been “in the full”, I probably wouldn’t have clicked through – I would have reckoned on it being more mainstream-media-sanitised, “See it’s not all that bad, is it?” reporting but a) it was linked by Chris, and b) it was in TinyURL format. As it turned out, I clicked through into Episode 1, and was hooked.

Hometown Baghdad is an honest, no-frills, but all-too-brief glimpse into the everyday life of a group of everyday Iraqi twentysomethings who have had their lives interrupted by the war.

As with the previous episodes, the latest from Hometown Baghdad, “Symphony of Bullets“, is both moving and uplifting; moving because of the sense of what now passes for normal life in Baghdad; uplifting because despite the gunfire, humour still shines through.

I try not to blog about politics here – it’s too easy for things to dissolve into a “push me; shove you” argument – but maybe its time for the world’s media to pull out of Iraq, and let normal Iraqis tell their own stories. Perhaps one day, the coalition soldiers will simply have nothing left to do.In the meantime, if you subscribe to one new blog today, make it this one.

[tags]Iraq, Hometown Baghdad, video[/tags]

I didn’t spot this myself because I don’t subscribe to my main feed in Google Reader, just the comments feed. Attensa was picking up my main feed posts just fine, and although I don’t use it much these days, the toast slices were popping up each time I posted something new so I figured everything was groovy.

After the heads-up from Paul, I tried to add the main feed to Google Reader but it told me there were no valid feeds at my URL. Yikes! I headed over to feedvalidator.org and checked both of my feed URLs. I needed to make some changes to a couple of the WordPress php files, and a change to a php module for one of the plugins that I use before the feeds would validate.

The strange thing is that the main feed still isn’t being picked up by Google Reader. By that I mean the feed title appears, but it doesn’t collect any posts. If I specify it as:

 http://andrewterry.com/?feed=rss2

it’s fine; the same if I drop the trailing slash, as in,

http://andrewterry.com/feed

The problem is I’m struggling to find out where/how WordPress constructs this URL. Even stranger is the fact that Google Reader doesn’t seem to care about the trailing slash on the comments feed, and picking up new posts there without any problem.

I’ve got a couple of queries posted elsewhere, but if anyone reading this can shed some light on this strangeness, I would love to hear from you!

[tags]Google Reader, WordPress, feeds, RSS[/tags]

“Thou shall post every day” is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging….

It’s something that every beginning-blogger reads about, and something that I wrestled with when I started this blog. I spent countless hours scouring the net for news about which I felt my comments would add value, or at the very least, a different perspective, worrying that if I didn’t post something every day, I would eventually lose interest in my own blog.

It didn’t take me long to realise that it actually didn’t matter. In my view, there’s no point in creating noise for the sake of it, but that’s exactly what many high-profile bloggers seem to do. I don’t need to name and shame – I’m sure they appear in your RSS feeds, just as they do in mine – but ask yourself this: when catching up on your headlines, how often are you picking certain feeds and doing a “select all; mark as read”?

I haven’t been blogging for long at all; and my blog is hardly a “must subscribe to” in the scheme of the blogosphere, but reading through Eric’s 10-point list, I sympathise with each point he makes. I’m sure there’s an old adage about not speaking unless you’ve actually got something to contribute, and that’s the position I’ve taken with my posts here.

I’ve seen a couple of articles like Eric’s appearing lately, but none have put it so succinctly. Let’s hope the noise-makers in the blogosphere are reading too….

[tags]blog, blogging, posts, conversations, posting, frequency[/tags]

We’ve seen bloggers making posts about presentations and keynotes as they happen before, but the interesting slant on this is that Keiren McCarthy from The Register will be there, trawling the blogosphere for blog posts about the meeting, tagged with “igf”, as they occur and feed the interesting ones back into the meeting in real time. I haven’t heard of this technique being used before, and certainly not being used at such a forum.

The output from the meeting will feed into the Internet Governance Fourm being held in Athens at the end of the month, so this represents a great opportunity for bloggers passionate about the future of the net to make their voices heard during a meeting of academics, business people and politicians as if they themselves were in the audience.

Of course, it depends on Kieren’s editorial control in making sure that the “right” blog posts are bought to the attention of the panel, but it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. 

Really? Perhaps Mr Waterhouse has never come across a Trackback before; perhaps he is unfamiliar with the kind of link-love that feeds sites like Technorati and Techmeme.

Or perhaps it’s simply that he feels the great unwashed masses have no business sharing thoughts and ideas with the world, while the kind of publication he writes for tries to survive by pushing its policital virtiol  and “news” about d-lebrities on an ever-decreasing readership.

Ashley Norris, whose article on this subject caught my attention, nails it perfectly when he says,  ”Ultimately, with Keith, it boils down to the fact that the number of people who are interested in his tablets delivered from on high, is dwindling.”