Barely Noticeable Additional Pages

This website has started to attract attention. As far as I am aware an additional 2 people have visited and read some of my blogs, that’s an increase in readership of somewhere in the region of 200%, with that influx in traffic, I thought it best to tidy a few things up, so here are the obligatory bullet points:

• There is a corndog shaped page, as if the main website wasn't pointless enough, there is a collection of silly sub-domains mostly created for a single daft joke, that are now all in 1 incredibly pointless place.
• There is a 2nd more expanded reading page with extra added reviews for the previous 15 books
• The Write this for me section has the About and Rachael News bits in their own pages now.

And now, the post-amble.

The pages from write this for me were harder to make than they should have been, I discovered a while ago that there were rss feeds for other pages on both my blogger and my tumblr blogs (why can't I just stick to one blogging platform? Or 1 blog for that matter, why do I need so many?), obviously I can't just copy and paste the content, that would require 2 changes to be made if I decided to update any of them.

On tumblr every additional page gets its own rss feed, so including the content in a page is incredibly simple, you just set the feed limit to 1 and tell it to include the description where required (like so: FAQs, Feedback & About), but on blogger, you get a single feed with all of the pages listed in the order they were made, it probably makes more sense that way, but I didn't know what to do with that, the most recent page is easy enough, but how do i make the other one?

I tried finding ways to start reading a feed from the 2nd one, to start from the bottom and to paginate the page so I could direct straight to page 2. None of these attempts were successful. In the end I used an If pregmatch function to check the link and only display the description for the matching page, I was sure I had tried it before, but I must have missed something as it worked 2nd time. And now, just to buck the trend I have established with this blog, I'm actually going to include the code, just in-case someone accidentally finds this post while having the same quandary as I had at some point in the future, as they will be really annoyed at the omission if not, I know I would have been:

if (preg_match('/about/',$link))
    echo $description;

I'll assume the fellow amateur website maker will have already figured out how to include the rss feeds and will know to change the item names and the match bit between the /'s.

The resulting pages work fine now: About and Rachael News, that’s all of the extra pages properly integrated into the site now.

The 2nd reading page was made because I wanted to fill out my reading diary for a 6 book challenge I had done with work while I was in work and I thought I would use the reviews I had already written on Goodreads, I couldn't get on Goodreads, but I could my website... I think I still did it at home anyway though.

I haven't just been writing the reviews for no reason, I set myself a few challenges at the start of the year, I didn't write them down and I probably didn't even verbalise them, but here is a quick run down of what they are and how I'm doing:

1. Read 25 books - I've finished 12, so a little behind, but it's not impossible to catch up.
2. Write a review of all these books - All 12 so far
3. Utilize all the blogs - I wrote one in the corndog blog over the weekend and wrote one in write this for me yesterday, I have done all 1 of my trips abroad in my travel blog and the other blog has been well served with content, there isn't really any good yardstick to measure this one by, so its a bit of a rubbish aim, but yes, I'm probably winning.
4. Have poetry on all the blogs - I didn't used to write poetry on the blogs, but I quite like it nowadays, it can be fun to write and if it's not too complicated, easy to write, the corndog blog has this one, write this for me has this one, the other blog has become the main home of poetry in my little blogging world, with My Stuff, The "Friend Zone" and The farmers Eavis, so the only one missing (as this one doesn't really count) is the travel blog, I have part of an idea actually, but I can't really make it work at the moment, so... maybe.
5. Finish Losing Time - I'm on the 2nd draft, so it's not impossible, but I am quite lazy.

Considering there are only minor changes, I have had quite a lot to say, much to the interest of no-one, this stuff down here is almost completely secret, only the top bit will be on the website and not even Rachael will read this blog, however stupid the other ones are, she thinks this is themost pointless, she asks:
"Why do you write this blog?"
"To write about the website."
"But you haven't made any changes'"
"I have..."
"Oh, only you would notice that."

And you know what, she had me there, so I decided not to bother after all.

Horizontalisation

I told you I wouldn't stop messing around with it didn't I?

There hasn't been a 'website news' blog for quite some time so there are quite a few changes:

• New layout with links across the top and pages split into blog related sections.
• New pages showing bits from all the blogs including the about pages.
• New section in the Site part for 'Projects' into which Losing Time has been absorbed.
• New Reading page to show what I'm currently reading.
• The website has moved again (physically - the address remains the same)

I decided at some point that I should redesign my website, if only to prove my own assertion that it would be incredibly simple what with the php based design and it was, relatively.

On rotating the page, I realised I would have to trim the links, so I started by splitting the links into rows, the top one with 4 links to blogs, which now included the newer writethisforme blog and the 2nd one with links to pages within the site.

But then I decided It needed more pages than that apparently, so I turned the links at the top into sections of the website, each with a bit of the blog and pages relating to the blog in links, I found each of the pages in tumblr blogs has its own rss feed, making some of the pages quite easy to implement.

Then I decided to do some new pages, A reading page to show the book I'm reading and I think the last 15 books I read, I found that GoodReads has rss pages, so I could show the information quite easily. The original idea was that I could show all my reviews I wrote of books, especially since I decided to review all the ones I read this year, but then I decided not to, I think the books themselves is more than enough.

Losing Time is something else I have been working on, it had it's own section, but I thought it should form part of a wider projects section.  I had nothing really to put about the other projects, but they can come later if I do start work on any of them.

Regarding the move, I had an email telling me about UK based hosting from Hostinger and my website kept on going offline. When I tried moving though I was informed my website was already hosted, how do I move then? I silently ask my screen this question.

So I removed my name-servers and A records and set up a redirect to a temporary website address that came with the hosting package, then a few days later I tried adding my regular address again and success! It worked. So I'll stay here for a bit I think.

I left my sub-domains where they were for now though, they seemed less important than the already incredibly unimportant regular website that I only update for myself.