National Blog Posting Month

OK, so I’ve just signed up for a thing called National Blog Posting Month, also known by the “elegant” name NaBloPoMo. This was probably a rash thing to do. The idea is that every day, for an entire month, I have to post something to my blog.

From past experience of writing a journal, this is unlikely to happen. Some days simply aren’t interesting. But it will be interesting to try, and to see whether I fail abysmally or only moderately . . .

The name is rather inaccurate. First, it’s not a specific month. It’s one month from the day I signed up. And second, it’s international. So it should really be called Ongoing international blog posting  exercise, or  Oninblopex.

I’ve a bit of a cold today and just thinking about doing this makes my temperature rise, so I’m definitely not predicting great  success. But let’s see.

Hmmm . . . Maybe I should go and un-sign-up . . .

Shall I turn them off?

Note

Since I wrote this, WordPress have switched to using a different version of the popups. They now ignore the settings I was using for turning them on and off for individual links, and personally I find the new ones ugly and annoying, so I’ve now turned them off for the entire blog.

Snapshots (snap previews)

I’m still debating whether to turn off the so-called snapshots on my blog, now that I’ve discovered how to customize them a bit. Some people like them, some hate them, and I like them when I want them and not when I don’t.

As a tryout, here are two versions of my blogroll. One has the snapshots which pop up when you hover over a link, and the other has hover text (for the links where I’ve written any). Please try out the behaviour and then vote in the poll. It would be really helpful to have as many people’s feedback on this as possible.

Hover over these links

WITH	WITHOUT
Adirondack Metal Designs Astronomy Blog Blogging for London Building a CD Cast me gently into morning for the night has been unkind Graphiquillan Jane’s Ride Little Brown Job Music Teaching, Learning, and Performing News from the Holmestead Ninebark Imagery PamBG Qrystal dot name RachelCreative Sarah Askew The Grammar Vandal	Adirondack Metal Designs Astronomy Blog Blogging for London Building a CD Cast me gently into morning for the night has been unkind Graphiquillan Jane’s Ride Little Brown Job Music Teaching, Learning, and Performing News from the Holmestead Ninebark Imagery PamBG Qrystal dot name RachelCreative Sarah Askew The Grammar Vandal

Give your feedback

I can either have snapshots pop up for all links, none, or selected ones. Some of these options are harder work than others.

If you think snapshots should pop up just for some links, then please tell me which ones (tick as many as you like, and add more in “Other” if you want):

By the way, the reason you can’t view the results of the second poll isn’t that I don’t want you to see them, but that they drop off the bottom of the background image and end up as white text on a white background and I don’t want to go through the other 18 appearance styles offered by Polldaddy looking for the one that behaves itself. If people do vote, I’ll let you know the result in a future post.

Taming the snapshots

Snapshots

Snapshots in WordPress are popups which appear when you hover over a link. They’re meant to preview a site so you can decide whether to visit.

Sometimes they’re useful: I use them to check which blogs in my blogroll have been updated, so I can visit just the ones with new material. At other times they’re downright annoying: for example when one pops up over a picture I’m viewing.

At least for the theme I’m using, WordPress settings only let you turn all snapshots on or off. There isn’t a setting, say, to turns them off just for pictures, or show them only for external links.

Mine are currently turned on. So I can demonstrate, with a link to the brilliant comic xkcd. Hover over the link below and you’ll see that

• this is what happens.

(It took me a while to realise that you’re then supposed to click the link in the snapshot, not the one in the text; I was trying to chase the snapshot out of the way in order to get at the link in the text and click that.)

But

• what if you’re rather it did this
• or even just this?

Gaining some control

Opera 9.6 has some nice features to analyse displayed web pages and see what’s going on. A rummage through a page of my blog revealed the existence of some likely-looking classes (categories which can be applied to HTML tags) with names like snap_preview and snap_noshots. So I tried these out in some test posts and now have what I think is the solution. It works for my blog, at least. (I suspect there may be some variation depending which WordPress theme you’re using; mine is Cutline with some changes I’ve made to the appearance.)

This is what I found:

Turn off all snapshots throughout the blog, overriding any settings made in individual posts

Go to Appearance ⇒ Extras and untick the box.

If you want any snapshots at all

Leave the box in Appearance ⇒ Extras ticked.

