Unintentionally Blank

I have had a busy week. It started last Thursday with a meal and more than a few with my work colleagues. Friday morning wasn’t too pretty, but I struggled through the day in order to attend a stag do I had been organising for my friend. Saturday was spent paintballing, watching the agonising end of the six nations and continuing to drink our stag into the ground. Sunday was a day for rest, relaxation and, mainly, rehydration. I’ve been back to work this week and spending my evenings looking after a sick girlfriend and babysitting next door’s, also ill, children.

So what do you do when you run out of time to blog? It’s taken me until today to catch up with all the articles in my feed reader and I am exhausted (I’ll be in bed merely seconds after hitting the publish button, I promise). Do you always make sure you have a post or two saved up? Do you concentrate more on quick links or news stories if you don’t have much time? I need to learn how to keep up when everything else seems to take over, if you can help I’d love to hear from you.

There was a time when I thought blogging was only about angsty teenagers venting their frustrations over their “miserable” lives. Blogging was the last thing I wanted to do, there was nothing wrong in my life (nothing as terrible as the trials that affected every blog owner that I had ever seen anyway) and there was no way I wanted to moan at everyone and no-one because that’s what teenagers did. Blogging is so much more than that, there is a whole other world hundreds of times more interesting than moans and rant and most importantly, I’m glad that I found that out too.

Continue reading “I Used To Say I Would Never Blog” »

I like MyBlogLog, it’s come under some stress recently, which I’m not going to bring up, but I like it. I particularly like the recent readers widget, I installed mine as soon as I could after signing up. There is only one thing I don’t like about it, the default widget is ugly. That’s why I spent a bit of time with the CSS and made mine fit in with the rest of my sidebar. This is the first part of two on how to make your widget better looking.

Continue reading “Making MyBlogLog Pretty: How To Style The Recent Readers Widget” »

Digg has had a hard week. What with Technosailor’s (anti) Digg Week and Wired news, admittedly arguably immorally, exposing the ability to buy diggs. Now they have a new competitor, one that can’t be bought and won’t suffer from Digg’s other flaws. Spotplex is a similar system, but it ranks articles on how many page views it gets in a certain time period.

What is Spotplex?

Spotplex provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. It is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.

Continue reading “Spotplex - First Impressions” »

Gack Ink, the “bring your own blog” network, is having it’s second round of submissions. You have until 8am EST (whatever that is compared to your time, I certainly don’t know) Monday morning (or afternoon/Sunday evening depending on your time zone). So head on over, check out how to apply and have a go!

Speaking of which, I have finally added the Gack Ink button to my sidebar. I’m not sure how well it fits with the rest of the site though. I wonder if I’ll be able to design my own button/link? The main point is, click through and check out the other members of the network, I have found a ton of new stuff to read and I am more than looking forward to discovering the new round admissions. Will you be among them?

Wordpress 2.1.1 is Dangerous

It was quite a surprise to see that the Wordpress development blog were declaring that their latest release was dangerous. Turns out someone was messing with the original code of our beloved blogging software. Thank goodness for the swift work and dedication of the Wordpress team in providing a newer version. If you installed version 2.1.1 (unlike me, I’m just too lazy) then download 2.1.2 now!