Everyone’s doing it.

Yep, everyone is dedicating a day during the week to blog about one thing in particular. Mari’s got Stoopid Saturday’s and Joana’s got FAnime Friday’s. And all the other cool kids have theirs too…

So now it’s my turn.

May I present to you Wednesday Weevils! Hurrah!

So, why Wednesday? Well,

• I was due writing a blog post anyway, so might as well be Wednesday.
• I’ve wanted to do this type of thing for ages now.
• I like Wednesday’s. Sort of.
• Was going to do a Sunday something, but thought the web could do with some entertainment mid-week.

And uh, weevils?

• I think weevil is such a strange and funny word.
• I don’t really know what weevils are, but I sure don’t like finding them in my flour and sugar!
• Because it is such a strange word, I can make it mean whatever I want it to. I am wholesomely powerful you know…

So, tah dah. Wednesday Weevils! My weekly outlet into web wonderings…

Er, what?

Basically, there’s a lot of things I think about web-wise, like many blog/website owners, but I generally don’t build on these thoughts, which to me seems a waste of good brain cell usage.

So no more! These Wednesday Weevils will allow me to explore and poke these thoughts, and share the end result with you!

Amazing!

Let’s get to it Chuck…

This week’s weevil is the problem with staying updated with my favourite websites. As my lack of blogging shows, I’ve been without enough time to assert my web-presence, but to also even at least visit the website’s of those I secretly admire…

So I’ve been looking for a solution.

And really salty slugs may be an answer! Although, a salty slug, doesn’t tend to be a slug. It tends to be a dead, warped somewhat slimy thing. So, I’m not actually on about really salty slugs at all.

No no no. I’m on about RSS!

I never really understood what the whole poofyness was about RSS until I started using WordPress properly. For those who just don’t know, it means Really Simple Syndication.

It’s a one stop shop for keeping up to date with sites that produce a RSS feed. All WordPress powered ones do, and generally those powered by super-tron blogging platforms do too.

So what do you do? Subscribe to a site’s feed and voila.

Voila what? Well… you have a feed in your bookmarks… and you can get things (plugins/RSS feeders/poofy lions) to read these feeds for you and show you just what the feeds say.

Which should be the site’s recent updates (blog posts in most cases).

Woot! You no longer have to visit the website to see if it’s updated! Just check a magic bookmark and you can know instantly! Wowzar!

Now, if you are like me, which you (hopefully) aren’t, then, even this isn’t simple enough.

With my lack of time, I’ve been subscribing to websites’ RSS feeds (with the hope to stay updated), but boy, do I check ‘em? Hell no! I haven’t got the time to do that either!

Oh me oh my oh.

What can I do?

So I’m currently on the look out for some amazing tools to house my really salty slugs. Any suggestions? I’m open to anything, honestly!

Or generally a good way to stay in contact with mega-cool websites when life is just too full and plentiful with other things?

My little lions, comment away… I’m waiting!

P.S. Whaddya think about the whole Wednesday Weevils thing?

[I realise the title and date are snuggling together right now, due to the need for sleep I will have to fix this tomorrow].

It’s that time again, Wednesday has arrived, as have my weevils. Are you ready?

This week’s weevil has been conversations in comments.

Most owners that have open comments will read the comments you make, but rarely respond or act upon what you’ve said.

It’s probable that maybe 80% of the time (at least) that there is nothing to respond to - with the normal ‘generic’ comments made. By this, I mean those where the comment author clearly hasn’t wanted to spend that much time thinking up a full response either because they don’t wish too, or they haven’t got the time to.

But I thought the whole point of having comments is to receive:

A statement of fact or opinion, especially a remark that expresses a personal reaction or attitude.

Well yes Emz, well done for stating the obvious.

Hang on, just stay with me a little longer before you get bored… Look at it this way:

If I said something to you in the street, you know, if I made a comment, then generally most of the time you’d reply, right? (Yes blah blah not if I said something nasty etc etc…). But if I said something constructive, or something that made you think and challenge your brain cells then you would respond. I would hope.

So if you’ll do it in the street, why not on your blog/website?

Yes yes yes. Back in the ol’ days of when I originally started blogging I didn’t respond, even if I really wanted to. Why? Well, I didn’t think people did that on blogs, therefore, I didn’t.

Which was silly. I know. Even still, it’s only recently that I’ve started replying.

Yes, you can leave your reply via a comment on their blog, but I don’t know, for me, that just seems a rather… strange way of doing it. Not quite the proper way of doing things.

But that’s me.

I personally tend to ask a lot of questions within my comments, and I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t interested in the answer. The amount of times I get an answer? Well, very rarely to be honest. Which I think is sad.

Comments don’t have to mean simple one-liners that you don’t actually mean, and the blog author knows you don’t actually care for, they can spark whole conversations.

Surely, that’s what conversations in the ‘real world’ are sparked by? Someone making a comment about something?

So, with this weevil, I have made this site ‘conversation friendly‘.

• I now comment within the comments.
• I comment to your comments directly, and my responses are emailed to you at the email address you supplied. Kudos to Joana for having this on her site, and inspiring me to do the same on mine.
• You can now visibly quote anything I’ve said within my post by selecting the text, and then clicking ‘quote selected text’ near the comment form.
• You can now visibly quote each other by clicking ‘quote’ near the date displayed on someone’s comment.
• As a side note, I’ve enabled gravatars, just so you can ’see’ who you are talking to. Although many people don’t yet have one.

