The keenly observant, frequent visitor here will notice I’ve been doing a little redecorating of late. This has been greeted with an almost universal non-reaction, with just a few dissenting voices of opprobrium. Not bad, I reckon. I probably won’t be doing much more re-decorating, since MT4 seems a bit of a bastard to upgrade to, so things should stabilise as they are for a while, at least.
Biggest change for yous guys as part of the gradual Vox-ification of the site is you can now have ‘avatars’ by your comments – that’s piccies of yourself. You may recognise the idea from Blogger, if you use Blogger or visit Blogger sites, that is.
Initially, I tried out Gravatars, for the general reasons that
- they’re global – you can use them on any gravatar-enabled site
- they’re easy for me to implement, since nice people have already written Gravatar plug-ins for Movable Type.
However, they’re slow little bastards, these Gravatars, and no one seems to want to use them, since all you get out of them is a piccie.
So I’ve now made the switch to MyBlogLog avatars. MyBlogLog is owned by Yahoo! so
- is practically instantaneous, since Yahoo! has more servers than most countries
- offers you lots of other things, too, if you own a blog, such as visitor tracking, a widget that shows visitors who’s been reading the blog and a display of your blog’s most popular links.
Marvellous, hey? All you have to do is sign up for a MyBlogLog account, upload a pic and stake out your blog, then use the URL of your blog here. All very simple really.
‘Course, it was a pain in the bottie for me, since I had to write two plug-ins, one in PHP, one in Perl, to get the bloody thing to work. But I think it’s worth it.
