Tag Archives: wordpress

New Theme concept trial

John | August 11, 2010 - 10:44 pm

Today I’ve begun developing a new blog site theme layout using the recently released RichWP Framework for creating customized themes in WordPress. I’ve only been working on the for two hours, so there is lots to do and lots to learn. The big difference with this theme is that is a classic blog design with a each posts going down the page in chronological order. My previous theme had a magazine style layout – it can be seen on the home page of my main web site (which can be found here).

The advantage of this type of theme layout for me is that it’s easier to publish new posts, as the post don’t need two photos (as required by the previous theme to maintain its magazine format. In fact it doesn’t need any photos.

Above is the featured photo of 8 August 2010 from The Guardian Eyewitness app for the iPad.

Eyewitness: Almaden bush races

The traditional Australian bush race meeting is almost a thing of the past, but Almaden, a north Queensland town with a population of just 30, has bucked the trend. Amateur jockeys race on stock horses in sprint races, with bettors ‘buying’ the horse for the race at auction.

By the way, my new Lexus is going well, and I’m very pleased with the decision to make the changeover.

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Match and beat

John | January 30, 2010 - 7:42 pm

This evening I changed the Word Press theme I’m using from a magazine style layout to a classic blog style where each blog is seen in full on the blog home page and follow one another in chronological order. As always, you can search for something in the Search feature in the navigation bar at the top of every page, or click on Categories or the tag cloud in the sidebar. To make a comment on any post, click on the title of the post (it changes colour to indicate a link) and you will go to the post’s own page where there is a comment section at the bottom which allows you to make comments and shows other comments made – and you can reply to those comments as well as my post.

Last Monday I went to Borders at Chadstone shopping centre to see what English-Italian learning books they had in stock. They had three copies of the Concise Oxford Paravia Italian Dictionary – but all had different covers and different prices. One had a cover saying it was Second Edition and it had a red sticker stating it was NEW and had colour. It was $93.50. One had no edition information, and the price was $92.95. Another stated it was Third Edition and was $71.95. I might have the prices mixed on the last two books. The Third Edition had less words (175,000) than the Second Edition marked as NEW (180,000 words). All in all I was confused, and I didn’t expect the staff at Borders could explain the difference between the editions, even if I could find any staff.

So in the next two days I did some research on the Internet and even sent an email to Oxford University Press in South Melbourne. It turned out that the Third Edition was a 2003 edition of the dictionary with a CD that used the 3rd edition of Symbian S60 to power the CD-ROM (I suspect), and the Second Edition marked NEW was released only two months ago.

I also discovered that Borders advertised the new Second Edition on their website at $71.95 (not $93.50 as marked on the book at Chadstone). So I printed out the web page and took it to Borders on Wednesday, got the book and took it to a sales counter where I showed the price on the book and the price on their website. I couldn’t believe the response I got.

“We don’t price match.”

“I’m not asking you to price match. It’s the price on your own website.”

“We don’t price match. Not even with our own website.”

Today my faith in human nature was restored when a very pleasant young man knocked on my front door, identified himself, and began explaining the savings advantages of changing from AGL – the default electricity and gas retailer for my area – to Australian Power & Gas. Karlo was soon joined by George (his boss) and Josh (a trainee), and George over for a while to further explain the savings. He also stated that it was a 3-year contract to sign up with Australian Power & Gas, but if during that period another party made a lower priced offer, they would “match and beat” it.

I’ve made a previous post about serendipity, and the two stories above seemed to point to me appreciating an offer today for a contract that would price match (and beat) any other offer during the course of the contract.

I’ve got a cooling off period of 10 days from next Monday to check it all out, including the advice (from Judge Judy, I think) that “If it seems too good to be true, then it probably isn’t true.”

I’d appreciate any comments or thoughts or experiences.

So what does the picture at the head of this post have to do with the content of the post? Absolutely nothing. But it’s from an era that I remember fondly, when I used to ride my bike into town every Saturday morning to visit the Mount Gambier Institute Library and browse the wonderful overseas magazines on the reading tables. It was post war, and in Mount Gambier we didn’t see any of these amazing goods advertised in the Saturday Evening Post, LIFE, National Geographic and  Popular Mechanics from the USA; and The Illustrated London News and Country Life from the UK.  I have great feelings of nostalgia for those days, and seeing the adverts again that I used to drool over arouses those old feelings again.

