Actually, it surprised me that Sitepoint, a wonderful design resource, ran a poll yesterday to see whether RSS is “mainstream”. It also promoted the poll heavily on Twitter which Sitepoint says “headed to mainstream”.

Both Sitepoint actions facinated me.  Sitepoint is a site for web designers and developers.  I would think, for their audience, RSS would be mainstream.

Most of my sites have nothing to do with the Internet other than the fact they’re web pages.  When offered, I’ve had few RSS takers to any of my blogs.   Even the one with thousands of email subscribers has only a handful of RSS subscribers.  I thought that told me RSS isn’t mainstream.

Anyway, so far the RSS poll is interesting.  If you’ve got a min, pop over and vote so you can take a peek at the results.

Sitepoint’s promo of the poll on Twitter however is a whole ‘nuther ball a’ beezewax.  Their current giveaway of a $30 pdf ebook on CSS to gain Twitter followers though I don’t see a “follow me on” link on their site yet makes me Wonder too :)

For most blogs, without some fancy footwork, categories are the structure of the blog if not the whole site. In most templates, your categories will make up a clickable list of links somewhere on your pages. It probably will be in your sidebar. In the old days of web design, I think we called that a sub-menu.

For WordPress, that category list ends up being an important menu. If you write on a lot of topics, it can be the primary way peope will find your stuff. Obviously, you might consider your category names carefully.

In WordPress, you do have control over how many of your categories display in the listing on your pages. However, this would conceivably make them invisible. I can’t see that there would be anything to be gained by not making your posts readable on your blog.

Common sense says I don’t want a long list of categories. I don’t want people have to read an extra page to find all those posts I wrote about vestal virgins ;)

I also read somewhere while I was researching categories that you shouldn’t include your posts in more than one category as it would result in “duplicate pages”. Of course, that would be a bad thing because it upsets the search engines.

I’m going to have to research that further though as it doesn’t really make sense to me. If each of these posts is snippet of text in a database, how could linking to that data result in duplicate pages? Even if it were multiple links it would still only be one little chunk of text right?

Sheesh, correct me if I’m wrong here, will ya? Maybe I still don’t get it.

WordPress says tags are free form words that you put in a comma separated list under your post.

So basically they’re keywords like you should have in the header text of your posts but it’s no doubt easier putting them on the page? O.K., I’m in.

My personal Native American hero is Sitting Bull.  Even today, I think some of his words speak the truth, as in his famous quote about the people who were conquering his:

This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path”.
Sitting Bull

He said much more about the war with America, his people and the people who were to come.  You can find many Sitting Bull quotes that are relevant today here.

I believe that I am 1/16th, or possibly 1/8th, Yankton Lakota Sioux.  My heritage has been clouded by years of misinformation but I am hopeful with new DNA technology and patience I can find my real roots.

This also serves as an example of a post concepted of a need to share some quotes that kind of blew me away when I read them :)

Wonder what I know after 45 days of WordPress blogging?

I know that:

• it’s insane to jump into a live website “whole hog” without any advance planning.  Yes, Virginia, even a blog;
• a WordPress blog is a “Cadillac” of OpenSource software. Wonderful good looks and a smooth ride, but high maintenance; and
• real blogging, with intent, is an interesting pursuit.

If this is the only course you are interested in at Lynda.com, save your money. For similar reasons that the Blogger.com class didn’t quite make it, this video course didn’t either.

Digital cameras are not a subject you can make a film about years ago or really months ago and have people really “educated” by it today.

That being said, I am pretty much green to digital photography so I learned some things. I at least learned enough to have some idea of what they’re talking about in my camera instruction book and a little of when to use different features that are on my camera.

I learned you could take pictures from a moving vehicle and posted my first video on YouTube :)  The pictures looked a lot better on my computer so I suppose I need to take a class in movie making too.

I learned enough to be sure that the subject interests me and to sign up for another class. I’ve got 2 weeks on my month trial subscription yet. I think that’s plenty of time to take Digital Photography Principals from Taz Tally. You know who he is?

You can make an HTML link that not only links to your page, but also takes the person viewing the link to a certain spot on your page.  Even if that spot is below the fold.

For instance, if I want to say something about how new I am at Twitter and I also want to give anyone interested another little glimpse into my web life, I can post the word “green” with a link to one of my sites that defines that word the way I mean it.

After I got done twurling it, the link ended up being: http://twurl.nl/b7lswy.

By putting the following code in my page defining “green”, I was able to link to a particular place in the web page, not just the page.

<a name=”green”>GREEN</a> – Inexperienced, brand new.  The term is often applied to personnel.  Also applies to being new at any thing else.  Worry if your mechanic says “I’m pretty green at this but your motor needs a rebuild”.

By adding a “#“, or pound sign, and the defined name, i.e,”green” (without the quotes), to the url for the page, like so:

http://www.welcometothefair.com/lingo.html#green

I can send people right to the spot on the page I want them to see.

Maybe I should have put an Adsense block right above it?

Blog Header Before Functions Moved

It was a pretty simple matter to delete the functions from the header.php file in the Theme Editor section of the Design Tab.  Reinserting the functions into the sidebar was a little trickier in this theme as there are actually 3 files for the sidebar.  I also had to edit the main style sheet to make the functions display as I wanted them to.

While I was doing all this, I added an email subscribe because many of you are probably old people like me and don’t really think RSS feeds are all that great either.  I use them if I can’t subscribe via email but I’d rather get everything I need in my inbox :)

I’d also been experimenting lately with the number of posts I displayed on the front page of this blog.  I started with 10 and that made an awfully long page as I get pretty long-winded in some of my posts.  Then I changed it to 4 posts and visitors only got a smattering of all the things I write about here.  I didn’t like that either.

I knew I could switch to using all excerpts of my posts but I didn’t think that was so cool to have to click to read every single post on the page.  I knew there had to be a solution to print some posts in their entirety and make the rest shorter so, off to Google.

First I found some code that purported to do this and probably worked with some version.  But after 3 hours of messing with my blog on my local machine, it was back to Google.

Should have looked at one of my favorite sites, Daily Blog Tips, first.  Sure enough, they had just the plugin that I wanted.

So whadda ya think of the new look?