Planning changes to my blog

I have run into a couple of problems with the template of Behind Dreaming and this has made me think about whether I should make some changes. I realised that the date I posted was not listing and now I have fixed that. While I was finding the code for this I also discovered that those looking at this blog through Internet Explorer have been having the right-hand sidebar pushed below the main body of the blog. I have now fixed this.

By playing with this template I have realised it seems to take too long to load. So I am now thinking about matching the template of Behind Dreaming to my blog of poetry To Write is to Dream... This does not mean they will look exactly alike but I love the floating template of my blog of poetry. What will probably be different will be the colour theme and background image. So I guess this is a "watch this space" sort of post.

The other things I want to change in both blogs is to make it clearer that the current Search Box is to search only each blog. I am also aiming to add a Google Search Widget so those who come across my blog can then keep moving along: though I would still prefer you to all stick around :-). I am hoping by posting these plans that it will motivate me or more even get my editor to have a reason to remind me that I posted these plans.

I have tried to avoid adding advertising though I am aware that especially in IE a pop-up add started appearing a few months back, maybe longer. Maybe I should start thinking a bit about advertising as well, though I will not rush into this.

The other long term plan is to add more to the connected delicious account and add a greater range of labels to different sorts of writing blogs. You can only have so many that only have poetry/poet and blog. Once I have enhanced these bookmarks I am thinking that I should make them easier to access on this blog. I would love if some of the writers of the blogs I may have bookmarked could give me some ideas of labels so others can find there blogs this way as well. If you also have a delicious account that is writing related please let me know so I can add it to my network. I have actually created this delicious account for this reason and have other accounts for personal and work bookmarks.

Finally I have recently added Feedburner to both my blogs but I am aware that it has been having problems lately.

Twitter and poetry

I find the more places I feed my writing into the more I try to think of things that fit into the arena I am feeding into. Take Twitter as an example. I have 2 twitter accounts: one for work and one for non-work tweets. I feed my personal twitter account into my livejournal and I know I have friends there that I am connected to. I also have to admit it is much easier to write a few tweets a day then it is to write one post in my livejournal. Whether any of the tweets mean anything as a daily feed - well I guess time will tell. One of my friends that I am connected to through my livejournal has begun to follow my my personal tweets.

Back to how Twitter has made me think about what I am writing - well I created a twitretry. I have to admit is is pretty bad compared to my other poetry. But writing a tweet that is a cross between it and poetry was a lot of fun. Maybe next time the twitretry will be a little, well more, um poetry like :-)

The term twitretry was coined by Neal Barber - thanks Neal