Our fame is spreading. Last Thursday I did a ten minute interview about our blog for Australian radio and today a short interview for ABC – the US channel.
They both found it difficult to understand that Lords can blog – I think their view of us is somewhat dated!
It looks like the experiment is starting to take off. At the end of the day, the House of Lords (like the House of Commons) is part of our society so it’s not that surprising but, on the other hand, stereotypes are found the world over.
You forgot to say which one of the Lords you are.
An executive editor at Nature, the scientific journal, posted a link to here on the Nature weblog community site (network.nature.com). As a Brit working in Australia it’s fantastic to be more in touch with the workings of Parliament, especially the Upper House, than ever I was in the UK.
Good show!
One thing I suggest you do is get someone to fix your blog for RSS reading. FireFox doesn’t recognise it, I had to have a couple of tries to get the RSS link (the RSS icon is linked correctly but the label next to it–the link most people will go for–is just a recursive link to the blog itself) and then when I did get it up, the title hadn’t been set. Obviously nobody has tested it with RSS, but there are many people (like me) who will only read a blog through RSS. This should be really easy to do as WordPress is very good at RSS.
Chris Dornan,
Yes I agree with you, the RSS needs more work but it is a beta project. I’m not keen on the blog engine either because its not set up to preview what has been written. It also means that you cannot preview HTML formatting in your reply.
I am using Firefox 2.0.0.13 and it works very well with the blog. It was a lucky accident that brought me to Firefox because I boot under Windows 2000 and IE6 does not have tabbing.
The really good thing about Firefox is that you can add on a dictionary that underlines in red when something is not spelt correctly.
Another great tool for blogging is Babylon:
http://www.babylon.com/
We all come across words that are new to us and with just a right click on the word you get a dictionary meaning of the word as well as a thesaurus and language translation engine.
Have not found a substitute for Microsoft Word and its grammar checker come readability statistics. It would be nice to have this in Firefox.
The RSS icon below the search box does not work but the two at the very bottom of the page ‘RSS Entries’ and ‘RSS Comments’ do. They are named wrongly but you can always rename them in the reader.
I don’t use a web RSS reader I use a free Outlook add-in from:
http://www.attensa.com/
Not all the Noble Lords’ are familiar with this technology. Some think that a hard drive is a bad journey to work and a key board is something they are chairman of. Joking of course but lets get the peers thinking outside of the box.