I’ve added the Gravatar plugin to the comments section of the blog so that they should show up if you comment with a registered email address. How fun is that!

I have terminated the Google Adsense adverts that used to run to the right hand side of this blog, and have replaced them with some Text Link Ads. You will notice that there is just one link there right now, but this is because of the way that Text Link Ads works. Sponsors actually have to buy the space on your blog. So it does take a while to build up revenue.

I will let you know how the campaign progresses - this is me optimising my blog for once, something you can expect to happen around January every year, as that is when I have to pay my hosting bill. If you think that you would like to join Text Link Ads because of reading this post then you can click on the links below. Choosing the affiliate link will benefit me, and this site through the Text Link Ads affiliate scheme, at no cost at all to you.

Benefit me by using an affiliate link: Text Link Ads
Or click through cleanly (no affiliation): Text Link Ads

I am reading blogs through Vienna these days. I subscribe to:

• The Dreamhost Blog. - http://blog.dreamhost.com/
• Google Blogoscoped. - http://blog.outer-court.com/
• Mashable. - http://mashable.com/
• Nik Cubrilovic. - http://nik.com.au/
• Official Google Blog. - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
• Omnidrive. - http://omnidrive.com/blog
• Pandora. - http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/
• Rocketboom. - http://rocketboom.com/vlog/
• Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger. - http://scoble.wordpress.com/
• Signs of the times. - http://sillysigns.blogspot.com/
• The Jason Calacanis Weblog. - http://www.calacanis.com/
• theshow. - http://zefrank.com/theshow

Thanks to all of them for magnificent content. All day, every day.

In the blogosphere comments sections tend to have a few fields for you to fill in. Your name, your email, your website/blog and then your actual comment text. Now the most important part of the comment should of course be this last field perhaps coupled with the first field. If Bill Gates is criticising Vista it has greater significance to me doing it for instance. However I tended to notice that more emphasis was give to the website field. I thought that in some cases people were only posting to slip in their link to their website or blog without it looking like a cheesy chance to plug oneself. Putting a link into the main comment text is often seen as a shameless self-plug, but adding your blog URL into the comments form is not.

The idea that people would post comments to just get the link love that they need to pump them up Google or to increase their traffic by a little bit is not really impossible to fathom. But I would rather as a regular reader of comments sections on blogs only see comments that are written by people who really have something relevant to say. So to do this I take away the prize. On this blog URLs entered are not linked rather they are displayed as text. If you like what the person says enough to want to read more then you can navigate to their website yourself.

And when posting on other people’s websites I use the website “http://saynotofreelinks/” which normally would give a 404 when clicked or a search for “saynotofreelinks”. I was partly inspired to this when I heard Steve Gillmor voice that links were dead. Since then several people have started to agree that the value of the hyperlink is declining and linking is not the best way. Allow people to find stuff themselves so they find everything you’ve done rather than the snippet that was originally discussed. Even though the value is falling I still think people are willing to make comments just to get them for free, and I don’t think it adds to the web.

I have been getting a rather large amount of comment spam which tends to waste my time, and clutter my inbox. So I am have installed a quick plugin that will ask you to write 5 characters before posting. This make take you 3 or 4 seconds, but I hope you don’t mind too much. It helps to keep everything clean. As a bonus incentive comments are now posted before moderation by myself, since most spam will be cut off my the captcha test. I am using this plugin.

On the subject of spam I was pointed today to a site that turns spam mail into art on Google Blogoscoped. The picture shows an image that I made with one of the spam messages that I got today. Very nice indeed.

Time for a new design on the blog. And this one is rather different. I took the old theme which was a slightly modified commonly distributed theme (Blue Horizon if you want to go get it) and deleted the stylesheet. What resulted was largely what you see in front of you now. I junked the sidebar of course, and deleted more code that I didn’t need, streamlined the comments and changed the way the permalinks worked. The text hovers 20 px from each side of your screen. If you have a widescreen monitor (or just a large screen) this will be substantially wider than other blogs which tend to be fixed width to maintain fancier layouts.