Posted in Experiences, General, Italian | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Reading the OED

John | December 26, 2009 - 11:48 pm

Apart from the lead up to Christmas Day, this past week has seen a very interesting sequence of events for me, because so many things seemed to come together this week regarding the OED – and Christmas Day.  Even my post on Christmas Day, in which I had to look up the OED on my computer to see how to spell “misspell”.

It really all began a few weeks ago when I decided to adopt a far more interesting theme for my blog page, designed by Felix Krusch in Montreal, and accelerate the search for a new blog name.  It crossed my mind many times that I should look up a book I’d read two years ago, called Reading the OED.  It has lots of words in it that most people have never heard of, but have meaning that are often extraordinary.

I thought it would be really great to choose one of those words from the book to use as part of the new name for my blog page.  But I couldn’t find the book.  I searched high and low for it, in every spot in my home that I could think of.  Perhaps I’d lent the book to someone, or tossed it out in a super clean-up as a book read.

So I finally drew up a list of possible new names for the blog site and asked Felix his thoughts.  He replied:

For the Title I personally would go with “The Tarragon Tatler” or if you allow me to suggest a new one “The Tarragon Times” …. I like the alliteration of the 3 capital “T”.

So I adopted his suggestion.  And so did Google.

Last weekend I increased my search for my copy of Reading the OED and finally on Sunday, I intensified the search and eventually found the book.  It was too late to use any of the words in it for the Title of my blog page, but I was thrilled to find the book again, to re-read it at random.

Against this background, on Tuesday, I visited Jeffrey’s Stonnington Books in Glenferrie Road, Malvern, and to my great surprise and astonishment, they had the OED on display and for sale, at the amazing bargain price of $1,300.

This was the first time I’d ever seen the OED in the flesh.  I could hardly believe it.

The link with Christmas day with Matthew and Joy, and their parents, family and friends was that in November 1997, Matthew arranged a collection at work for my 60th birthday, and in accordance with my choice of gift, was given the OED on CD.

Twelve years later I’m still a great fan of the OED, and have updated my CD to the DVD version (but not yet the latest version).

Interestingly, Jeffrey’s Stonnington Books had the author of Reading the OED in store when the book was released in Australia, to autograph copies.

Here we see Ammon Shea, the author of Reading the OED, looking at one of his reference books while holding a volume of the OED.  The other 19 volumes can be seen on the book shelf behind him.

The photo was taken by Marks Woods of Brooklyn, NY, and of Harvard University.

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Serendipity

John | December 12, 2009 - 1:37 am

IMG_0160It’s strange how things sometime develop in a certain way without any planning.  But everything falls into place by chance.

For quite some time now I’ve been trying to find a new name for my blog page  without any success. I wanted to develop a different image from The Silver Fox, or The Chain Saw Man which have been my blog titles since I started the blog in July this year, but nothing seemed to appeal or work for me, or the potential name got millions of results in  Google, and mine would have been at the bottom.

But in the past two weeks, two unrelated things happened.

1. Ralph posted a comment on this site, which he intended to be helpful, as the image for my previous post to this one was missing.  He even did some research to tell me the HTML code that I should use, to point to the image location.  However, WordPress doesn’t work that way, so I tried to explain it to Ralph by sending him a URL link to WordPress that might show the way it works.  In doing so, I check out the link and what Ralph would find, to make sure it was useful, and that’s when I had a fresh look at commercial WordPress themes.  That’s when I came across RichWP and fell in love with the themes that Felix Krusch creates.

2.  I did a lot of Google searching about blog titles and found quite a few sites that offer useful advice on how to choose a name for your blog page.  it should be short, catchy, easy to remember, easy to spell, and hopefully unique.  It’s not easy to find a name that complies with that advice.  If you did a Google search for blog titles ideas, would you like to guess how many results you will get?  459,000,000 !  It’s a popular subject.

One the articles I read suggested that you name your blog after something you like.  There’s a lot of things I like, but by chance, last week I bought a bunch of tarragon from Woolworths Carnegie North supermarket.  I’ve always liked the perfume from dried tarragon in little herb jars.  This was the first time I’d seen the real herb in the flesh, so I bought the bunch and put it in a glass of water near my kitchen window.

