Notes: Unless other otherwise stated Wordless Wednesday posts are not my artwork, and the credit to the artist is given as a link above the image.

Thursday, 31 May 2007

All my new features (Blogger only)

As some who visit my blog frequently or at least more than once may have noticed I have been busy and there are some changes that have been made.

Okay, I will admit to having added a fair few hacks here, I'm keeping myself occupied and my mind off my mothers health issues.

A good few of the following hacks are what our friends using other platforms have built in, here using the Blogger platform we need to hack the HTML to use them. I know that some people say they don't have a clue, but if you follow the links below and the step-by-step instructions then it's easy. Many thanks goes to the Blogger Hackers who work on making our blogs even better and sharing their efforts with everyone.

Whilst some are obvious, others aren't so I'll just point out what is different.

Starting with the obvious;
  1. There are now tabs at the top of the page, these show the 5 most frequent tags that I use. The hack for this can be found at Hoctro's Place Showing your Blogger Labels as Tabs with Ramani's Tweak your label tabs from Hackosphere giving the 5 most frequent.
  2. Following from there, when searching my blog via the archive or the tags you will now only see the titles of the posts and a +/- besides them. This allows you to expand and compress each one and hopefully make searching easier by saving you having to scroll through full posts. It means I need to consider titles and tags more. Peek-A-Boo view of posts in label/archive pages is also one of Ramani's.
  3. You will have noticed already that my longer posts now have a 'read more' link at the end, this is another hack from Hackosphere, Selective Expandable posts.
  4. Another that will not be so obvious is Author comment highlighting and notification, this hack does as the title suggests and highlights the authors posts in the comments, you can also send the person who you are responding to an email to let them know. Unfortunately it only works if the person has their email in their profile, it still highlights your replies though.
Right, so I think that is just about all the hacks I've added, as you can see Hackosphere is a wonderful resource for all Blogger hacks, Ramani also has a Blogger Hack Search Engine! for anything you can't find on his blog.

One word meme

I've been tagged by akelamalu at Everything And Nothing for a meme whereby you answer the following questions with just one word.

This is a nice distraction and I was wondering what to post about since missing WW this week and having been away.

Here goes ...


  1. Where is your cell phone? - Here
  2. Relationship? - Yes
  3. Your hair? - Long
  4. Work? - Unfortunately
  5. Your sister? - None
  6. Your favorite thing? - Cross
  7. Your dream last night? - Falling
  8. Your favorite drink? - Coke
  9. Your dream car? - Small
  10. The room you’re in? - Bedroom
  11. Your shoes? - ballerina
  12. Your fears? - Death
  13. What do you want to be in 10 years? - Relaxed
  14. Who did you hang out with this weekend? - Patients
  15. What you’re not good at? - Patience
  16. Muffin? - Chocolate
  17. One of your wish list items? - Health
  18. Where you grew up? - Lowestoft
  19. The last thing you did? - HTML
  20. What are you wearing? - Clothes
  21. What aren’t you wearing? - Glasses
  22. Your pet? - Bouncer
  23. Your computer? - Cool
  24. Your life? - Stressful
  25. Your mood? - Low
  26. Missing? - Peace
  27. What are you thinking about right now? - This
  28. Your car? - None
  29. Your kitchen? - Hideous
  30. Your summer? - Hot
  31. Your favorite color? - Red
  32. When is the last time you laughed? - Wednesday
  33. Last time you cried? - Tuesday
  34. School? - Distant
  35. Love? - Forever

Now I have to tag some more bloggers so here's the lucky three:
  1. George of Odysseys of George
  2. Happily Anonymous of Reality Is Over Rated
  3. Danielle of Modern Musings

Saturday, 26 May 2007

Saturday Photo Hunt

Theme - Colourful
Become a Photo Hunter


Click Image to enlarge

This is my boyfriends VW camper (and no Dylan isn't my boyfriend), this picture has fewer flowers than the van did up until a couple of months ago when they were all removed and the van was repainted (still bright yellow). It's supposedly going to be sold ... You know men and their love affairs with motor vehicles though.

It's colourful in more ways than one and has always turned heads where ever we go.

A couple of notes following the comments
  • Dylan is the name of the van and the bunny.
  • The bunny is Dylan from the Magic Roundabout (see Wiki entry)
  • The photo was photoshopped by my boyfriend and he added Dylan

Thursday, 24 May 2007

Mum

My mum called me on Saturday with some news she said I get angry when she doesn't tell me things, it's true I do ... She forgets to tell me that she's moved or changed her phone number for instance.

Yesterday I called her and she had more news, now if I don't blog for a while it's because I'm home with her, looking after her, she has been diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer.

To say I'm not worried or scared would be a lie, only I'm not just worried and scared for my mum, I'm worried for me as well she has a bad track record of passing her bad genes on to me, I've already got her dylexia and dyspraxia for instance, not to mention matching moles. Of course and more importantly I also can't imagine life without her.

So anyway if I vanish off the face of the blogosphere it's because I'm just too busy bossing nurses around and telling them how to do the dressings, reminding them of their infection control procedures and generally being a royal pain in the arse making sure she's looked after properly ... Won't be hospital security kicking me out it'll be her.

Wednesday, 23 May 2007

Wordless Wednesday

Pond by auralfreq

Tuesday, 22 May 2007

Display RSS feeds on your website

If you have your own domain and webpage and you want to display an RSS feed on it from your blog or another source there's a host of websites offering free copy and paste html to do this.

As I mentioned in a recent post I've syndicated my blog feed to my home page, to do that I used FeedForAll and thier free script RSS2HTML, you do need access to the FTP for this and so it's not something for Bloggers using the basic blog providers services. Feed for All give a script for free that allows you to publish an RSS feed on your web page as HTML instead of Java script therefore allowing spiders to read it.

FeedForAll has made available a free PHP program called rss2html.php, which can be used by webmasters to automatically display RSS feeds on their website. The resulting webpage will always show the RSS feed's most current data. The advantage of using the rss2html.php script is that the resulting webpage's contents will always be up to date, and can be easily spidered by search engines.
The RSS2HTML is available to download here (forth one down), when adding it to my own I struggled even with their documentation help but you can see the results here. I'm not going to try helping with that, I did find that it worked well in a floating page though, if you try this and get stuck I might be able to help if you email me (contact details on my profile) or comment here.

Viva Voodoo - Too Dumb to Die


Too bad to be good: too good to be bad. Mired in mediocrity, they are actually too crap to be there. To get out of this purgatory and move on, all they have to do is die.

Just found this mildly amusing little flash game based on the cartoon above, it's short and easy to play.

Monday, 21 May 2007

Home page

I have to blog about this as I'm really rather impressed with myself.

For a few years I've had my own domain, not mytopsy-turvylife.co.uk (you can see how I use my own custom domain name in this post Using a Lycos Custom Domain Name on Blogger) but another one. All I ever do is play about with it.

Over the past week I have syndicated my RSS feeds on it, that's my last 15 posts on this blog appearing in full on another website as html rather than java script, have a look at inanna's garden to see what it looks like.

It wasn't easy to add all the bits and put the link in the right place but I managed it finally and I am quite impressed with the end result.

I'll come back after work and explain how I managed to get it working.