Today is Blogday August 31, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a commentAnd the first I heard about it was when I turned up at the office this morning, and the client asked me if I was doing anything for blogday. Clearly I’m tuned into the buzz of the blogosphere. I haven’t got five blogs to post on, so I’m going to head over to my old blog at Wordpress.com and start hitting the next button. The first five blogs in English and updated in the last few days will get a link.
The ramblings of a lunatic seems to have slowed down a little lately with a post a week or so ago and nothing else in August. He has a taste for rock classics, obviously a student and a football fan, something of a techy.
Gilmera ELT is an English Language Teaching school for teachers in India, and its most recent post calls for the attendees at a course to make comments about it on the post. Many of the students comment on the importance of love in teaching, and not letting preconceptions interfere with how a student is perceived.
The Bodhisattva seems to be a collection of reviews of books which are rather outside the mainstream, but seem interesting, mostly science fiction / fantasy. I landed on a post with numbers 21-30 of the the author’s top 100, recognised none of them, although some of the authors are familiar, and have added a couple to my amazon wishlist. I may come back to this one.
The world starts here is the blog of an enthusiastic Russian student living in Iceland. Rather than the normal angst-ridden posts of most teenage bloggers, this blogger exudes optimism and excitement. It’s catching!
The Reader is a very personal blog of vignettes and anecdotes of life. Its well written and occasionally macabre. Worth reading.
Of the five blogs, I’ll probably come back to two. To get these, I had to wade through about 15 others which were very out of date, plus a few where I couldn’t read the language. It strikes me that there are less of the rambling personal blogs than there were the last time I spent a while hitting a next button and the standard of writing is much higher. Maybe all those rambly blogs are off on myspace or bebo and don’t set up on Wordpress.
Happy Blogday!
Everyone’s stumbling upon Camden Kiwi August 12, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , 1 comment so farOver the last few days, I’ve had well over 1500 visits from people who’ve stumbled upon my post about ways to reduce your impact on the planet. Its the biggest flurry of hits this site has ever had, and rather makes my day to check my stats (Google Analytics and Stat Counter) to see such big numbers.
Although noone’s left any comments, there are a few nice reviews and ‘thumbs up’ on StumbleUpon. Personal blogging is it’s own reward, but its good to know someone’s reading and getting something out of it.
I’m on the BBC! July 22, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a commentTo everyone who’s come over from the BBC’s London Blogs feature, welcome!
Have a look around, make a comment, read and enjoy
Moving a Wordpress Blog just got easy June 16, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a commentIts a little late for me, but the nice people over at wordpress.com have just released a new feature to export your blog there via XML, so it can be imported into another wordpress blog, say on your own hosted site.
Very useful, if a little late for Camden Kiwi!
Moving a Blog from Wordpress.com to your own Wordpress installation May 30, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , 7 commentsThere’s not a lot of documentation on how to do this, so here are the steps I took to move Camden Lady, on wordpress.com, to Camden Kiwi, on my own hosting service.
From what I’ve seen so far, you should only attempt this if you’re comfortable with ftp, basic work in the Unix shell, basic SQL, and a little general hacking. You don’t need to be an expert, just sensible, willing to give it a go, and with those basic skills. I did find myself needing to clean up via the shell when I misinstalled some plugins.
First, you need to get a hosting service, and install wordpress. I use Dreamhost, but there are many others out there. Make sure you get one that does an automatic install of wordpress, because most of them do and it saves a bit of fiddling. You also need mysql, php, some form of ftp access and a shell account.
Installing and setting up wordpress is easy and well documented, so I won’t bother with that.
The first challenge is to set up your blog in your new place, and find a theme and all the plugins you want. The themes on wordpress.com normally have links to places you can download them from. I’ve also set up plugins for the sidebar widgets, statcounter and akismet.
They were all fairly simple.
With Akismet, you will need an API key from a wordpress.com blog. That’s wierd, but it’s the way it is. Get the API key from your existing blog, and use that.