So I implore you to start conversations on people’s blogs, and if possible, to encourage conversations within your own posts.

What kind of Internet world would we have, if we could all openly and informally exchange thoughts fully amongst one another?

A beautiful one, wouldn’t you say?

Crikey - it’s Wednesday already? My, time is flying! And with it, stealing all my time for being online! Nevertheless, I will spare an hour to write my weevils, rather than, well, sleep.

Dedicated you see.

So this week’s weevil is search forms. Not just general search forms as such, but providing one on your site.

I’m all for making things easier, and let’s face it, who wants things hard, anyone?

In my attempt to make things easier for you, the still-wet-behind-the-ears reader (or the proudly-established-18plus-poofy-lion-reader - of whom I love!) I have gone and dived off the white cliffs of Dover…

…

???

… er no… sorry! Wrong message! (The white cliffs of Dover may be pretty, but they are way too far away from me!).

Um no, for you, (as I was saying, before rudely interrupted…) I have added a search form to the site! Woo! Partay! Flying flapping frogeees!

*cough*

Actually, the search from is probably entirely useless to you unless you happen to be a regular visitor, or came here to find something useful. If the latter of which, you must have the wrong site, honestly!

So why add it?

Well, I personally find hate hate hate looking endlessly for something on a site, to the point I can give up. But I have super-powered perseverance, so don’t generally give up. Which means hours upon hours of web crawling.

Gah. Not fun.

Use-ability is important, and crucial to any site, so maybe my visitors want to check how many times I’ve said poofy lions, or really see whether I’m artistically talentless via my doodles.

So yes kiddos. Search for stuff! It’s great!

WordPress blog owners… there is the basic search form and function available (search.php and searchform.php need to be within your theme’s folder to work), but this lacks super-massssive-xray-beam powers.

In other words, it’s limited to being a rather silly search function that only does a half-arsed job.

There are many plugins out there to help do the other half of the job, I started with one, but switched when the first was only doing 3/4 of the job, which ain’t dandy!

I haven’t played with Movable Type enough yet but there appears to be a basic search function.

Cutenews? Ah, not sure.

Actually for all none major-blog-platform-powered sites, I would guess the answer would be using Google search?

Bottom line - if your site is growing, and building up many reference points, it may be worth considering getting your site search-friendly.

I would highly recommend getting some sort of search-ability up on your site, because it makes your site look ultra cool and important…

Plus, it might actually be of use to some of your readers and visitors!

Go for it! Take the plunge!

I almost forgot about Wednesday Weevils. Oops! Being back at college my time spent on my ‘puter is, well, minimal, if only to play a little music whilst hovering around. So I still need to reply to comments from last week’s weevils… and er, generally, get my butt into online-action.

I’ve actually got a rather sore throat that isn’t particularly comfortable, and my eyes feel all droopy and overworked. Me just wants to sleep right now. Pooof.

But, I’d better do these weevils, although, admittedly, I haven’t had many ‘web wonderings‘ in the past few days that really constitute an entire post worth of rambling. (Does anything?).

Alas, I have one wondering though, that you might be able to help me with…

So, you may have noticed the title, ‘FooFoo‘? Well, I’m sorry to disappoint, but it’s not actually anything that interesting at all. I just get bored of using the same normal words all the time.

No, I’m actually on about photos. Sort of. You see, I’ve had a flickr account for a little while now. Originally, I was good at updating it pretty much regularly, but now, like most things, I’ve been slacking.

However, I was uploading some photos over the weekend, and was unpleasantly surprised to find I’d reached my photo limit for my free basic account.

Crappers.

I had never realised you could only hold 200 photos at one time.

Flickr told me that I could still upload, but that some would be ‘hidden’, but not deleted. That won’t do, for me, though.

I’m not a photographer at all, but I do like having images to rekindle memories of events and emotions.

Being short of a credit card, I can’t actually upgrade my flickr account, which I wouldn’t mind doing.

So I’ve had to ponder the possibility of finding somewhere else to put my foofoos.

I did create a subdomain here, at the site, to store my photos, but, for some reason I never felt quite comfortable doing that.

It uses Coppermine Gallery, which, is pretty powerful, but I wouldn’t know where to start to make my own design, and sometimes, I feel it’s a bit too powerful and function-full for just general photo uploading and sharing.

Here’s where you come in.

Do you know of any good places for storing and sharing photos? Or perhaps generally any alternatives for photo storing. Maybe there is an amazing web application I have yet to find out about that could be hosted here.

I had considered a photoblog powered by WordPress… but, I don’t know… I have a lot of ‘back dated’ photos I’d like to post…

Oh, I don’t know.

Do you?

Psst.

Yo ho me hearties… me hearty has been awash ov’r the deck, and me still hast failed to shake me fist online.

Ye may be o wonderin’ why me speeks like a pirateeee arrrr?! Well, it be Talk Like A Pirate Day! Yarrr!

Ahoy, me is a dog and hast only this simple ‘n’ stup’d weevil to share with ye…

:-), thee smiley, hast turned 25 years today!