I really loved the smell of the herb every time I was near my kitchen window, and so that, by chance, came to mind in the list of things I like.

I sent a list of possible blog titles to Felix while he was sorting out my new theme, as follows:

  • The Tarragon Tatler
  • The JTHonline Tatler
  • JTHonline.com Tatler
  • The JTHonline.com Post

He favoured The Tarragon Tatler from my list, but suggested I make it The Tarragon Times.

So I went with his suggestion, and adopted his theme.  I can’t go back on it now as Google has placed The Tarragon Times at the top (#1) of  444,000 results, and if you put the name in quotes, it is the one and only result.  How’s that for good SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Posted in General | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Themes

John | December 6, 2009 - 6:41 pm

On Friday afternoon I decided to look for a new free WordPress theme to try out just for a change from my usual Thesis theme. Now and again I like to do this to show visitors that the way the page looks is not set in concrete. It’s how I like it. On Friday, I looked at dozens of themes, and even tried about eight of them, and the one I liked was the Aesthete Theme. So I published it. Ralph apparently liked it and made a comment (using my last post to do it). I’ve now gone back to the Thesis theme, which makes Ralph’s comment look a bit strange.  So I’ll show you a screen grab of what the page looked like that he commented on:

Aesthete Theme

It looked much better full size because of the header photo and the delicate scrolls that like a squiggle in the above photo.

I’m still trying to think up a new Blog Title and Tagline for this page. I’ve tried The Silver Fox speaks up, and currently it’s The Chain Saw Man speaks up – but I want a name that doesn’t bring millions of Google results.

The Silver Fox currently brings 22,100,000 results and The Chain Saw Man brings 94,100,000 results.

I’ve thought of “John’s Journal” but that brings 23,700 results.  Another one I’ve looked up is “JT’s Journal” – 4,900 results and one the top results is for guess who?  Justin Timberlake.

Back in the late 1960′s to mid 1970′s when I used to do real 35mm slideshows with music, they used to start with “John T Hill Himself Presents” .  Now that gets 0 (zero) results when searched for in quotes.  But I think it sounds pompous, and I want a Blog Title that doesn’t sound pompous.  In fact, I’m look for a name that reflects on the blog page itself, and not on me.

I’ve asked readers before if they can think of a title, but I’ve had no suggestions, which is perhaps a good thing, as some people might get upset if I don’t adopt their suggestion and they’ll forever think that what I do eventually adopt is not as good as what they suggested.

I am, of course, talking utter nonsense. After writing the above, I’ve just done a Google search for “The Chain Saw Man speaks up” in quotes, and it brings only 4 results – and they all relate to this blog page.

But how often do people do Google searches in quotes?

Posted in Design | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Chainsaw Man Part II

John | October 18, 2009 - 4:40 pm

A few days ago I received an email from a friend who had been away on holidays for a while and hadn’t seen this blog page since it was called “The Silver Fox speaks up, and he wondered why the change of name.  I replied that he could check this out by searching for “silver” in the Search box on this page and he’d find my post explaining why I decided to find a new name for this page.

SilverFox

But I realised when I replied to his email that I’ve never explained why I chose the new name.

Firstly, I liked the idea of taking a photo of myself dressed as a tradesman and have it at the top of the page.  But most of all it was because of the stats reports that I get, which among other things list the last 15 visitors  to my blog page as a result of Google searches, and the search terms they used.  Almost all visitors to my page as a result of searches are seeking information about my chainsaw.  The following is the latest stats list of visitor search terms:

WP_searches

Here’s a video of the B&D cordless Alligator chainsaw in action:

Here’s another video, from Germany. It looks like it comes in green over there, as an option. This video shows how easy it is for even a young lady to use the chainsaw. She also shows how to tension the chain, which should be done every 10 minutes or whatever time the manual says and it’s also on the chainsaw itself. Also you do is loosen the nut as shown in the video. The chainsaw will then automatically tension the chain and then you re-tighten the nut. A spanner is provided. She also show where to oil the chain. A plastic “oil can” is provided that has a nozzle that fits in the oil hole.

I’ve enjoyed talking to you, but now I’ve got lots of other things to do today – especially to watch Australian Idol tonight with Liza Minnelli as mentor during the week and guest judge. Last week it was Harry Connick Jnr.

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