Posted by Rachel on January 19th, 2006 — Posted in Meta-blog
Apparently WordPress version 2.0 was just released, but this is not what baffles me. I’ve just set up another blog for my HCI group using the same easy “One-Click Install” method made available to me from my lovely hosting people.
You would think that the interface would be exactly the same, even though the two blogs look different on the outside. Somehow this is not the case. The two blogs appear to use the same version of WordPress, but this blog as a far less confusing “write post” interface (an interface that I think has slightly confused my team-mates). There are none of these expanding menus on the right to chose from users, categories and breakfast cereals to author your post with (the cereal thing wasn’t really a choice).
For at least the team-mate I live with, posting was a bit confusing. Fair enough, you pick “Write” from the menu and then “Write Post” (as a non-admin user, he doesn’t have the myriad of other options I am faced with), but then what? The rest of the options weren’t visible. Hopefully with time and exploration it’ll be easier. At least with my incredible admin powers, I can at least edit the entries into the right categories. On the other hand, I had to show one team-mate where to log in, and he had to explain over msn messanger to my other team-mate what to do. Putting the log-in options at the bottom of default templates wasn’t an inspired idea, and is counter-intuitive for people not used to blogging.
edit: It appears on checking the other blog that it’s a later version than this one. But why make it more difficult to navigate?
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Posted by Rachel on October 3rd, 2005 — Posted in Meta-blog, Miscellaneous
I gave up on getting any of the wordpress plugins I found to work. I figure that it’s probably easier to just stick with what I know… and that’s spacking rss feeds into webpages. 
heh. Most of my personal site is entirely generated using rss - I found that I was terrible at updating websites, especially ones about me, but using feeds from various online journals/blogs I keep and bookmark sites, it made it a lot easier to have current content online.
The sidebar on this blog not only now has links to relevant sites I’ve looked at recently, but I managed to sort out a feed of the music that I’m listening to as well. I do like rss. It is tempting to change my project entirely into something that keeps track of people but the rss trails they leave… but I suspect it may already have been done and it’s a bit late to change tack now. heh.
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Posted by Rachel on September 30th, 2005 — Posted in Meta-blog, Miscellaneous, The Hate List
Adding wordpress plugins to the Hate List. Or at least my inability to get them to work!
Reading is so boring, but sadly it must be done! I don’t want to miss any of the good bits. If there are any in this book. Heh.
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Posted by Rachel on September 28th, 2005 — Posted in Meta-blog, Miscellaneous, Project
The new semester has just started so I’ve been spending money on secondhand books for modules, doing reading and note-making for my project and going to lectures. I’ve found that a good project reading time is the hour before my Monday and Tuesday lectures, as my housemates have a lecture an hour before mine start, so I walk to campus with them and loiter somewhere doing my reading. Or as I like to call it, “project reading for great yay”.
Didn’t manage to do as much work over the holiday as I would have liked… various family things got in the way mostly as well as the “lounging recovering from family things” part of the last few months.
Other than academic activities, I’ve managed to spend mildly scary amounts of money on perfume oils from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. On the plus side though, any oils that don’t smell good on my skin or in an oil burner can be easily ebayed.
And when did “ebay” turn into a verb? The same time as “google” and “blog”?
Oh! And I’ve been trying to fiddle with wordpress to get my current playlist to show up in the sidebar, but all the current wordpress plugins I’ve looked at completely fail to work. The one that’s stuck on there at the moment is being eyed dubiously as to it’s workingness. I may just stick in some kind of javascript doodah working from my Last.fm rss file.
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Posted by Rachel on May 3rd, 2005 — Posted in Meta-blog, Project
While I am slightly addicted to blogging, sometimes it does come in very handy to help organise my thoughts. Having more than one allows me to organise for certain topics or areas of my life. Hence a blog about my final year project.
Of course, not everyone will find it interesting and I don’t expect to get many readers, if any, but still… it’ll be useful to me.
A bit more about the project
I’m aiming to build an intelligent agent that can search the blogosphere for entries that are related and relevant to the keywords entered in the search. Hopefully, I’ll get it to learn what kind of things the user looks as, so that say… a more technical user who understands all the big words and complex terminology can get directed towards more complex entries that could be of more interest and your average joe user would get a less jargon filled, simpler set of entries to browse through.
Now, it’s all a bit… ambitious, but I’m going to do my best and I’ll learn a lot along the way. 
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