Turn off snapshots for an individual link

Include class="snap_noshots" in its tag.
Example: <a href="http://xkcd.com/" class="snap_noshots">

Turn off snapshots for a section of a post

Put <div class="snap_noshots"></div> around the section concerned.
Caution: it’s tempting to do this for the More tag. But this doesn’t work properly, since when the post’s introduction is displayed alone, it has the opening <div> tag but no closing </div> tag. Similarly, if you decide to put <div class="snap_noshots"></div> around the entire post, you’ll have to avoid using the More tag in it.

Override this to turn snapshots on for an individual link

Include <class="snap_preview"> in the link’s tag.
Example: <a href="http://xkcd.com/" class="snap_preview">

Turn snapshots back on for part of a section where they’re turned off

put <div class="snap_preview"></div> around the part where you want them.

Add hover text to a link

Include title="the text you want" in the tag.
Example: <a href="http://xkcd.com" class="snap_noshots" title="Link to a web comic I  enjoy">

Notes

• I’ve been cautious in those instructions and only used  <a> and <div> tags. That’s because those are the only ones I’ve tried. Presumably you could add the class= settings to other tags  too, e.g. <ul class="snap_noshots"> to remove snapshots from a list of links. But I’ve not checked.
• I’m not sure how universal it is for browsers to turn title="sometext" into hover text; all I can say is that Internet Explorer and Opera 9.6 both do it. If you know what other  browsers do please tell me, and I’ll add the information to this post.
• There appear to be circumstances where turning snapshots off in Appearance ⇒ Extras only turns some of them off. I suspect it might vary from theme to theme. Any more information on that welcome too.

A search Wordle

WordPress provides a wealth of statistics about who clicked what to get to a blog, what they clicked when they were there, and so on (all unidentifiable; don’t worry!). You can get paranoid in them for hours.

A particularly interesting one is the list of search terms which people used to find the page, but it’s also quite hard to digest. You just get a list of the terms and how many times they were used.

I was pondering my list of searches, trying to make sense of it, and then I remembered Wordle, the addictive website where you feed some text in and out comes a “word cloud” in which the size of each word is determined by how many times it occurs.

Ideal! I copied my list of search terms, put them in and played around with the settings for a while, and out came:

Image created at http://wordle.net/
Click to see full size

which is much easier to visualise. Because it’s, er, visual. And, I might add, the brain has a lot of processing power devoted to visual information. (I wonder what an audio equivalent would be? Now that might be fun!)

Actually that particular wordle isn’t 100% accurate, because in my eagerness I forgot that some of the terms (e.g. the impressive pluto planet dwarf plutoid plutino) had been used twice and should have been pasted in twice. Or maybe it is accurate, if it was the same person returning? Who knows? (Answer: the person who used it. OK, point taken.)

Now I’m wondering: does Wordle translate the number of times a word is used into the total size of the word, taking into account how many letters it has, or does it merely translate it into the font size? Hmmm . . . OK, OK, in theory I could work that out by counting the words myself and looking at the result, but that seems like a lot of work at 12:50 am, so I’ll be content not to know for now.

Poll results

This probably isn’t of great interest, but several people did use the poll to give feedback about their preferences for the front page so here are the results. I’ve excluded my own real vote, and the vote I did to test the Other option. Five votes is hardly a statistically significant sample, but never mind. It tells me what five people thought, at least.

What would you prefer to see on this page?
Full posts, all the time	3
Full posts only if short	1
Other	1
Just introductions	0
No preference	0

So I’ll do what I originally thought: show full posts, but maybe very occasionally just an introduction if the post is a particularly specialist one or if I’m keen to keep an earlier one easily visible.

The one person who voted Other asked to see recent comments—meaning, I think, the actual text of comments left on the blog, as opposed to just a list of who’s commented. But I haven’t managed to find any way to do that, so if you know of one, please let me know.

Beautiful bird photos

Sometimes when someone comments on your blog and you follow the link to their home page, you get a good surprise.

Yesterday, Little Brown Job, aka Paul, commented on my recent post about Dabr. (In case you’re wondering, little brown job is a birdwatcher’s name for a small, unidentified bird.) I followed the link to his blog, where I discovered that Paul is a bird photographer and takes pictures like this:

Goldfinch © littlebrownjob.blogspot.com

I occasionally dabble in photography but haven’t done for quite a while. I’d love be able to take this kind of photo. I enjoy photographs of nature, but mine tend to be of things like trees, which have the big advantage that they don’t run away when they hear you coming—and of being big enough not to need a particularly long-focus lens.

