Looking for a New Theme for This Blog
While reading Thinking Home Business, I found this interesting article:
I’m finding it a bit of a juggle at the moment to post here consistently. I seem to be spending more time on reorganizing the machinery than I really want to, but I’m going to be doing a lot of travelling soon - China, USA - and this sort of thing is better done, in my experience, at home base rather than on the road.
A good slab of researching and writing time yesterday went on the blogoz-australian-blogging-conference-roundup/”>blogoz overview post I did for my deswalsh.com blog. The day before and late into the evening, I spent a lot of time checking out potential new themes for that blog and then installing and tweaking the one I finally decided upon, Brian Gardner’s Silhouette theme. I swapped that for another of his themes, Vertigo Blue 3-column, which is a very good theme, but was not really what I wanted for the longer term.
I quite like also the theme I’m currently using here, Vertigo Red 3-column, which is the same as Vertigo Blue 3-column except for the colour. But again, I’m not comfortable with the graphic image in terms of how I see this blog’s future development. Not sure how best to put that, but while I see it as stylish, I also see it as a bit sombre or heavy for what I want.
Another consideration is that I’m really irritated by a problem for which I can’t find an instant solution, a database error, which manifests itself as I type this, in a block of text - below the editing tool box - as follows:
WordPress database error: [Table ‘wordpress_thinkinghomebusiness_com.wp_post2cat’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT cat_ID AS ID, MAX(post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wp_posts` p LEFT JOIN `wp_post2cat` pc ON p.ID = pc.post_id LEFT JOIN `wp_categories` c ON pc.category_id = c.cat_ID WHERE post_status = 'publish' GROUP BY cat_ID
I’m not unique in experiencing this problem. Nor does it appear that anyone has a simple solution - at least that’s how it looks to my non-technical eye from studying exchanges like this. The problem is apparently related to installation of the latest version of WordPress, 2.3.
I’ve tried out a whole stack of WordPress themes today/tonight. I’ve been sticking largely to the 3 column ones, as I find that gives me more scope for placing items in the sidebars. And, as this site is using the latest version of WordPress, 2.3, at first I was using just themes that are listed by WordPress as compatible with WP 2.3. Then I started to try a few others. I’m guessing that there are themes which are in fact WP 2.3 compatible but for some or other reason are not on the list. My inclination is to err on the side of prudence and install a theme which is on the list.
One theme I like - and have tested successfully on one of my currently less-trafficked blogs (not, however, upgraded as yet to WP 2.3 - is blogohblog.net/”>Big Blue. It has a lot of what I’m looking for and is on the list as WP 2.3 compatible.
I’ve noticed also, here and there, some warnings that some plugins might not be compatible with WP2.3, so I will be checking that list too.
Suggestions, preferably not too technical, welcome.
One Week on from blogoz
Getting back to this topic, Thinking Home Business recently posted:
blogoz is the tag adopted for posting about the Australian Blogging Conference held in Brisbane a week ago.
Today I’ve put together and posted on my deswalsh.com site a blogoz-australian-blogging-conference-roundup/”>roundup of posts about the conference, including the blogging-conference/”>post on this site last weekend.
blogoz-australian-blogging-conference-roundup/”>
My intention is to put future posts on the topic on that blog, rather than here.
BlogRush May Prove to Be Useful, Still Being Fixed
I stumbled across an interesting article from Thinking Home Business:
A couple of weeks ago, along with a lot of other people, I signed up for blogrush.com”>BlogRush, which was then the latest and greatest hope for a system offering the prospect of generating amazing traffic to your blog while you sleep.
In blogrush-traffic-klondyke-or-fools-gold/”>BlogRush: Traffic Klondike or Fool’s Gold? I rounded up a range of comments on the new system and indicated my mixture of mildly hopeful curiosity and scepticism.
A few days later I read a blogrush-stats-can-john-reese-make-this-work/”>post by Yaro Starak who had been an early adopter of BlogRush. When I saw the stats Yaro displayed for his BlogRush account, including credits of nearly 300,000 and 733 bloggers in his BlogRush network, and then saw how pathetic my figures were against that, I thought it was game over, shut the gate, at least as far as I was concerned.
But further on in the post in question, Yaro made the point that because BlogRush is set up to display post links, from other blogs, with some affinity with your own blog’s topics, one of the benefits of BlogRush could be to help us find other bloggers of like mind or similar interests, whom we might not otherwise come across.
Tonight I’ve put that observation of Yaro’s together with a contribution he made last Friday when, moderating a discussion at the blogging-conference/”>Australian Blogging Conference, I put him on the spot to come up instantly with three key ways people could use to increase their blog traffic. His first point? “The best source of traffic is another blogger linking to you”. And what’s the first thing that has to happen before a blogger can know about me/my blog, and vice versa? We have to find out that the other exists.
So maybe BlogRush could even be helpful for bloggers like me, who do not have the large numbers Yaro and some others can boast.
What is a bit frustrating is that I don’t have any idea what figures I may now have. And tonight when I logged in again in the hope of getting some up to date figures, I got the following message.
We don’t yet have enough data for your account. Please check back soon for custom reporting.
Odd, that. They had figures a couple of weeks ago.