I am all Times New Roman now too. Which is great to complement the rest of me site. This blog is almost ready for blending into the rest of the site. But the final merger will need the next version of the main site to blend with! So what is coming up for this blog. I am going to be posting a full beginners review of Mac OS X Tiger in what will probably be a five or so part story. I am going to reviewing 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google (first post) which I got today through the post. I also have lots of coding bits and bobs mainly in PHP that I have created recently that I want to share.

And that is not to mention more news on Otavo, why Yahoo Mail Beta is teribble, why Odeo fails, why iTunes is better than Windows Media Player, and a huge piece on my classification of web services, into those that improve our lives and those that only serve to help with the mess the internet makes for us.

There are a number of things coming up for this site now. But all of them are coming towards the end of June so you will have to be patient. I am probably going to cut back on the ads I recently added to the education section and upload more content. I am also going to reinstate and update the Hotmail feature, update the dormant web section, make a notes section lifting the code essentially from the riddle forum, publicise the links blog more heavily on the main site, update the PHP zone to include working versions of all my PHP projects and to have the source code from them freely available, post a full review of Mac OS X to this blog, add set 4 to the web riddle, better integrate my pictures into the sidebar, work on the UI for an exam results project (remotely controlled of course), completely recode the website editor to incorporate different levels of authority as well as moving files, PHP transfers etc and finally reorgnise the backend of the site deleting unused content and updating old pages where needed.

Is that it? Nearly. I also want to completely redesign the CSS for the site, and get all pages on one common (and new) stylesheet. This will tie in heavily with the new editor which should be capable (via JavaScript) of adding such themes to the code. So there is a fair bit to come, and I will post more information nearer the time on the dedicated Site Log.

So what is up next? Well I have a few ideas. At the moment I am exchanging emails with Hotmail staff which (when the issue is resolved) I will publish here. I find it interesting to see these customer service teams in action. Sometimes it is clear that your message hasn’t even been looked at. This doesn’t seem to be the case in general with the Hotmail staff though. So far the support has been top notch although perhaps not super active. More later.

I might do a post about some of the best things about 30 boxes. At the moment it has to be the way you can add RSS content. Anything on your calendar that is RSSified. That is ace. Photos, bookmarks, comments… I want to find a work around for forum posts on this front. If anyone knows a coComment style tool for forums that would be simply brilliant.

I still have a load of reviews left over from the last time I did a post like this. They may come soon. I am going to review Riya as soon as I get in, and Yahoo! Mail Beta again as soon as they let me try it. There is loads of other stuff coming out soon too. Anything that I like will of course be reviewed. If Google build their calendar and it beats 30 boxes then I’ll be the first to say.

Right. I moved to this brand new blogging format only just a little earlier this week. I have implemented a few themes, and I have now found one that has stuck. I have tried out a few plugins. And now I have a few implemented that work well. I have imported a lot of posts from Blogger. And I have modernised some of these to suit the new software. To make the display nicely. To make them part of the categories. To tag them up. I havent done all the posts. But I have done a fair few of them. And the first few pages of the blog now look very nice.

Now all that the blog is waiting for is more posts, and those are coming up.

For the first time I am now publishing a blog using WordPress software. And what’s more is it is running on my domain. This increases the functionality of my blogging. Whilst Blogger is a great service it doesn’t give users all the options in the world. Using WordPress I still don’t have all the options in the world, but I do have most of them.

The template that I used to use for my blog however is not really liftable into this new one. I may get round to redesigning one for the future but at the moment this theme seems nice enough. I plan to change the header image from time to time. I will be importing the posts from my old blog to give the feeling that this thing does have some content in it, although I am aware that it is likely that there will be some formatting issues.

For now that is it. Welcome to the new blog.