"We have a new room for the event, which holds up to 100 people."

One hundred red bloggers!

1114 Also posted to: Home page . At: 9:43:19 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Voxpolitics Seminar @ Houses of Parliament

Rob Henerey posted how he creates a news item on the Radio discussion list. So, I thought I'd explain how I do it here:

It all starts here I'm normally putting together little stories about me and the kids. Normally, Radio isn't running, and I'm editing, colour enhancing, cropping anything from 2 or 3 to 50 or 60 pictures from my digital camera. It's only a Digital Dream 1.3MB (£87.00) but I won't pay any more that £100 for a camera. So, I'm saving pix into the folders directly from Photoshop. I've become good enough that I know what size I want them to be, and which will go next to each one. I mentally draw the news item post up in my mind. Each folder is a width size for the thumbnail. I could create any size I wanted. All I'd need to do is create a new folder, call it a number and that would be the size of the thumbnail. I don't want too many though, these have sufficed for a few months now. Anymore and I think things would look confused. In this illustration, I've dropped an image into the asis folder - that's "as is" or same size. With this special folder, there is no thumbnail, and all I get is the image ref, no javascript double thumbnail jobbie. It's a tabbed folder, it's always available so I can drag images from websites directly to it. I've also set up Default Folder so there's a keyboard short cut to it too from any application. I'm using a customised version of Dave Winer's myPictures tool. Now, it only works with Mac Classic. I don't know enough about scripting apps on OS X nor Windows. Each image in my tool is thumbnailed by using clipToGif. I need help with this little tiny part to make it work on Windows and OS X.

Getting the image tags Up pops the Thumbs for whatever window. (I don't know why I called it that.) This is the window that pops up when Radio is restarted and there's images in the bits to upload folder. Or, if I drop an image into my bits to upload folder. If there's a load of images in this folder then there's a corresponding amount of images in this window. You can also see there's a shortcut of the image (highlited in black). I'm having trouble with shortcuts being processed in some places, and as I like to be able to edit the image tags, the hspace and maybe the valigns I have it raw too and usually use that version.   If it's thumbnail then it's 'orrible javascript as above. They usually are, and all the ones of my kids are JS. BTW: I've got a bit of javascript in my headers in each page to make this work. I've also added it to all my manila sites, to make them work when I cross post to manila sites.   I see it as HTML in Radio, looks a lot easier to understand. That is, underlined links in blue, as above.

Quick post menu item Now, to create a post. I pull down my myRadio menu, this is my myRadio menu, nothing to do with Userland. I decide which category the post is going to be. I post everything into the front page as well. This post is going to be a cyberSaps post. I don't always create posts this way. Sometimes I use the aggregator, or the bookmarklet for Mike Krus's Radio Express when I'm out bear backed blogging. I then open up with the menu command: last post to outline, which does exactly what it says on the tin.

Fresh empty post Here's the fresh empty post. To edit the title, I double click on the title bar, where it says weblogData.posts.00001112. And the containing table pops up (see below).

Edit the title By default my menu creates a title Quick post Or at least that's what the cyberSaps menu does, other menus, like the service message create titles with the date and time in. Anyway, I change the post to be something more useful. And, if I want, I can add more categories, or take it off the front page.

Add one of my boilerplates With the fresh empty post, I add a table. I've got plenty already made up in my boilerplates. Ah, there's some other scripts and bits in this menu, I guess the most used is the Copy Address no GDB and the sweetest, is the Squish and save. The rest are of the type, "paste this stuff in the clipboard and do this to it before." And the others are the menus that I've cribbed from elsewhere in Radio and put here. Then I've just tidied up my bookmarks to scripts and places and stories and stuff.

Start editing my post To the left is the fresh post with the boilerplate. I just open it up arrange the table cells with the images and text, as you do. Here's me editing my post, this post. It's a thumbnail, just click on the image and the bigger, full sized on will open in a new window. I check back and fore with the local version of the page, just to make sure what I see in the outline is what I get in the web browser.

Publish right now! OK, so I'm happy with the lot. And I want it upstreamed now. Now! I said. This menu builds and upstreams immediately. I can pick which category I want to upstream, and I don't need any new news posts. This menu item will upstream the front page of the category regardless.

The only other thing to do is make sure your full text news items in your RSS 2.0 remove the javascript nonsense. I've a call back for that.

1112 Also posted to: Home page . At: 5:36:28 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Quick post about quick posting

"When you remove the key-critical behaviour of search, you have moved from pull to push marketing, and everyone knows which of these is most powerful: pull"

I don't think Google will be able to keep this up for very long. I've clicked on several ads in Google's results pages, the ads have been useful to my search. But, so far the ads I've seen on blogs haven't been useful, so I haven't clicked.

I don't know if 'inventory owners' bloggers to you and I are paid for impressions or only clicks. If so, it's good for advertisers, as they get free eye-balls. Fraudulant clicks are not allowed either, and the click through is anything from a few dollors to 5¢, depending on the keywords.

I'm looking into this for me to advertise, and for me as 'inventory owner' of a blogging community - well, part owner. More a, sometimes, sysAdmin. If we can raise some dosh for a new machine all the better.

These are the ads that Google may use on the Villa blogs, looks like public (read cheap = 5¢) ads. Me? A socialist ad exec putting ads on blogs, never?

1110 Also posted to: Home page , serviceBF . At: 1:06:48 PM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Does Google's AdSense Make Sense?

"14th July, 5:30 - 7.00pm
Committee Room 20
Upper Committee Corridor
Houses of Parliament

Drinks and Food Provided"

It's been a long time since I was last there. Possibly, 20 years. I fell asleep after a long party the night before, a long bus trip down, and a boring talk by Bruce George the Labour MP for Walsall. Something to do with the Humanities course my mate was on.

Anyway, free food and some chance to meet up with, I guess, some nice lefties, who want to change the world with their blogs!

Deffo, I'll be there. Anybody else wanna go, add your name and email them to RSVP

1109 Also posted to: Home page . At: 11:44:36 AM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Bloggers storm the citadels

"The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a "noarchive" meta in the header of every page on his site."

Oooo! I'm going to do that I don't want to be cached. Like the page says, if I want to delete stuff from my site I don't want to find that within google. Or have to wait what could be 60 days.

So, I add the tag to my #prefs at the top level.
<meta NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="noarchive">

But I don't mind Daypop so it'll just be google that I'll stop.

So my prefs is looking like this these days...

1108 Also posted to: Home page . At: 12:42:51 AM  . .
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Other title(s) for this story: Google as Big Brother