WordPress for iPhone, Stumble Upon

Well, this has got to be good… Here I am using my iPhone once again to send information to my blog. This time it is a short note to describe adding a ‘Stumble Upon’ button to your WordPress themes.

I noticed that last week the hits rose quite dramatically on a particular item t do with iPhones and on further investigation it turned out that a visitor had added my site to StumbleUpon and thus the sudden influx. It was enough to encourage me to make it even easier for that to happen in future.

A quick visit to Stumbleupon.com and I had the code I needed to enter into the theme files I am using, but it needed some editing. Adding the ‘title’ attribute from WordPress code endured that the specific page or post gets tagged.

I’ll monitor traffic over the next couple of weeks to see what happens, but I am not expecting much.

Just to finish by saying I rote this entry using my iPhone, and as you can see, it has arrived safely on the site. I am a fan of the wordpress app for iPhone now… but have been a fan of Stumble Upon for years! 🙂

Dartmoor Letterboxes

I have been an avid letterboxer for many years but recently I haven’t been able to get down to Devon. However, I was pleased to see a Facebook community for letterboxing and joined up… but it’s moving slowly.

I found a new letterboxing enthusiast over at http://www.Saynotopontins.co.uk

The title is a bit odd, but you need to read the content to understand why it’s called what it is. I’ll give you a clue… it’s about Pontins and a bad experience or two that folk have had!

Why not head over there and see what’s being said about letterboxing, too?

Simple forum for WordPress

yellowswordfish

At last, I seem to have found a decent set of forum tools that plugs directly into wordpress! I have been looking for something that gives me some of the functionality of PHPbb but uses the WordPress user table in the database. Following a link to YellowSwordfish I happened across ‘sf-forum’.

I have since installed it on this blog, and you can get to it by following the ‘Forum’ links in the menu bar. It allows me to establish forum groups visible only to specific users or set up different ones open to public access. Currently, if you visit the page you will be able to see three forums related to the work I do as part of Cleveratom Limited. However, if you sign up to the site you’ll also see (as a subscriber) another forum dedicated to DVD technologies. Now, none of these are particularly high profile things for me to broadcast, but they do illustrate the power of the simple forum plug in.

The only caveat I would suggest is that to get the forum to appear you need to be sure that your page names match your database names – it took a few minutes for this to sink in and at first I was thinking I had not managed to get a decent forum… but hold fast! Get those names right and it appears beautifully.

Many thanks to Andy (I think) at yellow swordfish – a brilliant little plug in with lots of versatility.

Underground signs, Subway signs

OK – this has got to be blogged. I saw this on a recent tube journey and not for the first time wondered who agreed that it was a good sign to put up in a tube train. I mean, if you saw the stuff going on and left the train to call for help, the train would have gone by the time you got back from the phone… and who has a mobile that works in the tunnels? I mean, for goodness sake – they might as well ask you to post a letter about it for the good it would do…

tube sign So let’s say it *is* an emergency. Have you ever tried ringing 999 from the underground?