New blog design - PR Blogger 2.0

Posted Monday, February 6, 2006 at 3:28am in Blogging  | 

Hello, and welcome to my new shiny, custom built blog - PR Blogger 2.0. Well, I had to get the ‘2.0′ cliche in there somewhere. It’s been a month in the making but it’s now out of beta and ready to be put to some use. Sadly, I can’t claim to have had anything to do with any of the design process at all. If only I were talented enough! But it’s many thanks to uber cool designer, Matt Brett, who I got in touch with after he took the initiative to build feedicons.com - the site where anyone can download the new standardised RSS icon. After falling in love with Matt’s blog, I bounced him an email over and things went from there.

So what’s new? Well, apart from a running on the new WordPress 2.0.1 and a full design overhaul with XHTML and CSS validation, there’s a whole host of plugins under the bonnet. There’s a Flickr plugin that allows integration of my Flickr photos into the homepage; customisable post listings plugin to display recent posts and comments; a killer spam fighter plugin which is working perfect - no more deleting endless rubbish; a moblog plugin (of course!) and many others - too much to list in fact. Even the dashboard looks like something out of Star Wars. Matt has quite literally ‘pimped my blog’.

A couple of my favourite features are the Quick Links section and the moblog archives. The Quick Links are connected to my del.icio.us account and if I tag a webpage using QuickLinks as my del.icio.us tag name, my blog will pull in the url of the webpage and the comment I’ve made and place it on the homepage. Cool? I think so! This is ideal for me as I tend to make short posts of small things I find of interest, but at the same time sometimes think they’re not really worthy of a full post. I’m trying to get away from that and hopefully, this may help me do it.

Again, the moblog section is a killer. Basically, if I shoot a photo with my camera and send it to my blog - instead of it landing as an individual blog post, it will land in the ‘moblog’ section of the homepage and every moblog I send after will replace and send the previous photo into the moblog archives. This is the best bit though - although a moblog doesn’t directly go into a post page, it will still show up in my feed in an aggregator. Cool? Indeedy! Still having one or two teething troubles at the moment, but it was working fine when we were in the testing phase so it should be sorted pretty soon. Which reminds me, if you’re reading this post, you may have had to log onto the site manually as my RSS feed will need re-subscribing in your reader. Please do so. Oh, I’ve also purchased prblogger.co.uk which directs straight to this site too.

I’m still considering it a work-in-progress and plan to add new features over time, including a wiki - what for I don’t know yet, perhaps some type of PR research, analysis and evaluation resource? It will be good just to learn how to use and manage one. I’m also going to toy with audio and video - learn the different formats and how to embed them into posts, make them iPod compatible etc. But for the moment, I’m more than happy.

Matt has been great guy to work with. Who, we would call in the North East a ‘top bloke’. His qualities lie not just in his design skills but in his ethos of not being satisfied until the client is. A great attribute to have and I have no hesitation recommending him to anyone who’s thinking of any kind of design work - 110 per cent! With the UK being five hours ahead of Canada and both of us being night owls, I can honestly say I’ve spent one or two late nights (or early mornings) with the guy and consider him not only a great designer associate but a friend too! Cheers Matt!

Technorati tags:
pr+blogger, matt+brett, design, designer, wordpress, pr, public+relations, stephen+davies

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