Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

You might have seen the new google talk chatback gadget, which allows you to embed a chat icon in your blog/website so guests can chat with you, if you’re available. The cool thing is that they don’t have to have a google account to chat with you.

The code from google comes in an iframe, which wordpress doesn’t like very much for security reasons. However, if you’re game, you can get it to work with a text widget (assuming you use widgets). Paste the code into a new text widget, surrounding it with <ul></ul> tags to space it out a bit if you like.

Having had some fun getting php and javascript code to work in a sidebar widget, I expected this to be a lot more difficult!

First impressions: actually responding to someone takes a few steps. You get notification in a web page which wants to open a new chat window, rather than integrating with whatever form of google chat you already use. It’s slower too. Despite that, and notwithstanding the increasing need to control IM status, without getting overwhelmed by offers to chat, I like it!

I finally got around to a bit of a site re-design last night- it’s a fairly straightforward modification of the original light theme, and sorts out a few issues I’d been having with custom php and text widgets. Actually, I should confess that I’m a complete loser when it comes to the design part of web-design, so I got my web-designer hubby to help with it. Thanks Barry!

Those of you that tend to visit only through your rss reader won’t, of course, be able to see any difference, so if you fancy popping around for a look at the new design, come on in, I’ll put the kettle on.

I also got the site running a little more quickly by disabling a bunch of plugins that I’m not really using. In the process I disabled geopress, which was a shame, but I hadn’t really been using it and it certainly had an adverse affect on the speed of the site.

I’m still very keen to investigate geotagging and georss, but I haven’t yet found the solution that works for me. What I want is something a bit simpler than geopress- I don’t necessarily want the map, just the coordinates embedded in every post, with a default set to my home location and an option to add new coordinates if I’m posting from somewhere else. More tinkering required I think…

I thought I’d see what all the fuss is about with feedburner, so those of you that subscribe to my direct feed rather than through Planet Geospatial or Online Archaeology might like to re-subscribe to the feedburner feed instead. I understand from the feedburner pixies that simply clicking on the “subscribe” link will take you to the new feed, or you could just click here…

Cheers!

In which I finally learn how to add a dynamic blogroll to my blog… Read more »