Eponym is a new hosted blog service, and a direct competitor with Blogger. It’s nice and easy to use, and it’s really quick to set up a new blog – like I did (check out that nice Slashdot-esque theme).

My one criticism would be that the Control Panel page is a little cluttered – I think they should have ditched the top header, really.

But it seems quicker than Blogger, and is bound to be with fewer users, so for absolute beginners it’s worth a shot.

[tags]eponym[/tags]

As spotted by Google Blogoscoped, this is from a CSS comment on Microsoft’s website:

/* fix for the IE 1px-off margin error */
* html .StupidIEMarginHack
{
margin-right: 1px;
}

According to the BBC:

More than half of government and council websites contain errors and cause problems for disabled people, research shows.

Some 60% of UK government websites contain HTML errors, according to a study by the University of Southampton.

A similar proportion do not comply with guidelines created to improve web access, it found.

In response, a government spokesman said the UK had been actively promoting better accessibility of sites.

[tags]web design, standards, government it[/tags]

Daveybot provides a great round up of his Firefox set-up. Have pinched a few of those extensions for myself.

[tags]firefox, extensions[/tags]

Apparently the blog run by David Miliband, the UK government’s “Minister of Communities and Local Government”, costs the taxpayer £6,000 – whether that was a one off payment or an ongoing annual fee it doesn’t say.

Clearly the government’s ability to wildly overspend on IT even stretches to the world of blogging – which is surely the easiest techy thing to do for free?

[tags]blogging, politics, miliband[/tags]

Nick Bradbury has announced the release of the final version of FeedDemon 2.

It is such a great piece of software – I am hoping that when my new PC arrives, there will be a Linux equivalent that is as powerful…

Akismet caught its first attempt at comment spam today – the first spam I have had on this blog since it was set up. Nice to see it working so well – and I guess it means that I must be doing something right if I am getting the attention of the spammers…

Just had news that my new desktop PC is on its way and will be here on Monday. Woot!

Then I can get cracking with installing Ubuntu onto it… perhaps a few days off to get it sorted would be a good idea!

My Toshiba laptop is a nightmare right now – it keeps overheating and turning itself off. Not helpful at all.

There is a bit of a buzz around ajaxWrite, a new Web2.0 word processor, like Writely. Much of the buzz is around the fact that the guy reponsible for it is Michael Robertson who was previously behind Linspire, the user friendly Linux distro.

The first thing to say about it is that, at the moment, it is bloody slow. I guess part of the reason for that is the big demand on the servers at the moment as everyone tries out the new toy. People like me, then.

So what’s it like? It’s ok. It’s made to look like a desktop app, rather than the friendly colours of Writely and other AJAXy sites like that. It deliberatley sets out to take on Microsoft Word, in fact Microsoft Office according to the blurb on the pre-loaded document:

The look, feel, and functionality of Microsoft Word in a AJAX platform. This means you can load it in seconds from a web browser.

Did we mention it’s free? That’s right.

Microsoft Office Professional 2007 – $499

AjaxWrite – $0

Erm, ok. Well, for a start, there’s a little bit of a difference between what Office does as a whole and what AjaxWrite does. Even if ajaxWrite was the best word processor ever designed, it still wouldn’t be comparable, would it? What a bizaare claim to make.

Feature wise, it’s ok – better than Writely. It can open .doc files, and save them too, as well as PDFs which is great. However, it looks to me like you can only save files to a local disk – you can’t save them online or share them with others. This is a straight competitor to a desktop word processor.

One of my pet hates with software is non compliance with standards – especially on keyboard shortcuts. ajaxWrite meddles with the standards – like making bold text a ctrol-shift-b rather than just ctrl-b as normal. It’s all academic, anyway, as I couldn’t get any of them in any combination to work this evening.

In all honesty, I don’t like it. If you don’t want to use MS stuff, use OpenOffice.org, or AbiWord (both of which are just as free as ajaxWrite) or even WordPerfect or StarOffice if you don’t mind paying. ajaxWrite claims to have the functionality of Word, but it doesn’t come close – nor indeed to OOo Writer, and what’s worse it seems to me to fail to take advantage of providing a WP service online.

Update: the Office rather than Word comparison, according to this post, is because other parts of an office suite will be released in time. Ah yes, if I had read the post on Michael Robertson’s blog that I linked to above properly, I would have known that. So, that’s that cleared up then. Sorry, all.

Well, starting up a new blog has certainly made it clear to me the steps that are needed to try and get things settled and moving quickly.

1. Install WordPress. Ok, so I am a WordPress guy, and most of this will be WP specific. If you don’t have your own server or hosting, use WordPress.com.

2. Get a theme. I think settling on a theme early is a good idea. Too much messing and switching about can make you think more about style than content. Actually – work out which theme you are going to use before you set up the blog. Then the decision’s made.

3. Set up a FeedBurner account. Using these guys to handle your feed makes life loads easier – and provides heaps of useful info on how people are accessing your site, and how many are reading your feed. Oh, and to make life even easier, install and activate Steve Smith’s FeedBurner plug-in.

4. Install and activate the Akismet, Simple Tags and Email Subscriptions plug-ins. Each will either make your readers’ lives, or yours, simpler.

5. Start reading, quoting and commenting on blogs. Find an aggregator you like, subscribe to any feed you find that might be interesting. Link back to articles, quote people, comment on blogs. make sure it’s all relevant and traffic may be increased to your site.

6. Claim your blog on Technorati. This will increase the liklihood of your posts popping up in searches. Using tags will help here too.

No doubt more things will occur to me later. Check the comments for those.

[tags]blogging, wordpress[/tags]

One of the recommended actions for any blogger to take is to tag their posts, inserting appropriate links at the end of the post to a service like Technorati, say, which might be of use to a reader and will help increase the numbers of those visiting your blog. Hopefully.

I’ve been looking at a few ways of doing this. Some of the offline blogging tools allow you to do it – Qumana does, as indeed does Ecto. Most of my posts are made when I am away from my PC at home, and are therefore through the WordPress admin panel on the web. I had a crack, as Lorelle suggests, with Ultimate Tag Warrior, and found it a total pain in the arse – far too complicated for my liking.

Then Neville Hobson, who is clearly the King of WordPress plug-in recommendations, put forward the suggestion of Simple Tags – the title of which was music to my ears. It works beautifully – simply by adding the tags at the end of the post surrounded by the word tags in square brackets – like those you’d use on most forum systems these days.

Mega!

[tags]tags, wordpress, technorati[/tags]

Thanks to Neville Hobson for pointing out the Subscribe to Comments 2.0 plug-in which allows readers to click a tickbox to receive email notifications of when replies are made to comments they have posted.

A great little WordPress plug-in.

Kiko is another online calendar service. It’s filled with lots of lovely little AJAXy tricks and generally looks lovely.

One of the cool features include having a text box which allows you to quickly add appointments using a human readable syntax, which is nice.

The problem with the site at the moment is that it is soooo sloooooow. Until they get that sorted, I will still be a HipCal user. But I shall be keeping a close eye on Kiko.

The question that everyone is asking, of course, is whether Kiko is named after the footballer:

I think we should be told.