Actually, on most of the occasions over the past couple of weeks that I’ve logged in to get a report there’s been some sort of “we’re working on it, please be patient” type message. No doubt they’ll have it all working properly, one of these days, but the lack of availability after the breathlessness of the launch reminds me that cautiousness may not be such a bad thing in the face of heavily hyped Great New Traffic Things for the Web/blogosphere.
I’ll leave the widget in place for a while, just to see if there is anything of interest. And if it helps me make contact with some interesting new bloggers I might not connect with otherwise, that can only be good.
I have however dropped the widget well down the page, out of the prime space it was taking up for a short while. That will mean even less traffic, no doubt. It will also mean I won’t need to fret about it.
Australian Blogging Conference a Success
Check out Thinking Home Business for more articles like this:
I had a full-on and very rewarding experience on Friday 28th, participating with around a hundred others in the blogoz/blog_index.html”>Australian Blogging Conference in Brisbane, at the Queensland University of Technology campus.
The schedule covered a range of topics, from blogging and politics, through legal issues to business blogging and the future of blogging.
It’s a great tribute to the organiser of the conference, lawyer and QUT academic Peter Black, to have sustained through several setbacks his vision of creating this event and finally achieving it.
The proceedings were launched graciously by Professor The Hon. Michael Lavarch, Professor of Law and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, and probably known better outside Queensland as Federal Attorney-General during the Keating era.
That and the rest of the morning part of the event were pretty cruisy for me as I had no official responsibilities till the afternoon. So I was able to relax and enjoy the initial, general session, with Peter Black in the chair and featuring blog/”>Senator Andrew Bartlett, Professor John Quiggin and Duncan Riley, on :
* Why are blogs becoming so ubiquitous?
* What is unique about the Australian blogosphere?
After the coffee break I sat in on a very absorbing two hour session on legal issues, including copyright and defamation. The discussion was led very ably and authoritatively by Professor Brian Fitzgerald, with Dale Clapperton and Nic Suzor. Lots of food for thought and valuable information for any of us advising businessess on blogging issues. And a moral of the story for me, as a non-lawyer, was: you need to be careful about the legal implications of blogging but if you always anticipate the worst possible outcomes you will probably not blog.
Derek Barry has posted a report on another of the pre-lunch sessions, on blogspot.com/2007/09/australian-blogging-conference-politics.html”>politics and blogging.
After lunch - and by the way, hat tip to the organisers, sponsors and caterers for the provision of ample supplies of excellent refreshments - it was time for me to saddle up and join my very knowledgeable colleagues Joanne Jacobs and Nick Hodge in leading the two hour session on Business and Corporate Blogging. Our session was sponsored by Microsoft. We followed the guidelines Peter Black had sent us, especially the section “Think of it as a weblog”:
Think of the conference as if it were a weblog. At the beginning of each session, the leader talks between five and fifteen minutes. He or she will introduce the idea and some of the people in the room.
Then he or she will facilitate the discussion among all the contributors in the room, inviting others to comment and asking questions of others. It is hoped that everyone who would like to contribute to the discussion will be able to do so in the allotted time.
The response to this approach was really good and the feedback we’ve had was that people appreciated the level of participation by the people formerly known as the audience.
Check out Joanne’s notes on the session and Nick’s, with picture of the three discussion leaders. And see David Jacobson’s report on the session.
Yaro Starak responded positively to a late alert by me about the conference and my invitation to join me in leading one of the final sessions, a discussion about promoting your blog: Yaro has posted about the conference at his blogging-conference-recommend-links/”>Entrepreneur’s Journey site. It was great to have Yaro there, sharing what works - and doesn’t. Again, we worked on seeking full participation and were not disappointed, with some excellent contributions from participants.
One of those participants, John Harking, a SEO specialist, has written a blog.com/?p=108″>brief report on the session.
Special thanks to Duncan Riley who, seeing I was having a bit of a challenge in both helping to lead the discussion and bring up some sites online, jumped in and took over the latter role, very effectively of course.
Robyn Rebollo on her blogspot.com/2007/09/australian-blogging-confernece.html”>Accidental Aussie site reports on several sessions, including the other final session, led by Dan Walsh, one of the founders of conference sponsor Kwoff, on the future of blogging (Dan and I are not related, but the listing led to a little frisson of confusion - “Des, how come you are leading two sessions at the same time?”).
At the end of the day’s proceedings, a number of us adjourned to the nearby Normanby pub where over a few ales/wines/bevvies of choice we continued the conversation, got to know more of some new people and others we had previously known only virtually or only by name.
All in all, a great day. Social networking was excellent: as Julie Edwards says, “meeting new friends is great”. And it’s good that Peter Black is keen to continue the event, with Melbourne flagged as the venue city for 2008.
A word on sponsorship. From past experience with helping to organise sponsorship in this country, for even the most worthy and timely of events, I know it is a hard slog. Most Australian companies, in my experience, don’t want to be the first to sponsor something, or to sponsor an as yet untried idea. So in the annals of blogging in Australia, there should be recorded a special mention of the inaugural sponsors and hosts of the Australian Blogging Conference:
Gold Sponsor 
Premiere Sponsors
Hosts
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation
- Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Law
If you have posted a report or comment on the day’s events and I haven’t caught it yet, or if you know of other reports of the event than the ones I have linked to here, please share the link in the comments here.
