In spite of this well-acknowledged fact, you’ll notice that my blog is still littered with a whole plethora of categories, covering all sorts of topics and areas of life.  I have chosen not to focus on one target audience, but to write infrequently about everything instead.

Now, finally, I’ve got round to introducing a way for you, the reader, to take control of my blog and only show the articles you’re actually interested in.

On the left hand side of the home page, third box down, you should see a nice little list of categories about which I write.  By default, all of these should be ticked, indicating that you’ll see absolutely everything when you first visit.  You can un-check any topics you’re not interested in, click the ‘Save preferences’ button, and you’ll never be bothered by those boring articles again.  So if you’re really not interested in my Technology or Internet articles, or if Twitter rubs you up the wrong way and you’d rather not read my tweets, feel free to un-check those boxes and revel in the bliss of your new-found power…

This clever little system actually isn’t all that revolutionary, for those of you in the know, and only took me half an hour or so to put in place.  It uses cookies to store your preferences, and tweaks the WordPress query depending on what categories you want to see.  If no cookie is found (i.e. you’ve not been here before, or with this browser) it automatically assumes you want to see everything, which I guess is fairly optimistic but at least it gives you the option.  And of course if your browser doesn’t accept cookies you’ll see everything, just as you did before.

So take a peek (go back to the home page, it won’t show anywhere else) and let me know what you think.  I also have plans to give the same sort of customisability to RSS feeds.

In any case, it’s taken me until last night to resolve the matter.  I had previously tried copying new files across to upgrade to the latest version, but that didn’t work.  So last night I took a full backup of everything, deleted all the core files from the server, and uploaded a fresh load of files.  And as if by some deep and powerful magic, my command over my online presence was finally restored.  With that liberation still fresh, I jumped on the opportunity to make a few changes.

The most obvious change you’ll see is that I’m now importing my Twitter feed.  When I post a new tweet, it’ll get displayed here on my blog too, appearing like a little speech bubble.  This is actually a category in WordPress too, so I can non-Twitter mini-posts too.  Like for those times when I really feel the need to say something to the world, but Twitter doesn’t give me enough characters, and a full-on multi-paragraph post isn’t necessary.  Of course, I understand that you may not want my Twittering to come up in your RSS reader, so if you want to continue reading my blog by RSS but excluding these micro-posts you can now use this new RSS feed URL: www.minipix.co.uk/?feed=rss2&cat=-342.

Other changes I’m bringing in include a mobile-enabled view of my blog, so that you can read my posts from your phone.  I’ll hopefully also figure out a way of updating my blog from my mobile too, so that I can blog on the move.

I shall also be adding a new ‘Family’ category, as I seem to be writing an increasing amount about our son Samuel, and it feels appropriate to recognise his significance with his own category.

EDIT: If you’re seeing the Twitter micro-posts but they’re unformatted (i.e. not in funky speech bubbles) you probably need to refresh your browser to reload the stylesheet.  To refresh your browser, click the refresh button in the toolbar.  Or press F5.  Or press CTRL-R.  Or CMD-R if you’re on a Mac.  Or ALT-CTRL-SHIFT-TAB-R-X-N-SPACE if you happen to have that set up as a custom keyboard shortcut.

That first blog was a straight HTML page.  I edited the HTML, probably in Notepad, put the latest post at the top of the page, and re-uploaded the file.  Simple but effective.  But over time it became a little unwieldy.  So Phill got me to beta-test his PHP-MySQL blogging system that he’d been tinkering with, and that opened up a lot more options.  Before long though I felt it necessary to migrate to something more substantial, made the move to WordPress (importing my old blog posts), and have been a blogging sensation ever since.  Well, maybe not the sensation bit.

But now, an ominous cloud hangs on the horizon.  A tiny ripple out at sea that has the potential to grow into a tidal wave that will rip through all that once was safe and secure.  My wife has a blog.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’ve not exactly discouraged her, after all.  Quite the opposite.  I can hear the words echoing round the doldrums of my memory even now – “you should get a blog too”, I said.  How strange, then, that I should feel so threatened, so intimidated that she’s finally taken my advice.  Okay, that’s perhaps a slight exaggeration, but I’m well known for those.  Even the Queen knows about my exaggeration.  Oh no, wait, there I go again.  Anyway, where was I…

So far (as of 18th April 2010), there is only one post.  There is no apparent content to it, it’s just a rambling mess of an introduction.  And as rambling introductions go, it’s brilliant.  I love the irony of this seemingly endless inward debate about where to begin, even more so because it actually finishes without officially starting.  Inspired.  Take a read, if you will.

