Editorial opinions
I’ve set up a web site for my editorial opinions at http://theborderwatch.blogspot.com/.
I’m not a big fan of writing editorials. I stopped them at Myrtleford and Kalgoorlie, except when I had something that had to be said. The Border Watch has a policy though to run them, and I accept that responsibility.
Opinion pieces for daily papers can be tricky, especially somewhere like Mount Gambier where we don’t cover much national news and don’t have access to AAP.
There are only so many local issues to opine about. Read more
Identi.ca: Unique or clone?
I was never a big Tweeter, but found the concept strangely compelling. There are many people ranting on the web about service disruptions, but I never used it enough to be troubled.
Nevertheless, I like to try new things and stumbled across Identi.ca yesterday and set up an account with the short, early-adopter user name of mjg.
The service is Open Source and I like the fact I can login with openID. There is the promise of things to come in terms of integration and updates, such as SMS, Facebook and WordPress.
There is a good in-depth discussion here.
Three underrated WordPress plugins
John Lamansky asked WordPress bloggers to name three underrated plugins and Jeff Chandler picked up the idea at Weblog Tools Collection.
I mentioned two plugins at John’s site which I don’t think get as much attention as they deserve.
1) Javascript in posts: WordPress allows Javascript in php files and sidebar widgets, but not in posts. This plugin fixes that.
2) Exclude pages: This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus. And I will add:
3) My page order: Saves a lot of time if you want pages to appear in alphabetical order. It gives you control over how pages are displayed in menus.
Top 10 posts
I just logged into Google Analytics to check how two of my new sites are going in terms of traffic. Australian Newspapers doesn’t have a page rank yet.
The Border Watch doesn’t either. I developed the site a couple of months ago, but it hasn’t been live except when I’m working on it.
It will stay live now while I freshen the content. It will be launched formally sometime in the next few weeks.
Anyhow, I checked in Google Analytics to see what are the most popular posts here. Read more
Flickr photo meme
Thanks to Delmer I took up the Flickr photo meme.
The concept:
- Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
- Using only the first page of results, pick one image.
- Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab’s Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers.
The questions:
- What is your first name?
- What is your favorite food? right now?
- What high school did you go to?
- What is your favorite color?
- Who is your celebrity crush?
- What is your favorite drink?
- What is your dream vacation?
- What is your favorite dessert?
- What do you want to be when you grow up?
- What do you love most in life?
- What is one word that describes you?
- What is your flickr name?
Not addicted to blogging
Thanks to Sue for the lead, I took a short quiz to discover:
It’s my observation that people who started blogging before the social networking phenomenon hit the world are still writing fairly consistently.
I don’t have any actual evidence, but I suspect the start-up rate for new serious bloggers has reduced in favor of Facebook, Twitter and the like.
Kontera text advertising
This is a short audio post (890kb) I made on Kontera: in-text web advertising.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 6 or above) is required to play this audio clip. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Update: I’ve removed the text ad links; found them too annoying.
BlogUpp link exchange
I committed space on my sidebar yesterday to BlogUpp after reading a positive review.
It claims to be “the easiest recipe ever for a more effective and interactive web promotion.”
BlogUpp uses an iframe in the sidebar. The theory is that users promote two other blogs/sites in exchange for 90 percent cross-promotion back to their site, which is supposedly the best ratio on the web. Read more
Five guests I would invite to dinner
This topic gets kicked around in blogs from time to time. The usual formula is to select a world spiritual leader, world leader, celebrity, babe/hunk and novelty guest. Here is my list:
1) Allan Border. Arguably Australia’s greatest cricketer of the modern era, AB was my teenage sporting idol. He maintained a world-class batting average against bowling attacks that were much stronger than today.
I saw his epic last stand with Jeff Thomson at the MCG on December 30, 1982 and was there again a few years later when he scored a century against the West Indies. Read more
Die, Fluffy Wuffy, die
Thanks to a remark he left on OzComments I have discovered the entertaining blog of Matt “not the cricketer” Hayden enticingly titled Die, Fluffy Wuffy, Die.
He writes more wittily than I could ever hope to do about current political topics. I don’t think he’s from Perth, but he’s well across West Australian politics, including the current chair-sniffing and top-lifting incidents.
Overseas readers may even be aware the State Opposition leader Troy Buswell was exposed for sniffing a woman’s chair and thinking it a great laugh.
Matt covers the topic from a clever angle: “I think there’s one other party in this farcical episode who has been entirely forgotten and who deserves far more sympathy than either — namely, the chair. Poor thing. Probably sitting in some dingy bar somewhere, completely legless …”
He also touched on the South Australian record filibuster, which I meant to get around to commenting on.
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