chris nixon : nixonbyname.com

I’ve update NixonByName.com to include FriendFeed comments. FriendFeed now drives the majority of traffic to this blog, so I think it’s important to send some love the other way.

I enjoy using FriendFeed, and it seems that most of my online contacts are the same way inclined. They are not perfect, but they are doing a damned good job…especially after such a short period of time.

If you haven’t already added me as a contact on FriendFeed you can do so here.

I’ve made a load of changes here on NixonByName since I moved from Wordpress.com. The excercise was so that I get everything I needed in place before I make the same move for Photografr.com. I’m pretty happy with what we’ve got here, so look for the Photografr move to happen in the next couple of weeks.

Yours aye!

I have changed the comment system of NixonByName.com over to Disqus in a bid to further “socialise” your comments. The Wordpress comment system is very good, but it’s very blog-centric rather than user-centric. The downside for me is I lose a little  “control” over your comments. The upside is that it will be much easier for you to track your comments, your replies, and your contacts comments. Hopefully this will provoke a little more discussion.

Comment spam is handled very well by Wordpress and Akismet, so I was concerned about how Disqus handled this problem, but by all accounts it works well and very little gets through.

I think this is definitely the way forward. If all goes well here, the same system will be put in place when Photografr.com is re-launched in the near future.

I hope this goes down well with you. I’m very kean to know what you think about this new blog system. I’ve heard very few negative points about Disqus, and my personal experience of the system has been very positive. I look forward to reading your comments on my ill though-out opinions in the future.

Yours Aye.

NixonByName has been going for nearly a year now. I previously had my personal blog over on Vox, which was brilliant, but when they started restricting the feeds and all my readers had to suffer just two lines of text from a post in their reader, it was time to leave.

I’ve always known that my closest online contacts were subscribed to the blog. They occasionally comment, and I have a FeedBurner feed, which normally showed up about ten subscribers. I was aware that there could have been a couple more subscribed to the Wordpress feed, but I really only thought I was posting for my own benefit, and that others really weren’t interested.

As you may know, at the weekend I moved the blog from Wordpress.com to a hosted space. Apart from a few minor hiccups, it’s happened remarkable smoothly. My mate Rob did a load of work to get me up and running and IMed me through the whole process to keep me in the loop.

I’ve added a couple a plug-ins to help analyse who’s reading, but this was mainly done to test what was needed when Photografr.com makes the same move, rather than to test this readership. Well, it turns out there are actually over fifty subscribers to this blog! Only 20% were ever using the Feedburner feed. Now that the site feed is filtered through to Feedburner I can see you all. Hello!

I’m pretty pleased, but I also think that I may need to provide a bit more content to keep you guys interested. Don’t hold your breath, but you may find something interesting here in the near future. I’m keen to begin writing some quality content, but I refuse to put the pressure on myself while the Wee One needs my undivided attention. I’ll always keep posting the photographs and videos, but I will try to write more in those spare moments.

If you aren’t already subscribed to NixonByName, you can get the feed here.

Yours Aye!

I’ve fallen hugely behind with all my blogging recently. I put it partly down to tiredness, and partly down to laziness.

One of my aims this year is to move Photografr.com over to a paid-for host. I love Wordpress.com, but I now find it a little restrictive and now need more customisation. The problem is I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to web hosts. I have no doubt that I’ll pick it up quickly, but I don’t want to bugger everything up.

The smart thing to do is move Nixonbyname.com first, and find my legs.

A friend has generously offered me some web space, and he’s going to show me the ins and outs. Hopefully the switch-over will happen in the next few days, and (at least initially) nobody will notice any difference.

Basically what I’m saying is, “Stand By! Normal service will be resumed shortly.”

OK so who says I don’t have time to do things that aren’t strictly necessary?

I’ve changed the theme of NixonByName. I was getting a little bored of the old theme. I wanted something a little easier on the eye, so I’ve gone for Andreas09 by Andreas Viklund and Ainslie Johnson. Very nice it is too.

At some point in the next few months I plan to move over to a hosted solution rather than Wordpress.com as a trial before moving Photografr.com over too. I’ll save all that for the summer.

At the end of last year I started using a video sharing site, Vod Pod. It was a nice service that let me store and share the videos I found from around the web. It was partly a collecting thing and partly a sharing thing.

I enjoyed using it, but at the time I was blogging on Vox, and they didn’t play well together, so I stopped using it. I posted about my reasons for dropping the service briefly here.

I no longer use Vox, and so I thought it was about time to revisit an old friend. I’m really glad I did. It a great way to share video, especially here on a hosted Wordpress site, where if a video isn’t on YouTube or Google Video, it’s a real pain to post.

Vod Pod’s integration with Wordpress makes it a dream to post videos from every video sharing site I have tried so far, either from the site, or through a Firefox plug-in. It’s also simple to post to many other blog platforms

I’m not, however, just using Vod Pod to post to my blogs. It’s nice to share videos within the site itself. You search for videos around the web, and simply click to add them to your channel, or pod as they call it, in the same way you post items to Delicious. Other users browse your videos and they can make comments, or even add the video to their own pods.

I’ve created a few pods so far. One for each of my blogs (posted in the sidebar of both) one for my favorite music videos, one for random cool stuff, as well as another for videos I have made. Once you have signed up, it’s very easy to subscribe to other people’s pods, and follow what is being added to them. Vod Pod also allow collaboration on pods, which makes for a nice social experience.

Vod Pod works well. I’m visiting it a couple of times a day, and also regularly using it to post videos here (you may have noticed and abundance of vids being posted here and on Photografr.com recently). It’s ease of use makes me think I’ll be using it for a while to come.