David Gilson

Publications

Oct 6

Website Updates David No Comments
articles, blog, journalism, Publications, websites, writing

Now that I have a grand total of, erm, two articles posted on other sites, I’ve decided to create a new page here on my blog, because I don’t intend to stop at two. In fact, I’m hoping getting articles posted on other sites is going to be a semi-regular thing.

Imagine trumpets playing …

http://www.davidgilson.co.uk/publications/

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Selective Twitter to Facebook from Blog Test

Jul 30

Website Updates David No Comments

Quick blog post to see if my TwttierFeed is correctly set up to with the Selective Twitter Status Facebook application!

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New search bar

Jan 29

Website Updates David No Comments
GIMP, header, searchbox

Just a quick design update. I posted last week about changes to the header, including a search box. Well, I’ve just done some more cosmetic work to that. On the submit button I’ve changed the image of the word “search” to an image fitting with the text box image showing a magnifying glass, a common symbol for searching.

(Of course, all graphics work is done with good wholesome free and open source software, namely The GIMP.)

Header - after

The new search button.

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Would you like PDF with that?

Jan 24

Website Updates David No Comments
conversion, online, pdf, pdf24

I’m experimenting with a new plugin. You may notice below each post there is a line that says “Send post as PDF to” with a form to enter your e-mail address.

This is a plugin that sends my posts over to a site called PDF24 where their servers converts my posts to PDF and e-mails it to you. I know most of my posts don’t really warrant this, although I have been writing some longer posts lately that I thought might benefit from being downloadable in PDF form.

Anyway, please test it out, and let me know what you think to the idea in general.

Thanks.

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Cosmetic changes to the blog

Jan 20

Website Updates David No Comments
favicon, icon, RSS, sidebar, socialnetworking, wordpress, wordpress-plugins

Okay folks, I know I’ve broken with my regular posting schedule, sorry!

However, I haven’t abandoned things; I’ve been busying myself with making some subtle changes to the looks of the site. This post is more for myself than anything, as a record of what I’ve done. Also, I’d like to thank my friend and server admin, Ryan, for suggesting most of the things I’ve done to the site.

Header - before

Header - after

Header

I’ve done two things to the header, and I’m very pleased with both.

First of all, I’ve created a search box (one less widget to put on the sidebar). I also created a custom background for the text box so that it fitted in with the theme design. The submit button looks like text, although it is actually an image of text. This is because no matter how I set the style of the basic button, I could not get rid of the edge shading effect. So instead I made some text in the same font as the page links, and used it as an image.

Secondly, I changed the RSS link. Before it was a simple line of text with an RSS icon. Although now, I have taken the Feedburner counter that was on my social networks widget and put that in place. Then also, I have replaced the standard RSS icon with one lovingly drawn by yours truely.

Custom social networking widgets

Sidebar

I have dropped several unnecessary widgets, including my free-form text boxes with the QR codes and campaign badges. I’ve added a collapsible archive widget, I wanted to have a collapsible category widget too, although I just could not find one that worked properly, shame!

My “social networking” (a simple Text WP widget) has gone back to the original version – a collection of favicons. The first time I had it like that, I eventually dropped it as I thought it too much work to keep maintained. I still feel that way although I developed a spreadsheet to help me manage all the lines of text. So now, I just enter any new social networks into the spreadsheet, and then copy-paste the final cell of the sheet into my text box.

After having such a massive traffic spike last week (1,432 visitors!), I thought I should put up a “most popular” widget (rather than just a recent posts widget). It took a lot of experimenting to find a plugin that worked the way I wanted it to. I ended up settling with a plugin called Recently Popular. I also modified my Twitter Widget to show my Twitter counter. With these changes, I didn’t loose the counters I had in my social networks widget, but instead distrobuted them around the page!

Finally, just to try and save on more space, I have reduced the line height and font size (1.1em & 90% respectively).

The great spike of January 10th 2009

Popularity

I didn’t finish reporting my traffic surge properly, but I just thought I’d show the spike before I let anymore time slip by. I’m dissappointed things have slipped back to normal, but there is a small improvement on my mean daily visitors, and I’m hoping to get writing more soon to pull more people in from search engines. (Chart created by Piwik.)

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