well i followed my own advice to use the christmas/new year period constructively when it comes to the blog. these are the things i have done…

signed up to technorati and begun tagging posts

having realised the usefulness of categorising data i am going back through the blog posts since i started with typepad (almost done a year) and adding in lots more categories. according to a comment i was left this will also be recognised via technorati as tags which will be a bonus. i started adding tags to each post but after a few months worth gave up – it was just too boring… i don’t know why i just used a few categories in the first place. it’s so simple to add new ones and much more useful for me (and anyone else) now to find my way round the posts. the categories so far are: advent | africa | alternative worship | alt worship | applications | art | articles | australia | big chill | blah | blogs | Books | canada | chelsea | emerging church | family | Film | football | grace | greenbelt | holland | india | ireland | justice | labyrinth| linkage| liturgy | london | middle east | mission | Music | new zealand | pentecost | photos | podcast | politics | prayer | proost | shopping | spirituality | theology | USA | video | vj | web | Weblogs | worship tricks | youth ministry and no doubt i will add some more. some categories will only have one or two posts. to find categories in the future they are on the left hand side bar.

added an up to date photo into the blog banner/header (though i may change it again – not convinced).

changed the make poverty history photo (this was actually a photo of my hand that i took and i have since since seen it on several other blogs). this isn’t because i don’t want to make poverty history but the campaign was a focus for 2005… i’ve added in another image i like.

got rid of the calendar

rejigged my archives a bit

added various buttons to sites i have joined – technorati | my del.icio.us | blogtopsites | britblog | londonbloggers | rss feed – see bottom of right hand side bar. i’ve made a couple of the buttons so that they are all the same size (80 x 15).

i have joined flickr. i am going to blog about this separately. but i have added a flickr badge to the left hand side bar that links through to my photos. they are currently just some personal/family ones that won’t be of much interest to most blog readers. as i mentioned before i like typepad photo albums a lot and will continue to use them but having another online store of photos with the ability to share them with other friends is brilliant. helping my son harry get going on his blog was what made me realise how cool flickr is. i am going to pay to get the pro version.

i have also added the firefox del.icio.us extension so that i can add pages to my del.icio.us with the click of one button in the browser bar which is very cool.

so that’s about it. i guess i’ll gradually keep going back to finish off the categories but then leave it alone for a while and get back to blogging content which after all is probably more important.

Technorati Tags: applications, blogs, del.icio.us, flickr, tag, technorati