Resources from the web site of Well House Consulaants on the subject of Blogging and Blog Administration. We provide open source training course and business hotel accommodation in Melksham, Wiltshire, England

"The Horse's Mouth" is our blog - a daily diary of events, happenings and programming tips. Where articles relate to the writing of the blog itself, they're indexed for you here so that you can get back to them easily and all under the same roof.

Articles and tips on this subject		updated
6	Blog v Forum Look around this site and you'll find lots of changing information including a Blog and a Forum. You'll also find a "what's new" page and a library listing that changes with our ever-increasing number of Open Source books. What are they all for? Why do we have them all? Each has a different purpose! The ...	2011-12-17
3514	Microblogging - what I should have tweeted in the last 48 hours Lisa was commenting to me this morning how she gets most of her breaking news these days from a twitter feed The last few days have been so busy I've not had time to write a full blog each day, even though I have so much to say People in Melksham have complained that shops have been selling them First ...	2011-11-10
3208	Links for social media, microblogs and business networking Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are all networking tools where you can find a regularly updated feed of what I'm up to; postings to my Blog, and they've moved from being Occasional Geek Interest only to something much wider. So here are buttons to take you to my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages ...	2011-03-20
3186	How to add a customised twitter feed to your site Twitter has become a useful flow of updating information - an alternative headline source from an RSS feed. How do you incorporate such a flow into your web site? There are Javascript widgets which you can incorporate into your page, available from twitter (so much less prone to spec change than a third ...	2011-03-04
3163	Twitter - the special use of @ # and http: in tweets Great talk by John Dickens of @godjira at #Melksham Chamber last night. He runs Twitter for Business courses - http://bit.ly/gcWzm4 I've been tweeting for a while - Twitter is described as a microblogging service which basically means that you can put messages, up to 140 characters, onto the service ...	2011-02-10
3016	The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited Can you link that image from another web site? Can you publish pictures you took at the school's sports day? Are you allowed to register the your neighbour's name as a domain? Must you remove out of date information from your web site? Who's responsible if a user of a forum that you host post serious ...	2010-10-27
1000	One Thousand Posts and still going strong Can you believe it? In the two and a half years I've been writing here I have posted no fewer than ONE THOUSAND items and articles - ranging from the frivolous to the serious, and from the long to the short, and from daily life to highly technical tips. Why do I do it? Because it gives me a chance ...	2010-10-13
2000	2000th article - Remember the background and basics Entry number 2000 ... little did I look forward to my two thousandth article when, in the summer of 2004, Lisa suggested that I should join that trendy group who were starting their blogs. But here I am, in my fifth year of posting, averaging more than one article per day. Why has it lasted? Perhaps ...	2010-10-08
2823	Where have all the bloggers gone? I stumbled across my Live Journal page the other day - or rather someone suggested that I stumble across it. Like so many blogs, it started up as a full flood of enthusiastic posting, quickly reduced to a more moderate data stream, and then conked out completely. "Where are the bloggers now" I ask - ...	2010-06-24 (longer)
2751	Going off at a tangent, for a ramble The issue (illustrated within!) An essay, an article, a blog post is sequential. I start writing, and if I'm lucky you start reading, at the beginning and follow through to the end, or to the point at which I loose your interest. But there are so many asides that I want to add - commentaries on the ...	2010-05-04
2564	Microblogging services - Plurk, Twitter, Jaiku and more Yesterday, there were 10,000 downloads of this image from our web site, and if you click on the image, you'll get a full sized copy and see that it's 1600 x 1200 pixels and nearly a megabyte in size. So that's some 10 Gbytes of traffic! I know I'm quite well followed in some quarters, but this is ridiculous!. A ...	2010-01-05
2517	Blogging accuracy - open invitation for any corrections I make every attempt to be accurate on my blog - but they're written quickly, so you'll find typos in them (and the more passionate I get, the more typos jump in!). Usually, it's obvious what I mean and there's no significant change to the message I have - although it may be diluted by my confused wording, ...	2009-12-09
2449	Four aspects - Chamber, Transport, Courses and Hotel Our main business is in Open Source computer training - reaching people how to program in Perl, PHP and Python, in Lua, Ruby and Tcl, and on related subjects such as the MySQL database and the Linux Operating system. You can find a full public course schedule (with links to detailed course descriptions) ...	2009-10-12
2192	Copy writing - allowing for the cut Act 1 is boring, and sets the scene. Act 2 fills in the plot. In act 3, all the pieces come together and the show was a rising climactic conclusion. And the audience leaves the theatre in a buzz, thrilled and remembering a great evening. The model works well for training courses and presentations ...	2009-05-21 (longer)
1978	From spam to mod_alias - finding resources Nine articles on Spam and seven articles on scams ... ninety eight resources that mention spam and twenty five resources that mention scams, out of over fourteen thousand resources on our web site. It's amazing how our site has grown over the years. Looking at some more technical, you'll find 52 resources ...	2009-01-05 (longer)
876	Making pages clearer - easy Disability Discrimination Act Compliance Welcome to the new, clearer, Horse's Mouth. You should spot that the text size is slightly larger, and contrasts better against the background. And if you're not keen on the new look, you are now empowered to change it to suit your own preference - simply click on the "customise" link on the right ...	2009-01-04
425	Caching an XML feed If you're using PHP to add a newsfeed to your site, please be kind to the news feed supplier and cache the feed if your page is a popular one. I posted a couple of weeks ago ... a link to a piece of code that grabs a news feed .... and I've enhanced it now to do the caching. Here's the modified code: $feed ...	2008-05-17
410	Reading a news or blog feed (RSS) in your PHP page If you want to quote the latest articles from an RSS (XML based) news feed on your site, is it difficult? No - it can easily be programmed in PHP. I was exploring this yesterday and have the source code showing just how easy it is in our training resources. Want to try it out? This link runs the ...	2008-05-17 (short)
1203	A Fresh horse For all the hundreds and thousands of pictures that I've taken, there are many occasions that I think "I would like a picture of xxxx that illustrates yyyy" and find that I've not got one. I think it was my fifth entry on 'The Horse's Mouth' where I talked about looking for a picture of a donkey ... I ...	2007-05-24
1077	In answer to 'am I glad I started a blog' ... Mine serve me usefully to seed our web sites as well as for regular readers, so I'm a bit of an odd one to advise you. You need to have a clear purpose that's going to carry on into the future / through the life of the blog - otherwise it can get stale and fade. On the TRAIN blog, I sometimes wonder, ...	2007-02-12
508	Comment, please! I've just disabled track back pings on all entries on "The Horse's Mouth". Although this is a useful facility for linking like-minded blogs and providing "remote commenting", it's now been used for that here ... rather, it's been picked up by advertisers wanting to provide links to their sites selling ...	2006-06-09
671	Both ends of the animal If this is "The Horse's Mouth", then should my partner be writing a companion blog called "the hind legs of the donkey"? Lisa was not amused by the suggestion yesterday evening, and declined both on the basis that she doesn't feel that it's a commitment she should be taking on, and also that she doesn't ...	2006-06-05