Wednesday 14 January 2009

Public service announcement!

Genitals, ladymen, devoted followers and other rubber-necking squinters at the car-crash that is this blog: a public service announcement follows.


1.If you aren't currently following alright tit, the massively well-written story of a 29-year-old battling breast cancer, you bloody well should be. Entirely worksafe, providing that your work tolerates sudden crying jags and bursts of laughter, sometimes simultaneously.

Another thing that you all need to be reading right now, this very instant is John Q Publican's new blog. JQP is an old friend of mine and something of a mentor, too, and he has been more than tangentially involved in some of the processing behind Penny Red over the past 18 months, and I can confirm that he is a real live barman in real life. We often disagree, but I have huge respect for him as a systemic thinker, and I'm deeply excited to see how the new blog develops. The latest post is a response to this blog's Welfare Reform howzits and ponderings, and is joyous. Go, join the debate.


2. I am toying with the idea of moving Penny Red over to Wordpress. It's in every way a better system, and I'm in the process of constructing a site over there just in case, although I've not even half finished fiddling with the HTML yet after importing all the posts and comments. How would you people feel about this? If there are strong objections I'm happy to keep the Blogger format.


3. Talking of Welfare Reform, the Bill itself had its first reading precisely two and a half hours ago, and since I happened to be in the area I may just have sneaked into the votes office, sneaked in with my public pass on small and sneaky feet to get a copy of the document - hot off the press in all its thick, stinking manila glory. I'm reading it right now. If this blog doesn't update again it's because I've choked on this gingernut trying to comprehend how a Labour government can possibly justify abolishing Income Support - point 7 in an extensive contents page dripping with ominous portent.

Watch this space.

6 comments:

  1. Coincidence - I've just done it. Come on in, the water's lovely, &c &c. It actually has a whole host of useful features and the update process is just that much sexier. No rly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wordpress is cool -- a very flexible web tool.

    If I can offer some nerd advice get the bcSpamBlock plugin it's absolutely brilliant. Stops all spam and very few users will know it's there. You only see a comment validation box if you turn JavaScript off in your browser.

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  3. Is that self hosted wordpress? I made the move to self hosted wordpress almost a month ago after Google wrongly classified my wonderously mediocre blog as spam(said that it would be reviewed in 48 hours - still waiting). Since moving my visits have doubled, all in all a good choice.

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  4. I'm with the yay-sayers. Wordpress, either on the .com or self hosted, is by far the best public blogging platform out there.

    You'll initially lose some existing readers who don't update their feeds and similar, and getting people to change blogroll links can be a PITA, but medium term it's definitely worth it.

    If you want to self host, it's more flexible but you need to pay for server space—sharing with others is cheapest, can help if you want.

    If you do switch, make sure you edit your template here to link to the new site on every page and keep this place up as an archive. There are ways of getting automatic redirects done, but that's beyond my coding fu (I know people that can do it though)

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  5. Yeah, take it to WordPress. I don't know a massive amount about this coding malarky (or anything other than it involves ones and zeros...Or something...) but as an ignorant user of WP I can tell you its shiny and awesome and adorable.

    ReplyDelete
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