sw’as

I’m sure hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people know by now that WordPress is now beginning to offer a hosted blogging service. It’s currently very exclusive and you have to be invited, as noted by Matt, there is already an invite on eBay. But that’s not the point to this post.

On the new WordPress.com homepage there is a list of bullet points headed “Why Blog?”

1. Connect with an audience of dozens to millions.
2. Stop sending mass emails to everyone.
3. Archive your thoughts.
4. Why the heck not?

Number 1 - Yep, it’s dozens in my case nowhere near millions - and probably never will be. Number 2 - I never did that. Number 3 - Yeah, it’s good for that - so long as you’re willing to share your thoughts with the world. Number 4 - Exactly!

While I was composing an email to Yaro Starak today, it struck me that there are good reasons to read blogs as well (well, der!). I might have met Yaro, once maybe, but I’m not really sure. Yet, because I’ve been reading his blog for so long and we’ve traded trackbacks and comments, it certainly feels like I know him and I didn’t think twice about shooting him off an email to ask for his assistance.

At the risk of stating the obvious, blogging is great because it creates communities. They’re communities with no geographical borders, and an endless supply of interesting people. As well as that, blogging allows people to peek in and sample a community before they commit to being part of it. And that’s if you even want to be part of it, maybe you would find it just as enjoyable to simply sit back and watch. I do that with a number of blogs around the place. There is so much interesting stuff out there in internet land, while you should always keep exploring, it’s nice to find your little corner and be part of the community.

On a somewhat unrelated note, it’s been brought to my attention that this blog is becoming increasingly uninteresting for some of my readers (sorry Pa). Some have suggested that it was better when I was talking about holidays, family, friends and Laura. Rest assured that I haven’t given up on those topics, I just haven’t had the time of late.

Over the past few days I’ve installed a whole bunch (approximately three) of new WordPress plugins on this site.

The first plugin I installed was one to make the rel=”nofollow” go away. It is automatically inserted by WordPress in links in comments. There has been a little bit of discussion on the nofollow directive around the place lately and I’m siding with the dofollow camp. My reasons for siding with dofollow are explained much better by others around the place, including the authors of the various dofollow plugins that are available^[1]. I went with this one, for no particular reason. It does the job.

Then I installed the Live Comment Preview plugin by Jeff Minard & Iacovos Constantinou which was actually quite a hassle to get working. The plugin uses the ‘REQUEST_URI’ server variable in an if statement to insert the required JavaScript into your site. It took me ages to figure out why it wasn’t entering the relevant if statement and finally I found out it was because the PHP installation on my server doesn’t supply the ‘REQUEST_URI’ variable so I changed it to ‘PATH_TRANSLATED’ and away we went. It works beautifully.

The third plugin I in installed was the most excellent Subscribe to Comments plugin. Normally I wouldn’t expect anyone to bother subscribing to comments considering I get them only very occasionally. However, it should be useful for people who are using the Footnotes Plugin.

I also installed a fourth, the Official Comments plugin. It isn’t doing much yet, but it will. All of these plugins will come in handy when I do a site wide re-design planned for later in the year (after I finish uni - if only it would happen faster, with less effort required).

1. You can find at least three in the Comments section of the WordPress Plugin DB. [↩]

I have about fifteen posts just sitting there in draft form waiting to be worked up to a standard where I would feel comfortable publishing them. It seems I have plenty of ideas about what to post but no time or patience to sit there actually fleshing them out. The posts waiting for some work include:

• How to destroy a perfectly good pair of jeans
• WordPress Plugin for adding JavaScript^[1]
• A house in the country^[2]
• How lucky we are
• Some attempt at fiction
• Post # 108
• html v. english
• Nerky? Geerdy?^[3]
• Post # 119.

As a general rule I try to keep my job and all things about it well separate from this website^[4], but I think it’s worth mentioning that I’ll be going to a conference in Pennsylvania next month which I’m very excited about. That’s right, I get a trip to the States!

Uni is wearing me down. I’m just so over it. I’d much rather learn about things that interest me, by myself, to my own standards. The next couple of weeks are going to be hellish as we^[5] pump out two assignments that we really should have done more on by now. The couple of weeks following that will probably be spent catching up with other work that we should have been doing while we were busy pumping out assignments. Then, of course, the few weeks following that will be spent pumping out final assignments and cramming for final exams. And that will pretty much bring me to the conclusion of my current stint at university.

Do you think I’m over-using the footnotes? It’s quite possible, I need to find a balance I think. I impressed myself this week by achieving the number one Google result for the first time on terms that weren’t so specific that it couldn’t possibly have been any other site^[6]. The really satisfying part is that I didn’t even try, really. If you Google for “footnotes WordPress” (without the quote marks) you will find this site at the top!

One more random topic to finish this thing off.

I received an email from Aidan yesterday which was a forward of an email sent to him by his (I think I can say this) long distance girlfriend^[7], Chelsea. Someone actually took my advice, and purchased an Eels album. And just like I said, they didn’t regret it.

I walked into tower records and haunting me in the “tower record’s recommends” on sale shelf was the Eel’s ‘Blinking Lights and Other Revelations’. Recalling somewhere on Simon’s blog that this came with his recommendation I added to my shopping cart of Bruce. I haven’t made it to the new Springstein album yet, I can’t turn the Eels off.

I’m listening to the album right as we speak, and I must say, again (am I repeating myself too much), it’s an excellent album. Every one of the 33 songs is a solid performance. I hate buying albums based on a hit song or two and finding that the rest of the tracks are really average. Blinking lights and other revelations is the complete opposite to that kind of album. I hadn’t heard what I’d call a hit song from the album before I bought it but every track is worth listening to and should be listened to over and over.

1. I’m going to kill this one as there is actually no need for it. [↩]
2. Inspired by Aidan’s recently chosen architectural thesis topic. [↩]
3. Probably won’t publish this one, or if I do I’ll at least change the title. [↩]
4. Based on some very sound advice I received here. [↩]
5. All my assignments are group assignments, thankfully I have an excellent assignment partner with a GPA much higher than my already reasonably high one. [↩]
6. Like “Simon Elvery” for instance. [↩]
7. This doesn’t imply that he has a short distance girl friend, or any other kind of girlfriend for that matter. As far as I’m aware, you’re the only one Chelsea. [↩]

This has now been upgraded and superseded. Check out the latest version.

Because of Rob’s comments I have updated the plugin so it now works with the excellent WP-Amazon plugin. While I was in the code, I decided I’d add a couple of new features as well.

You can now choose whether or not the numbered links in the text should display as superscript or not.^[1] You can now also customise the backlink text. Many sites like to use this little guy: ↩ (↩).^[2]

You can access all the options in the Footnotes tab of the Options section in Admin.

I have kept comments closed on this post. Please use the original post to make comments on the Footnotes plugin Feedback here and bugs and feature requests here. You can also view all the changes there as well. Here is the download link if you just want to get straight to it.

1. I did this because I noticed a number of blogs around the net that display the link as normal text so I figured I should offer that functionality. [↩]
2. This also better accomodates people using this Plugin iwith different languages. [↩]