The other photos on his site are equally stunning and I do urge you to visit it at http://littlebrownjob.blogspot.com/. The site really is too good to miss. Visit and enjoy!

Last few days . . .

Only three people have responded to the poll, so I’ll give it until Wednesday, then delete it and do what I think.

If you click View Results it’ll currently say five people voted, but two of those were me: once to express my actual preference, and once to test the Other option and find out how to view what people enter for it.

Update: I’ve taken the poll down now, and if you’re interested you can see the results in this post.

The Name of the Blog

Once you’ve given something a name, you’re generally stuck with it. Does that apply to blogs, too?

Here’s how this one got its name.

As an Opera Mini user, I wanted to participate in the Opera Mini forums at my.opera.com—initially simply in order to sort out some bugs I was experiencing with Opera Mini.

This entailed creating an account there, in order to could post. That had the effect of creating a place to blog. That reminded me that I’d been thinking for a while about trying out blogging.

I didn’t yet know what I would want to write about, so what should I call it? I remembered there was a song called A horse with no name, so the blog became A blog with no name.

Then I realised I needed to continue the blog elsewhere. But it seemed a bad idea to have two identically-named blogs. So this one became The other blog without a name.

That was meant to be a temporary title: once the posts were transferred, I’d rename the original one The old blog with no name and this one would revert to A blog with no name.

It irritated me a bit that I inadvertently got a word “wrong” in the change: with no name became without a name. But the rhythm of the words woould be spoilt by “correcting” it.

So far, I’ve not persuaded myself to change it. Is it a good idea for websites, even ones without a name, to change their names? And it’s quite a nice non-name . . .  On the other hand, I think of a certain orchestra which named itself after some biscuits, and I don’t want to be stuck forever with a name I find I dislike . . .  Any thoughts?More seriously, people who searched for “no name” to find articles on the old blog won’t get sent to the new one. But if I change the name of the new one, people who are used to that will use the wrong search, tiny handful that they are.

Maybe I’ll just leave it as it is for now.

Easier access, more posts?

You probably know that so far, I’ve mostly not been able to post easily to the blog. My web access at home has been restricted to what can be done in Opera Mini on a Sony Ericsson k750i phone. (In case you’re wondering, that’s still quite a lot, but there are restrictions; see my post about mobile access.)

Well, now I’m trying out (maybe temporarily) access via a PAYG mobile broadband dongle. So far I’m liking it, but having to keep an eye on the data usage. £10 for 1GB lasting 30 days: that comes to just over 34 MB per day. The antivirus software used up most of today’s “average allowance” simply by updating itself, and some people put a lot of graphics on their blogs, and a lot of graphics-filled posts per page too, so I’ve got to be a bit careful.

Hopefully though, I’ll now find it easier to post short things I want to share as they occur to me, and might update the blog more regularly rather than making special trips to the library to post things I’ve written at home.

One interesting realisation though: now that I’ve got easy access from the PC, there are still Web things I find much more comfortable to do on my little phone screen in Opera Mini. One is reading mainly-text blogs: I don’t need to sit at the PC, or sit the PC on me, but can relax and read on the phone. It’s easier on the eyes, to: shorter lines of text which take less concentration to stay focused on, and only a square inch or so of screen shining in my eyes.

And that’s helpful, because it means I can use my unlimited web access on the phone for those things, instead of using up my Dongle Allowance.

The good news is that posting here seems not to use up too much data.

Let’s see what happens.

By the way, I once read somewhere that a recommended line length for readability in a given font is 1½ times the length of the alphabet. That’s about

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmn

and I’m expecting that these lines will turn out to be a bit on the long side . . .

Edit: I’m confused now—was it 1½ times the length of the alphabet, or double? I’ve got a nasty feeling I’ll want to look it up now, because not being able to remember properly will niggle me.

It’s OK to press the button!

I’d like you to press the button. The button is there for you. I mean the one in the sidebar that says vote. It’s there for a reason . . .

The idea is that I get an idea of the preference of people who visit the site.

Er, obviously. So far, four people pressed the button, and one of them was me. So please feel free to join this select group! Or not. But if you do, it will help.

Sadly you don’t win a prize, other than maybe seeing your preference implemented if it’s the most popular one and I decide to heed it.

I think I’ll leave it there for another week or so, then remove it so it’s no longer cluttering up the sidebar.

Thanks.