With statcounter, set yourself up on statcounter.com first, so you have all the info you need.
To copy your blog over, you need to take :
Posts - The easiest way to do this is via RSS. Increase your RSS feed size to the size of your blog. You will need to create a post to force a regeneration of the feed. Get the feed, and save it somewhere. In your new blog, use the Import tab, select RSS and give it the file in which you saved your feed. It will then update it.
I had a small problem, in that everything was imported as being written by the wrong user. To fix this, you need to go into MySQL, and run a query ‘Update wp_posts set post_author = n’ where n is found from ‘Select id from wp_users where display_name = ‘xxx” xxx is the name you want displayed. You must set up the name you want first, of course!
Links - I think this has to be done by hand.
Comments - You could possibly extract the comment feed. I’ve decided to leave them.
Images - Don’t do it. Keep your images in flickr. Its so much easier
Categories - These come automatically with the posts. If you have sub-categories, you will need to relink them to their parents via the Manage –> Categories tab.
Sidebar widgets - Any customisation of these (such as text boxes) also need to be done by hand.
This is a rather painful process, particularly because it would be very easy to do with access to the wordpress.com databases, so I hope that they’ll offer an export facility in the future.
Once you’re happy with the new blog, put a post on the old one to tell people you’ve moved. I also put a text box in the side bar so that people who enter the blog via an older post still see it. It’s a good idea to let anyone linking to you know where you’ve gone.
And there you have it - all done.
Happy geeking May 20, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a commentI've spent the afternoon having a happy geeky time, setting up wordpress on my new hosting service. It works well, and at some stage in the near future, this site will be moving.
I'm doing this because I need a new host for my business website and blog, and may as well have them all together. Although its a long time since I've worked in technical roles, I used to be a Unix / Oracle systems engineer, and there's still a bit of geek in me, so it was rather fun getting it set up, and having a good look at MySQL and some of the PHP scripts I'm planning to use.
One of the (very few) disadvantages of wordpress.com is that you can't put javascript into your blog. That would let me do a few nifty wee things, such as participate properly in webrings, and show all the green bloggers links. I'd also be able to get better stats and see who's visiting.
How to use Flickr for photos on your Wordpress.com blog May 16, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , 1 comment so farA friend asked for instructions on how to do this, so here they are. They’re detailed so that even the most untechnical blogger can do it. She’s using IE, rather than Firefox, and has only just started using a digital camera. She’s been having a lot of problem with Wordpress’ upload facility and because she’s on the other side of the planet, on a dialup modem, I can’t figure out why. It could be that dialup modem?
I use Flickr for all my photos now, because its so easy and you don’t have to worry about resizing or anything. Now that Flickr’s been bought out by Yahoo, it’s not likely to disappear any time soon either.
To do this, you need to:
- Get a Flickr account
- Upload your photos
- Put them into your blog
1. Get a Flickr account.
Go to www.flickr.com
Select ‘Sign up!’ from the menu at the top right. 
That will take you to a Yahoo signon screen. If you don’t have a Yahoo id, select Sign up again.
Go through, fill out the form, and you will be able to use Flickr.
2. Upload your photos into Flickr.
Go back to www.flickr.com, and sign in with your new Yahoo id
Select ‘Upload Photos’ on the right hand side 
Use the Browse buttons to select the photos you want to upload
If you want to give the group of photos a tag, enter one
Make sure the privacy settings are set to ‘Public’
Press Upload
3. Now you’re ready to put the photos into your blog. There are a few ways to do this. One is to register your blog in Flickr, by selecting ‘You’ from the flickr menu, then Your account, then Your blogs. For the moment, we’ll do this the straight Wordpress way. Also, its probably easier to do this using Firefox browser and Performancing, but because my friend is using IE, these instructions are for that.
Open two IE windows, and go to your flickr.com account in one, and your wordpress.com account in the other.
