An online notebook
Teacamps are the bi-weekly get togethers of people interested in government and the web, which emerged from January’s Barcamp.
I don’t get along nearly as often as I would like – something that will hopefully change now I have a bit more control over my time – but I will be heading down to the House of Fraser cafe on Victoria Street this Thursday. Hope to see plenty of folk there!
Next Saturday (September 20th) is Software Freedom Day:
Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere!
There are various get togethers happening around the world to celebrate – here are all the UK ones. If you’d like to know more about free software, this video from Stephen Fry is a pretty nice start:
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Other things you might like to do include tracking down your local Linux User Group – who can help and advise you on any issues you are having – and actually installing some open source software on your computer. Here’s some quick suggestions:
How else could you support or celebrate software freedom day?
Recently it was announced over at WordPress.com that a new feature had arrived – the ability to have ‘sticky’ posts on your blog homepage.
Regular updates are what blogging’s all about, but sometimes you want to keep hot topics or other static info at the top of your posts. This feature has existed as Sticky Topics in the forums, but hasn’t been available on blogs. Until now.
These are posts that exist outside the normal chronology of your blogging, and stay at the top no matter what.
There are a number of uses this feature could be put to – from introducing your blog to new readers, to highlighting important information to your readers.
However, people who manage their own WordPress installs needn’t be dismayed as there is a plugin which provides this functionality to self hosted blogs, which you can find here, courtesy of Lester Chan.
One of the features of a blog is that the posts appear in reverse-chronological order – that is to say, with the latest content first. But there are times when that might not always be appropriate. Let me give you an example.
I’m planning a series of blog posts on a certain topic. Current subscribers and regular readers will spot them as they come in, but what about comers to the party? One way of grouping all the posts would of course be to stick them all in the same category. But all the posts will be displayed in traditional reverse-chronological order, meaning folk have to work their way from the end to the beginning, or dig around for the first post in the set.
There is a way around this though, which can be achieved by fiddling around with the URLs you use. Let’s take the posts on DavePress within the blogging category as an example. The traditional view of the posts can be found at http://davepress.net/category/blogging/ which has the latest at the top. Compare that with the results of http://davepress.net/category/blogging/?order=asc (note the ?order=asc at the end). This view of the posts put them in chronological order, starting at the beginning.
You can apply this to any view of your posts, including the home page, and tag and author views. There are other options too, including sorting posts or pages alphabetically. If you really wanted to, you could also incorporate it into your theme, making such presentation an integrated part of your blog.
I’ll be using it to help promote the blog series I’m planning. By circulating the URL including the extra bit to reverse the post order, people will be able to find themselves at the beginning and work their way through without excessive scrolling just to get started.
Am sure there are other uses this could be put to – any thoughts?
Nice post from Steve Rubel, comparing the approach taken by two hugely innovative companies to engaging with their customers:
Google isn’t exactly known as the most transparent company in the world, but they’re light years ahead of Apple – a company that in some ways they share a kinship with when it comes to their reputation for innovation. Apple (or for that matter any big company) can learn a lot about radical transparency, customer service and PR from Google, even though they’re hardly perfect here.
The post is worth reading in full as Rubel analyses some of the good stuff that Google does (open about improvements to their products and lots of blogs) – and compares it to the lack of such activity by Apple.
I dare say that many public sector organisations are behind even Apple in this regard. Would you even want to be as open as Google about this sort of stuff? My view would be yes, but I would imagine that the idea would scare a lot of folk to death!