Jay’s Brainfart

As you may, or may not have noticed depending on how often (if at all) you visit, I’ve had a bit of a fiddle with new themes recently, and have stuck with the V5 theme by Yichi.

The new look of my blog

This is a great theme, although not widget ready unfortunately - I also had to edit the theme a fair bit to get certain things working, and remove broken features - and the initial feedback I had from some Plurk buddies was fairly positive too. :)

I came across a service called Disqus today thanks to the blog over at Readburner… and I’m rather glad I did!

Disqus effectively creates a “forum” for your blog, allowing for threaded commenting and a community to grow around the comments themselves.

I’ve added it to my blog as you can see - however as a consequence the existing comments are masked - the only drawback I’ve noticed so far. Disqus are looking at a comment import system - its listed within the settings for the plugin, but its not enabled just yet.

Anyway I’d urge anyone who blogs on a regular basis to check out Disqus

Ok I decided to start doing a video blog every now & again, just as a change to some of the normal stuff I do - after all variety is the spice of life and all that crap!

Anyway this is just a test to see how it turns out - I’ll do a proper video blog in a week or so with actual content, and I’ll edit the video appropriately too. Please comment and let me know if you have any suggestions or if you want to see more etc… I’d like them to improve as well obviously!

For those of you that actually know me, you may take the piss - I’m expecting you to. :P

I came across something this morning that I thought was pretty cool - its a tool that will essentially turn any webpage into a social page, and will eliminate the need for unsightly shoutboxes.

Its called “Thats My Mouse“, and I read about it on Mashable - and found that it launched at 8am this morning, so thought I’d give it a whirl - so I’ve installed it on this blog for general useage. Its a small javascript installed that allows anyone on the same webpage to see what each other is doing, and chat too.

Now being at work, I can’t install the Internet Explorer addon needed (yes, I work for a retarded IT company that still uses IE6… they don’t get that Firefox or Opera are infinitely more secure), so I’ll have to wait until I get home before I can check it out - though you can check out a demo here, which I thought was quite nice.

Anyway check it out, see what you think… and in the meantime I’m going to try and get it working on my blog.

I’ve just been fiddling with my blog and noticed a comment on one of my posts from me… or what I thought was me anyway.

So I check the comment, and its not me - its another James Buckingham that lives up in Aberdeen, and he runs thebuckinghamfamily.co.uk. Now if you check the site… its a wordpress blog it looks like a wordpress blog… but isn’t… yet it uses the same theme as mine! Weird huh? :)

Anyway, should any other Buckinghams around the world come across my blog… feel free to leave a comment to say hi etc… its always interesting to investigate possible relatives etc. Oh - and if your name is also James Buckingham, please comment… we could get a little Dave Gorman-esque experiment going on. :D

As you may already be able to see, I’ve become bored of the site’s theme, and am currently in the middle of overhauling everything.

I’m going to be streamlining things somewhat, so be sure to check back a little later on and things should be in full swing again.

Soon, you can also expect my first video review/blog… I’ll be hosting them at Youtube to start, so once the first one is available, I’ll make sure to keep everyone posted. ;)