Category Archives: Web Design

Those top 5 posts

Web Design

Copying Stephen and Will here are the top 5 posts of the year:

5: The News Quiz – a post about my shop appearing on said radio programme (426)
4: Torchwood on CBBC – the screenshot of the BBC mistake (533)
3: TV on your P990i (Xvid / DivX / MP4 / AVI / MPEG / 3GP) – might be something to do with the clever Google Bomb title, might be due to the lack of other instructions (851)
2: TomTom Navigator 6 on a P990i – quite popular as TomTom still don’t officially support it on the P990 (907)
1: News Of the World – A post about Mark Oaten without mentioning Mark Oaten! (1095)

However all these posts (combined) still lost out to the most popular post of the blog Major ’24’ spoilers revealed (which is now 2 years old) with over 8000 hits.

Mobile network in internet tie-up

Mobiles, Web Design

The BBC are reporting that 3 is making the web easier on your mobile.

Mobile firm 3 has agreed a tie-up with top internet firms in a move it claims will make the mobile internet work properly for the first time.
…
It is launching a partnership with internet firms including Skype, Google and eBay.

I may be wrong but Google already spots when I use my mobile on any network and reformats the web for me, and eBay has been available for years at ebaymobile.co.uk.

A lot of posts

LibDemBlogs

Forgot to post this on Thursday, but I believe that on Wednesday we saw the largest number of posts on LibDemBlogs since it started. Some 73 posts were made and almost half were about the US Midterms. Unfortunately I’ve not got a proper record of posts per day so without going back through the last two years, I’ll rely on someone else to prove me wrong.

Firefox 2.0 – where?

Web Design

So there was a lot of fuss yesterday about how Firefox 2.0 was to be launched today. Then today more fuss about how Firefox 2.0 had been launched today. Yet when I go to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ it still shows only 1.5 available to download. It’s now 10pm (BST) so nearly Wednesday, so why can’t I download it?
ps. I don’t do RC’s after trying (for about 5 seconds) IE Beta 7, so don’t point me in that direction.

Semi-edit: whilst looking at the BBC website they say that it’s released at 1700 PST, which would be 1am here, so I’m off to bed.

Google Co-op LibDemBlog Search

LibDemBlogs

Whilst surfing about on the net I came across this on the BBC website “Google offers personal searches“. Now Google had told me in the monthly newsletter about Co-op and as I’ve signed up to almost everything Google have to offer I though I would give this a try.
What I’ve been able to do is put all the URLs of the blogs which appear on LibDemBlogs into a Co-op, which then lets me and you search this subset of Google search results. I have previously built my own search engine using the Google Search API, but this only allowed me to search the contents of one site. So for now anyway I’ve changed the search box on LibDemBlogs to use the Co-op version instead.

Convertion to WordPress

Web Design

Finally made the move to WordPress. After hours of finding a way to import my posts from Blogger as the import method just didn’t want to work, I wrote some code myself. Then I tweaked the template I had been working on, and this morning I renamed the directories so that the WordPress version went live.
Most things have moved, just need some time to get the comments and then the adverts back.

LibDemBlogs on your mobile

LibDemBlogs

Now I noticed quite a few people (well maybe just Will and Rob) reading LibDem Blogs via their mobile. Using Opera Mini they were able to shrink the whole site so that it fitted on their small screens.
However I was using a script that I wrote some years ago. This script only loaded the posts and ignored everything else. After speaking to Will in the bar I decided to revamp the script and publicise it. So the new url is www.libdemblogs.co.uk/mobile/. It’s been tested on Opera Mobile 9 on my P990i and the built in browser on Heather’s K800i. I’ve also added some customisation using cookies, so it’s possible to show the posts from the last x hours or even the most recent y posts. You can even choose to show the MyBlogLog Stats, the full list of contributors and the news feeds which appear on the side bar.
Please give it a go, and if you have any feedback please let me know which mobile phone you used, if it was the built in browser or Opera Mini and what network you are on.

Up and down

LibDemBlogs

My webhosts Dataflame have been playing with their servers, which has been causing me some troubles. The first problem affected all of my .htaccess files which in turn crashed my blog and LibDemBlogs. After getting them to fix that, I then noticed a collection of scripts were broken, CNPS and my sidebar script all stopped working, so then I got that fixed. Then tonight everything disappeared. I sent off an email, but didn’t get any reply, then I realised email to was down, so I tried live chat instead. Someone called Jamie went off and soon everything was back up again. However if you find something faulty on any of my sites please let me know as I’ll need to get those fixed too.