Blog Development Blog

Blog posts about the blog itself. Very meta…

A question for readers of this blog, whether you’re one of the few that regularly comments or not. What would encourage you to leave more comemnts? Or, indeed, any comments?

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Tim Hall | 7 Comments

As you may have noticed, I’ve streamlined the front page of the website making it slightly less cluttered, and faster to lead. It now shows five featured and five recent posts across all categories. What do you think?

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Tim Hall | 2 Comments

Has anyone got experiences (good or bad) of using Disqus as the commenting system on a WordPress blog?

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Tim Hall | 8 Comments

If you’ve been experiencing problems accessing the site over the last day or two, the hosting company has been hit by a DDOS attack, and had to implement measures that occasionally interfere with legitimate traffic.

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

We Get Comments

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Tim Hall

Found in the spam filter:

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There is a sometimes a surreal beauty in machine-generated gibberish

Posted in Blog Development | Tagged | Comments Off

If you’re seeing a banner ad just under the menu, it means you haven’t left any comments on this blog. I’m testing some code to inflict ads on people who wander in from Google without annoying my regular readers.

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Tim Hall | 1 Comment

Because of the amount of bandwidth comment spammers have been eating, I have turned off comments on older posts. Hopefully this shouldn’t have much effect on the quality of blog conversations, because most of you only comment on recent posts anyway.

Posted on August 24, 2014 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Some questions for readers

Posted on January 25, 2014 by Tim Hall

Since I’m thinking about another redesign, a few questions for regular readers of this blog: Continue reading →

Posted in Blog Development | Tagged | 1 Comment

Related Posts

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Tim Hall

I’ve added a new “related posts” feature to individual posts on this blog. It uses a combination of tags, categories and featured posts to display three other posts with content that’s likely to be relevant.

Rather than download and install a third-party plugin, I decided to try coding it myself to keep my coding skills in working order. The code I added to the template does this:

  • First it tries to find the three most recent posts with one or more tags that match those of the post. It will skip anything that doesn’t have a post thumbnail
  • If it failed to find three posts matching by tag, it looks at the post’s category instead to fill the remaining slots.
  • If all else fails, it goes for the featured posts, regardless of what they’re about. This is the fallback position, and it should always be able to find three such posts.

There’s still a bit of CSS formatting to be done, but it’s more or less there now.

Let me know what you think.

Posted in Blog Development | Tagged | Comments Off

New Look!

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Tim Hall

As you will probably have noticed, I’ve redesigned the front page of the site. Let me know what you think in the comments…

Posted in Blog Development, Miscellaneous | Comments Off