Category: Housekeeping

As Luigi pointed out, we have a new facility here: mapping. Our idea is to add more value to the posts, by making it easy to see where on Earth they relate to. And by the same token, you can click on the Map page and see all the geo-referenced posts. ¹

We won’t be tagging the little Nibbles, and we aren’t too sure how we are going to cope with single stories that refer to lots of places. Maybe tag just one, maybe think of something else. But for now we think this is, as the young people say, wicked cool, and we hope you find it useful.

As to how I did it, I didn’t have to do very much. The blogging software we use, WordPress, has brilliant people writing plug-ins that add all sorts of functionality. All I did was add one of those — GeoMashup by Dylan Kuhn — and then figure out how to get it to display here. There’s a lot more we could do to improve the map page … and maybe we will.

Meanwhile, I cannot for the life of me figure out why the Map link from Luigi’s post on those long-crowing chickens goes to the right place, but does not show a pin. Most mysterious. some of the others aren’t showing pins either. I need to investigate. So I investigated, and it seems there’s nothing wrong after all. Must be some kind of browser cache voodoo. Enough.

Oh no! Something has gone horribly wrong. Content has vanished without trace from our new improved look. I’m working on it. Or rather, I will be later in the day. Sorry.

Later, that same night … 

OK, we’re more or less back in business here. Still some tweaking and such to do — header pictures, for one thing — but basically fine. And it has prompted us to take a step towards something we’ve been discussing for a while: a three column layout. Or maybe everyone hates that idea? ²

Sunday morning; what could be nicer than to do a little weeding, planting and general tidying up? Nothing, if you have a row to hoe. Alas, if you don’t, there’s always blog maintenance.

I’ve updated various things so they ought to run more smoothly, fixed a page for The Competition, and done various other things that ought to be invisible.

One thing that is visible is a new category we call Nibbles.  It’ll appear over on the right, and is designed for linking to things that don’t really require much comment, but that we think may be of interest. We’ll see how it works out. If you have any comments, add them to this post. Thanks.

Oh, one more thing. The RSS feeds do not seem to be working all that well. Not sure why. The various different feeds (Posts, Comments, Nibbles) all seem to point to exactly the same place, which can’t be right. I’m working on it.