Yvonne’s Stuff

I’ve backed-up and upgraded my blogging software, Wordpress with no problems so far. Well, not too many problems, anyway.

My site’s been running for about two years, and has been mostly been acting as a link dump, with relatively little actual post writing from me. It’s due for a good spring clean and an upgrade to patch any leaky holes left in the previous incarnation, not to mention reaping the benefits of fancy new features.

Unfortunately, said fancy new features knobbled my design, because I created it before “widgets” came along. Since that design hadn’t been 100% finished, plus, I have a new design in the pipelines, I’ve decided to revert to the default theme, whilst I finish off my new design.

Ok, it’s no big secret… what with all of their services and things like gmail, analytics and webmaster tools that they let us use for free, and the api’s that they let us use and mess about with their stuff.

Anyway, if anyone just so happened to visit my homepage today to see either a blank screen, or a message bearing “oops” will realise that I did something really clumsy and stupid. I accidentally over-wrote the homepage with a pile of blog php stuff! And my local copy was one from donkey’s years ago.

Admittedly, the homepage doesn’t contain much at the moment, in fact, it’s little more than a holding page… but still, I didn’t relish the idea of going back and doing it all again.

Thankfully Google’s cached pages saved my skin, I was able to pick up the entire source code, and hopefully it’s the latest version and I haven’t overlooked anything. Now I just need to find time to finish everything properly…

Edit: Didn’t realise that it was Valentine’s day tomorrow, oh how droll. So come on, show us your Google-Love (or Googlove, as I like to put it) and post a comment telling us why you luv Google too.

Well, it’s finally happened, the devil is shivvering in his jim-jams laying in bed nursing a cold and snuggling up to his hot water bottle. Yeah, I’ve succumbed to the lures of the blogosphere.

For years I’ve turned my nose up at the idea of an “online diary”. I mean, who wants to read the daily musings of an ego-maniac with a boring life and nothing really all that interesting to say? Because, surely, in order to feel that compulsion to tell the wired world about what you and your cat did today, you would need to be one of them, wouldn’t you? An ego-maniac? With a mirror firmly attached to the side of your monitor even.

Well, maybe not. Over these past few years, I’ve found myself drawn deeper into the world of blogging, not as a writer, but as a spectator, and even as an avid fan in some cases.

The value of blogs as a medium of communication has increased far beyond the “public diary” label I’d originally foisted upon them. They’ve become invaluable sources of news and expertise in any specialised field you could wish to encounter. More so than a site’s more traditional “news” page, since blogs tend to be more friendly, more human. Not to mention the fact that they tend to have less “marketing speak”, a definite bonus in my book.

I suppose the organic generation of pages and pages of industry related content can’t harm the search engine optimisation either.

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