In the Wordpress account, start a new post.
In Flickr, find the picture you want to display in your blog
In Flickr, right mouse click over the picture you want to display, and select properties. Then select the url for the picture (this will end in .jpg), and copy that (using ctrl-c, or right mouseclick again)
In Wordpress, start typing your post. When you want to put a picture in, select the little ‘picture’ icon in the editing tool bar. This is the toolbar just below the post title. Don’t even think about the area you normally use to upload pictures.
In the window that appears (see picture above) paste the url for the picture that you copied before into the ‘Image URL’ filed, and select the Insert button. Your picture should now appear.
This will be a bit slow if you’re on dialup, and you might find it easier to type out all your words, and then put your photos in at the end (or go and get broadband!)
Good luck. If you run into serious trouble, email your photos to me and I’ll upload them (this is not a general offer - just for the person who asked for the instructions!!).
Anyone using this, please comment if you find any flaws in the instructions.
Back Up My Blog May 14, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a commentTechcrunch mentions a useful new service, which allows automatic backups of blogs. The problem is that you’ve got to run a php script on your server, and I don’t think the nice people at Wordpress are quite ready for that.
It is a worry, given that Wordpress.com is a free, beta service and I’ve now got over 100 scintillating masterpieces sitting on their servers with no easy way of backing them up myself. Over the last few weeks, I’ve taken to using Performancing, the Firefox plugin that lets you compose your post locally and then publish it to the blog of your choice, and I’m holding all my posts on that now.
It would be nice to have a ‘download my blog’ or some sort of export feature, even if it was a manual one, that would allow me to easily copy down my blog and save it somewhere. Alternatively, when and if Wordpress.com starts offering new, chargeable services, this would be a good one.
Reader Survey May 7, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a commentTomorrow, this blog is five months old. Today, for the first time, it had over 100 reads, not including the 20 or so taking RSS feeds. It feels like this blog is well and truly underway.
I’ve met a few interesting people through blogging, and you can see their blogs on the bar to the right, but I’m very aware that the majority of readers never comment and so I’ve no idea who you are.
Please, if you’ve a minute or two, would you mind taking a quick survey to tell me a little bit more about who you are, why you read Camden Lady and what interests you? I’ll leave the survey open for a few days, and see what results come through. If there’s anything I can do to improve the blog, I’ll certainly try.
You can find the survey here
Nearly four months blogging April 30, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a commentAccording to Technorati, 55% of bloggers are still posting after three months, so I'm in that dedicated half. Given that this is a proportion of blogs that are tracked by technorati, the actual number is probably a lot lower - people just signing up and posting once or twice seem fairly common.
Now I'm number 181,357 out of the 23.5 million they track, and slowly creeping up in the world. The number of hits doesn't seem to be increasing much though I'm pleased it didn't drop off completely over the last month when I've not been posting much. There are about 15 people picking this up through an RSS feed, which I can see on Wordpress' new Feed Stats feature, so I'm still averaging around 55 reads a day.
Wordpress goes from strength to strength, and you'll have noticed I've switched back to the Regulus format I had back in January. Wordpress have made it possible to edit it more, and it's my favourite template. I think its nice and clear, and although the green one was attractive, some people found it hard to read.
I've also just discovered Flickr. Well, I knew it existed, of course, but I hadn't realised how friendly it is to blogging until Wordpress started refusing to upload my pictures. I think I must have hit a limit with them, and Flickr allows 20Mb per month, which is more than enough for me. That's only 6 or 7 pictures at full resolution on my 5 MP camera, but dozens at any sensible screen resolution.
Most of my hits still come from search engines, though I know that whenever I comment on a popular blog, I'll get a few more. The story in TimesOnline which referenced my post about the Somers Town Coffee House, and my subsequent comment on that, brought in a lot of people. Good old british jet.com is still a popular one though.
And I've had 3454 hits since time began.
