Sabrina gave a great session at CreativeCamp Kilkenny last weekend on how to blog like a boy - or in other words how to make your blog look great and be user-friendly.

Her slides are available here, with her talking points in the comments of each.

One of the points that she raised was about blogrolls - they need to be relevant and up-to-date. A while back I got sick of constantly updating mine manually, so I found a better way to do it.

*If you use Google Reader then you can use it to track your blogroll automatically*

I mentioned it at the session and Will chased me today for details, so I thought I’d lay it out in a post, step by step.

Firstly, you need to decide what blogs you want to display in your blogroll and then in Google Reader you need to place all of these in the same folder or tag them with the same tag. Next step is to go into the “Settings” for Google Reader and access the “Tags” tab.

On the “Tags” tab you will see an option to make each tag public/private. Make the one you want to share *public*.

A new option will appear to the right of that tag, allowing you to “add a blogroll to your site” - click this.

You will get a pop-up where you can choose the colour of your blogroll and then you can copy and paste the HTML code anywhere you fancy. If you are using WordPress and a widget ready theme, then simply add a new text widget and paste the HTML code into that!

The great thing about using this to manage your blogroll is that it will update automatically as you add/remove blogs from that folder in Google Reader, which is much quicker and easier than modifying your blogroll manually.

Nokia have announced a battery recall for some BL-5C phone batteries manufactured between Dec 2005 and Nov 2006. In very rare cases the affected batteries could potentially experience over heating initiated by a short circuit while charging, causing the battery to dislodge.

Since so many people carry Nokia phones, I though it might help to post the link below which provides you details on how to check if your battery comes from the affected batch. Remember to look closely to spot the difference between ‘zeroes’ and the capital letter O – it can be hard to tell. Also think of sending the link on to anyone you know that uses Nokia phones.

Nokia Battery Replacement Check Website

I’m having one of those crappy weeks when everything around me seems to break and suck all the energy and life out of me while I get it repaired.

1. Our HTPC is broken, so we’ve had no recorded TV for weeks now, I have to plan to be in the house when shows are on.
2. My new Nokia 770 will not display any websites that use Flash or Javascript, rendering half of the web unusable to me.
3. I’ve also managed to crash my 770 four times so far since receiving it yesterday. The built in RSS reader sucks and when I went to delete the 100+ feeds I had imported into it, then the program crashed repeatedly until it crashed the whole unit. Wouldn’t turn back on until I stuck the charging cable back in.
4. In Twitter, I can see the options to follow people, but I can’t turn the notifications on / off per person - I can see the radio buttons, but when i click them my choices aren’t saved.
5. Mum’s feeds are not displaying her podcasts as enclosures via feedburner, even through I turned on the settings in feedburner and it said that they would.
6. The hubbie and I are both having huge problems with WordPress, to the extent that we’re thinking of moving away to Moveable Type. A simple edit of the categories on a post containing a video embed while using the Visual Editor screwed the entire front page of my blog. And for some unknown reason, any posts from last year have had their YouTube embed code removed from them. I’ve no idea how this could happen, everything else imported OK, so where did the code go?

I’m thinking that tonight will need to be a night without technology and with a bottle of wine. I just can’t hack these problems sapping any more of my energy. Earlier in the week I threatened to close my blog and simply stop posting, and once again I find myself swinging back towards that option…

Class! Although I’m not sure how practical it would be with the amount of rain we have in Ireland…

One of the reasons that I hadn’t blogged over the past few weeks (apart from being sick) was that I had got bogged down and behind in all my surfing. I read a ton of blogs and news sites via NewsGator every day and if I don’t make time every day I soon fall behind and other things get dropped.

I finally got caught up over last weekend (even with my mum dropping in unexpectedly!), the other main reason for this was the death of our lovely Media Centre… We had been expecting it for a while now and had put off the planned rebuild for far too long - culminating in it bluescreening about 8 times in 4 hours on Saturday. George formatted the C: drive on Sunday, but the fresh install just refused to take… so we’re stuck with only normal TV at the moment and no way to access all our previous recordings… Luckily we both have laptops, otherwise I’d be suffering serious internet withdrawal at this point (my previous record for managing to not check my mail stands at 48 hours!).

The old PC was a testament to George’s excellent PC building skills, he had upgraded components as we went along and with a new motherboard it’s going to make a good server for us for a long time yet. The one thing I won’t miss about it is the noise it generated - ever since the power supply fan had been replaced it was really noisy! But we’re about to order ourselves a lovely new quiet Media Centre, under heavy consideration is a highly customised Shuttle 2000M - packed with an Intel Core Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, 300GB hard drive and a dinky ejectable USB 80GB external Hard Disk Drive!

Anyway, the point of this post was to explain why the internet pleases me once again, not to ramble on about our PC troubles!! This week I found two wonderful new websites that have restored my faith in the internet and made me want to blog again!

Firstly, VideoJug - the site that titles itself “Life Explained. On Film”. It’s a brilliantly simple concept, lots of short videos explaining everything about life and breaking it up into easy-to-follow steps. They have a huge collection of recipes, but a quick look at their most popular videos of the last hour gives an idea of just how vast and far-reaching their content is:

And don’t worry if the video you require is missing - they’re constantly making new videos and the site is crammed with links asking you to suggest what new videos you want. Below each of the recipe videos is a list of the ingredients required and an option to shift between metric and imperial measurements. It gets even better if you own an iPOD or PSP, as all the videos are available for download in those formats, perfect if you don’t have a wireless connection in the kitchen!

The second site was one that was only launched yesterday, but it’s going to revolutionise how we search for lots of products. If you haven’t heard about like.com and checked it out yet, then go do it now. Seriously, I’ll wait…

If you’re a guy in a relationship, you’re probably crapping your pants right now. If not, you should be! My first look at this site lasted for over 20 mins as I clicked around and realised the potential. I need to replace my favourite brown suede boots - mega comfortable, low stacked heel, just under knee high. I entered my search and all the results are returned as pictures, allowing me to instantly see if it fits my criteria or not. I can then select a portion of the picture and refine my search based on that, telling it how much weighting to put on colour or shape by clicking on simple Web 2.0 style buttons. I can filter my results based on colour, price and brand. You can even browse through pictures of various A-list celebrities and click on their shoes and accessories to find similar ones. I’m going to end up spending sooooo much money here! (P.S. - there’s free shopping for the first 10,000 customers!)

Normal service has been resumed…

The BBC ran an article last month with the above title which I found pretty interesting. The article was based on a survey by Neilsen/Net Ratings entitled the 21st Century UK Digital Consumer.

We often see stories running in the news about new ‘technological’ words that have become mainstream and are being added to the latest revision of dictionaries, yet the survey shows that even though people are using the new technologies most of them do not know the correct terms to describe them.

Although, I have to admit that some of the terms used in the survey were unknown even to me - do you know the meanings of all of them?

In a similar vein to my presentation at BarCamp last weekend, I found an article this week over on “back in skinny jeans” that explains RSS the ‘Oprah’ way. It’s a really clear guide that would be perfect to give to a non-technical person of any age, nevermind your granny - one of the images used is shown below.