Reading Roars!

I was biting into a steak at an Italian restaurant (Bella Napoli) in central Swansea last night, when a bizarre thought entered my mind. I suddenly saw resemblances between the restaurant layout and the structure of this blog.

The restaurant bar was on my right, manned by a chirpy Rossoneri-supporting Italian with a penchant for The Sun‘s Dear Deirdre. Bar… sidebar. Sitting atop the bar were the menus, and the bartender was ready to guide and answer any query I had (like the search box).

Similarly, ahead of me, running left to right, was the high street, like the header graphic on my blog. The kitchen behind me was like the blog footer and the important bit in between, the dining area, was like the column you are looking at right now, where the content is displayed.

Now and again, the restaurant received a visitor or two, but thankfully no spiders (yes, I’m a wuss: I don’t like arachnids).

Has anyone experienced anything similar? Or was my large San Jovese wine, quite simply, too large?

As you can see, I’ve made a few changes to this blog.

Gone is the old Oracle (shopping complex, not technology giant) header graphic: I have now introduced a brighter, more colourful banner showing Reading’s ornate facades. Similarly, I’ve left behind a tight, cramped template in favour of one that is broader and more spacious, hopefully making the blog easier to read and use.

Other changes include:

• A widget-friendly sidebar. A widget wha’? Of course, I don’t mean the plastic things you sometimes get inside beer cans, but cool interactive elements that can be added to a website. These might be, for example, a Flickr plug-in for showing images, or a tag cloud (something I intend to deploy soon), depicting the site’s categories in a different way.
• A horizonal nav bar, placed at the top of the blog.
• A two column theme. I’ve dropped the third column (or first, depending on your perspective), as Google AdSense simply wasn’t delivering (I was hoping for a little more than USD 5 in 12 months). It made no sense to keep AdSense.
• A different style. Links are red (contradicting, I guess, a basic law of usability). I may change this, but then red is the colour I’d most associate Reading with (for it’s name, it’s streets and it’s Victorian buildings).

It’s a start and there will be more changes to come. Please let me know if there is something that you feel I should include/exclude/change.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Reading Roars! mentioned in a BBC – Berkshire feature about blogging. The focus of the article was, however, on another local blog I hadn’t come across before, the award-winning and absolutely quackers Scaryduck, maintained by Alistair Coleman.

Scaryduck is eccentric British humour at its best (up there with Monty Python and The League of Gentlemen), offering bizarre observations, podcasts and a downloadable game called “Scaryduck done a poo” (a game that involves unloading avian faecal matter for points – my highest score was 275).

There are many others, of course, but the following are the best of the bunch, in my opinion:

Business

• Steve Clayon: Geek in Disguise – Steve is a Microsoft man. Great if you want to know what’s happening in the technology world
• Drew B’s take on tech PR – A blog about blogs. if you want to know about the wacky world of web 2.0 and social media, start here

Sport

• http://royal4ever.livejournal.com/ – Stacey Cross shows tremendous passion for Reading FC

Media

• Reading Chronicle Blog – Behind the scenes at the local newspaper

Politics

• Janestheone – a candid blog from the former Reading politician

Other

• NEVERHAPPY.com – All about the nation’s favourite subject, property

I have been toying with new Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 recently. One of the things I like best about it is that it supports RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a way of having news from sites such as this one conveniently delivered to you, pretty useful if you like your news from more than one source.

With Outlook 2007, to my surprise, adding a news feed is really straightforward. I did it with Reading Roars! in 3 steps – click on RSS Feeds, right-click and Add a New RSS Feed, then lastly “enter the location of the feed you want to add”. And that’s it.

Then the fun begins. Articles are added to Outlook in the form of email, and labelled with author name, article title and publication date. As email, you can flag it, or drag it into your To-Do Bar.

You can also configure Outlook so that full article content is downloaded as an attachment to RSS messages.

Changing times, eh.

Düsseldorf Blog’s Wolfgang has introduced our blog partnership to his readers: Neu beim Düsseldorf Blog: Kooperation mit dem Top-Blog unserer Partnerstadt Reading ["Co-operation with top blog in our twin city Reading"].

Just for fun, I will invent a new word to describe this type of partnership: twogging (an amalgamation of “twinning” and “blogging”). Think it will catch on? Oh.

You may be aware that Reading has twinning agreements with several towns worldwide, one of them being the city of Düsseldorf, the capital of Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany. Now, quite possibly for the first time ever (or quite possibly not), a twinning agreement has been struck between local blogs: Reading Roars! and Düsseldorf Blog.

Reading’s close relationship with Düsseldorf goes as far back as 1947 (it is described as one of the oldest such relationships in the world), and developed into an official twinning in 1975.

Now this agreement has entered the digital age.

So what does this partnership involve? To begin with, both blogs are now linked to each other. In addition to these reciprocal links, regular posts will be appearing on this blog from Düsseldorf Blog’s Wolfgang Osinski (look out for his first, on the local carnival phenomenon), and I will similarly post on Düsseldorf Blog.

I’m excited about this partnership and hope it will help to promote understanding and awareness of both cultures.

Curiously, while a link to this blog was removed from the international Wikipedia site, a link has surfaced on Italian Wikipedia, the Italian-language version of the popular online encyclopaedia:

Blog di Reading Roars

Grazie mille!

A link to this blog on Wikipedia was removed (thanks “Dahlia Rose”) for being “inappropriate” and “self-promoting”. Perhaps Dahlia will kindly also remove links to Reading Wildcasts Lacrosse Club and Remix Reading? I believe that Wikipedia should be inclusive, not exclusive (as long as it does not offend).

Reading Roars! (that would be me) would like to wish you all a nice Christmas and a happy, and healthy, New Year (e-cards, by the way, to this address: mbrady@readingroars.com – thank you!).

You may have noticed a map on the sidebar. Provided by ClustrMaps, the map depicts areas, or clusters, on the globe where visitors to this blog are located.

As expected, the red dots appear to be mostly concentrated in more developed or connected parts of the planet, but a dot has now surfaced in deepest Amazonia. I’m guessing that this dot represents Manaus, a Brazilian city in the heart of the Amazon. Who accessed this blog in Manaus – and why? I’m eager to find out.