Dammit...

I spent half an hour composing a blog post tonight, only to find I'd written almost exactly the same post two and a half years ago!

I wonder if anyone would have noticed. :-)

A bit broken

You may have noticed that Beckysweb is in slightly reduced circumstances this evening. I've had to take emergency action and get rid of some of the bits that link to feeds from elsewhere, as they seem not to be working at the moment. So no flickr pics, and no live blogroll. Hopefully normal service should be resumed soon.

Getting back on the blogging horse

I've not blogged for a week, which is probably about the longest I've ever gone (what I really need is an overly-obsessive Becksweb fan who could confirm that fact, preferably in a John Motson voice), and it's getting hard to get into the mental space where I want to blog.

I realised some time ago that Giving Good Blog isn't about having something interesting to say, it's thinking you have something interesting to say, and then saying it. At the moment the part of my brain which filters through my thoughts and experiences and earmarks potential blog material seems not to be working. Things are still happening (as Things are wont to do) but nothing that I feel worth blogging about.

The "general writing" part of my brain seems to be on overdrive, possibly due to the blog not using up it's energies. For example, I bored the false tits off Siobhan this morning in a long email about "Why I Stopped Being a Moderator on Trannyflickr" (short version: because most of the people on Flickr are morons), and the lucky few who are invited to the wedding will shortly be receiving an invite and a sizeable information leaflet penned by my fair hand; but when it comes to blogging anything... meh. Meh to the power of 10.

Basically I've fallen off the blogging horse, and I need you (thats right, you!) to help me get back on. What would you like me to write about? Have you ever thought "gee-whizz, I'd sure like to hear Becky's irreverant take on that person/situation/event/thing/other"? Well now's your chance!

All suggestions will be seriously considered. Possibly ignored, but seriously considered. Look, I'm using my serious face:

:o|

That's how serious I am!

The Great Leap Forward

Well, not quite. I've just finished giving the blog a bit of a minor revamp. Thanks to a handy hint from Jessica the new feed is now in place quicker than I thought, and with one or two new nifty features added.

I've also made some little changes here and there to the actual blog pages, hope you like them!

I'm moving, make sure you don't lose touch

Moving house is said to be among the most stressful things that you can do. Based on recent research, I think the nearest equivalent in blogging is probably moving XML feeds.

To cut a long story short I want to move all my blog subscribers on various feeds to single Feedburner feed. There are things I will do in the background that might make this painless and transparent to you, but to be absolutely sure you're subscribed to the definitive never-to-be-deleted feed of Becky's T-Blog, make sure you're using the link below:

The New Feed

And to make it even easier, here are some buttons to help you subscribe via some of the popular readers:

Please make the switch, I'm paranoid about losing you! :-/

Blogroll 3.0

I've been exercising my more-or-less atrophied web programming muscles. Take a gander at the new-look blogroll running down the left side of the main blog page.

Not only do the most-recently-active bloggers appear first in the list, you can now see what they've blogged about too.

What's more, you can even subscribe to a feed of my blogroll, should you so desire. Actually, if you've not toyed with feed readers, this feed might be a good one to get you going. It's like a sumptuous taster menu of blogging, all in one place.

Whatevah, I'm pretty chuffed with it. :-)

On blog readers and blogroll etiquette

I use Bloglines as my day-to-day blog reading tool. It looks vaguely "Web 1.x" in it's design (I mean, who uses frames these days, tch!), and the colour scheme is awful, but I've yet to find another feed aggregator that matches it for speed, ease-of-use and robust functionality. There are probably readers out there that are better, but the ones I've tried aren't so much better that they make me feel like surmounting the inertia of "staying with what I'm used to".

If you're not yet using a blog aggregator to keep track of updates to this site (and all the other blog and news sites you read) I recommend setting up a free account with Bloglines. And once you have you can click this link to subscribe to this blog. Clever eh? ;-)

One of the things keeping me with Bloglines is that it runs my blogroll for me. A blogroll, for those not steeped in the terminology of the blogging, is that list of other blogs on the left hand side of my main blog page.

Basically I have set two folders of blogs in bloglines, one called (imaginatively) "Blogs", and the other called (slightly less imaginatively) "Other Blogs".

Using Bloglines's built-in Blogroll Wizard I've set it up so the list of blogs in my "Blogs" folder is replicated on my home page. And with a bit of CSS wizardry from Jessica I stripped out the tell-tale "Made by Bloglines" bit they stick in by default. Hey, I feel I've already given them enough plugs!

Because the folder in Bloglines is sorted by updatedness, my blogroll does too. Barring some glitches, the blogs at the top of the list are the most recently updated. I feel this is a fairly even-handed way to share out my "onward traffic". :-)

From time to time I look through my entire blog list in Bloglines and decide which items deserve promoting to the "Blogs" folder, hence getting a mention in my blogroll; and which should be demoted to the "other blogs" folder.

It's tricky. If I just listed all the blogs I subscribe to the list would be twice as long as the blog page. So I have to use a mental points system to decide who stays in and who goes. Points are scored for blogs that are:

• a good read
• being regularly updated
• relevant to my interests
• reasonably well-established (at least a few weeks old)
• linking to me

That last one is a bit of an awkward one. It would be wrong to only ever link to blogs that linked to me first, but equally it's wrong to link to someone just because they link to you. I'm a bit of a stickler for people at least linking somewhere outside their own site, even if it's not to me. I kinda believe that you only deserve traffic if you're willing to share it with others! So I usually make a judgement call based on that plus all the other criteria.

I went through the list today. Some blogs got promoted, some got dropped. If your blog's not on the list, then it's probably because it's fallen foul of one or more of my criteria, or I've just had a brain fart, or I don't know it exists. It's nothing personal. :-)

I probably worry about this kinda stuff too much. :-S

Crikey, that was tedious work

After having a bit of a fiddle with the new version of Blogger, and finding out that the new tagging system was reasonably well-implemented (not brilliant, but not terrible), I decided to go back and retro-tag some of my old posts.

"I know!" I thought, "I'll tag everything that I've ever written on the subject of transvestism!"

It took bloody ages! But, it was interesting to see how much I'd forgotten I'd even written about. Interesting, and frustrating, there were one or two latent blog entries in my head that, it turns out, I've already done to death ages ago!

But now, if you really really want to, you can read everything I ever wrote about transvestism.

It's quite a lot, er, you might want a Red Bull or something beforehand. And don't blame me if you get RSI from using the scroll wheel.

Here comes the new blog, same as the old blog

For a couple of months now, Blogger has been enthusiastically informing me "your new version of Blogger is ready!", only to own up after I pressed the upgrade button that "er, actually it's not ready yet, you've got too many posts and comments and stuff... sorry... we got overexcited".

But, as Selina points out, Google have started sending men in dark suits around who "accidentally" knock ornaments on floor and suggest that bigger things might get damaged if I don't, upgrade. So I decided to give it another go.

And, by jiggery, it worked! Look, it's all new and shiny!!

Er... new back end. Front end might stay the same for the time being. I don't think I'll bother implementing the fancy-schmancy new features just yet. That new archive menu thingy looks ghastly.

Right... I'm off to assign a new ID to my Flickr account, before Yahoo break any more of my limbs.

Update - ooh look! I've got TAGS!!