Happy New Year for 2010 from Useful Wiki and the Usefulwiki Blog.
In 2009 we moved from generic hosting to a local UK host and we’re pleased with that move so far. The theatre breaks blog is running much more smoothly under the hood.
I’ve no idea what 2010 holds for us, but it’s going to be fun!
A couple of weeks ago we changed the theme on the London Theatre Breaks blog from the old Regulus which served us well for a couple of years but is now looking out dated, which frankly it is. We chose a variant of the magazine theme Mimbo which seems to suit the type of content we publish about West End theatre breaks, and makes use of of thumbnail pictures in the extracts for navigation. At the same time we abandoned the practice of having the blog on a different page to the home page, losing the static front page. There are pros and cons to this decision so we’ll have to see how it works out in tandem with other changes to the way the blog works in the light of fluctuating conditions in the market.
The other thing that has been implemented is the Contents list on category pages, which we hope will aid navigation within the topics for each show for visitors. This has been acheived using a specially commissioned Wordpress plugin, small but effective. The idea is that when a visitor arrives at the blog, probably through organic search which throws up the URL and page for the category page in the search results, then the list of contents published at the top of the category page, a list of clickable links, will enable the visitor to quickly navigate to one of the articles which most closely matches what they are really interested in. This method has been tested already on the DARnet blog where it seems to be working OK and has also been extended to the TAG pages. The downside might be that severeal different ways of arriving at the same content might be presented to search engines but the feeeling these days is that this won’t actually do any harm as long as it helps the visitor to get access to the information they are looking for.
The Mimbo theme uses an image manipulation script called Tim Thumb that has been known to cause problems with some web hosts, depending on how paranoid they are at configuring their own settings. It takes the image which has already been uploaded to a subdirectory within the wordpress installation and then creates alternative sized versions of the image for use in thumbnails pictures on the home page , and also on the category and tag pages depending on which template is enabled.
Complementary to the London Theatre Breaks blog hosted here at usefulwiki, we’ve just launched a new Theatre Breaks Magazine styled blog over at theatrebreaksmag.co.uk.
The content is more focussed on the theatre breaks themselves and maybe a bit less on individual shows, and the theme is more orientated towards pictorial representations of the narrative about theatre breaks in London. Main categories are
London Breaks
Hotel Deals
Theatre Breaks
News
West End Guide
Things to do
I’m trying out a new static page strategy for the Theatre Breaks blog which might help to sort out a problem I’ve been having with duplicate titles but then again might create an ongoing maintenance problem. The thing is to learn as much as I can before making a drastic decision.
The WP-Supercache Wordpress Plugin has been installed on most of the usefulwiki.com blogs, with some teething problems but nothing too serious. The use of a cache should greatly reduce the load on the webserver CPU by replacing lots of PHP processing with static HTML files.
September is a busy month on the classroom displays blog with a new school year starting up. The number of people joining the flickr group and uploading pictures of their displays has grown from strength to strength in recent months.
The root page or top level entry point for the domain usefulwiki.com has been in need of attention for some time now, but it was the act of ordering some Moo cards for the London Theatre Breaks blog that really pushed me into finding the necessary round tuits.
I could decide to put the full url on the cards as http://usefulwiki.com/londontheatre which is OK, but a bit of a mouthful to mention. What if somebody only remembers the “Useful Wiki” bit. Ah, I’d better put a link to the theatre breaks stuff on the top level index.html page – but that was so ugly. All it did was to send people forward to the wiki itself and mention this blog.
I could have spent some time hand coding a nicer index page, but hadn’t got around to it in all the elapsed time up until now, but then the idea of moving this blog up one level popped up and it seemed like an ideal solution. Let WordPress take care of the fixed pages as well as the blog. I’ve already done this on the capitalstyle domain so I knew it should be possible without upsetting any of the stuff underneath, and by having a fixed page as the front page of the blog, it saves redirecting all of the archive of individual posts here because they can just be assigned to another page called “blog” which puts them back exactly where they were again 
And now we have a nice looking (well, I think so) index reference page for anybody who goes directly to usefulwiki.com together with all the functionality of a WordPress blog to add sidebar widgets, blogrolls, updates and plugins.
With the technical setup ready and waiting, and some great content being added the time to announce the existence of usefulwiki.com to the world arrived in October.
First there was the Reinventing_Project-based_Learning book launch at a conference which Linda attended via skype, then an article written for Sharing best Practice by Linda which has caused a splash of interest. There have also been twitters and blogs, and some URL truncators from the Classroom Displays blog which is now piped into various LEA intranets.
Perhaps the most significant news for usefulwiki is that Linda is running a series of training courses for Teaching Assistants and putting all of her course notes on the wiki where students can access them between attendances at the LEA centre. This is what is called “eating our own dogfood”!
Thanks also to Geoff Dellow for creating the Recommended software for education page, which then inspired a Primary ICT page, which now needs to be completed together with one for secondary ICT. And so we begin to build, page by page, contact by contact.