She tells me she doesn’t know what to write about yet.  That’s fair enough.  I didn’t know what to write about when I first started.  I suppose there are two schools of thought on blogging: some use it as an online diary, documenting their lives in varying detail; others use it to talk about ideas, ideals, inventions, and other interesting things beginning with ‘i’.  I have grown into one of the latter.  To put it another way, I see myself as more of a columnist than a reporter.  It will be interesting to see which way my wife wanders as she walks the road of a blogger.  Maybe she’ll talk about ideas she has for plays and sketches.  Maybe she’ll tell everyone what our son is getting up to.  Maybe she’ll complain about how her husband doesn’t do any housework.  Maybe she’ll reveal my own deep, dark secrets.  Maybe she’ll become a more prolific blogger than me.  Maybe the tables will turn and I will be shoved off the podium as the primary blogger in the household.  Can you sense my fear and dread and trepidation and fear?  Oh wait, I said ‘fear’ twice.  It’s clearly important.

Maybe I’m getting paranoid about nothing.  Maybe, after all, it is possible for two bloggers to live in peace and harmony under the same roof.  Maybe we’ll blog in different directions, with different writing styles, with different audiences, and there will never be any crossover and everything will be fine.  Maybe.  We’ll see.  In the meantime, feel free to read my wife’s blog from time to time.  But not all the time, and not at the expense of reading my blog.  I’ve spent years building up my readership, I would hate for either of you to desert me…

In the meantime, please do enjoy the new look for the blog, in particular the header image which changes depending on the time of day, and time of year, so check back at different times during the day to see different images.  I’m also quite pleased with the comments post-it notes too, which work quite well.  The only caveat with that is that I have had to put a cap on the length of comments, otherwise it all started to look silly.

Once comments are up and running again, please feel free to let me know what you think.  In the meantime, twiddle your fingers, or if you really do want to tell me something send me a postcard, or a homing pigeon, or smoke signals, or something.

Anyway, once it’s all settled in, feel free to let me know what you think of it.

The code for this bit looks like this:

<div id="media-buttons" class="hide-if-no-js">

Add media:

<a href="media-upload.php?post_id=439&type=image&TB_iframe=true&height=500&width=640" class="thickbox" title='Add an Image'><img src='images/media-button-image.gif' alt='Add an Image' /></a>

<a href="media-upload.php?post_id=439&type=video&TB_iframe=true&height=500&width=640" class="thickbox" title='Add Video'><img src='images/media-button-video.gif' alt='Add Video' /></a>

<a href="media-upload.php?post_id=439&type=audio&TB_iframe=true&height=500&width=640" class="thickbox" title='Add Audio'><img src='images/media-button-music.gif' alt='Add Audio' /></a>

<a href="media-upload.php?post_id=439&TB_iframe=true&height=500&width=640" class="thickbox" title='Add Media'><img src='images/media-button-other.gif' alt='Add Media' /></a>

</div>

I’ll quickly explain what this does: everything is contained within a DIV, with a unique id “media-buttons” and a class “hide-if-no-js”. The one that really stuck out for me was the class, and a quick look in the CSS revealed that the class “hide-if-no-js” did exactly what you’d expect – it hid everything inside it. I simply commented out that line in the CSS file, and found that the links suddenly worked!

If you want to try this yourself (if you’re having the same trouble as me), the file you want to look at is …/wp-admin/wp-admin.css, and the offending item is right down at the bottom of the file, and looks like this:

.hide-if-no-js {

  display: none;

}

Now, this is only a partial fix, as although I can click on the links and access the functionality behind them, the icons for those buttons still don’t appear. I’ve checked, and the image files themselves are definitely there. I’ve even manually edited the HTML using a bookmarklet to temporarily remove the link around the image, and then it displays perfectly, just without the link and hence without the functionality associated with it.

So I had a look at the link, to see if that’s where the problem lay. Sadly, that yielded nothing of use; the #media-buttons CSS had nothing relevant, neither did the .thickbox in the link. So I’m at a loss again. For now.

Still, at least I’ve got the functionality working now, that’s a significant improvement. Unfortunately it hasn’t resolved the problems I’m also having with the Add Link buttons, which give me a blank popup. Ah well, I’ll just have to investigate further, or make do with the HTML editor.