This blog is on the move

to

http://ballotsballsandbikes.wordpress.com/

Good news - Lib Dem Feed now working

I still have not changed the code on the blog other than to add the No New Trident Button and lo and behold the Lib Dem Feed has started working again all by itself. Brilliant

Ballots, Balls and Bikes or is it?

I have been running this blog for a little over a year now and the title was derived from those things I thought I would most likely be blogging about namely UK Politics, Football and Motorcycles.

The new version of Blogger has introduced the concept of labels and I have finally finished labelling all my posts so I thought it would be a good opportunity to see how my proposed theme for the blog has turned out.

There are 440 posts up on the site.

Ballots

106 posts were labelled as UK politics with 54 labelled as Lib Dems, 16 Labour and 12 Tories (If only winning elections was so simple). 7 posts were labelled as US Politics, 12 were labelled as Iraq and 31 were labelled Environment. Most surprising of all given where I started was that 66 were labelled as Thai Politics (100 were labelled as Thailand so 34 were nothing to do with Thai Politics). When I started the blog the Lib Dem leadership contest was under way and so naturally I had expected to be commenting on UK Politics and I had no inkling that the democracy in Thailand was going to hit so many problems or that there was going to be a military coup.

Balls

90 posts were labelled as Football with 56 being labelled Leeds and 42 Reading. Not that surprising as a Leeds fan and a season ticket holder at Reading.

Bikes

18 posts were labelled bikes of which 15 were also labelled as Harley Davidson.

Conclusions

I wondered about the imbalance between the number of posts on politics and football and the number on bikes but I guess the reality is that there is not too much to say about bikes from my perspective. It is just great fun to ride. Even better if you can combine two things and ride your Harley to the football match and ride it home again which is what I have done to most home games this season including two in January. Most of the posts have been pictures of bikes. The other big surprise was the number of posts about Thailand. I love Thailand but had no idea I would end up posting so much about it.

Maybe I should consider a rename to Bangkok, Ballots, Balls and Bikes!

New blogger

Back from Thailand (sadly) and recovering from jetlag I decided to finally take the plunge and convert from the old blogger to the new blogger. I was expecting the process to be very slow and was worried that there might be some unexpected glitches once the blog reloaded. But no the conversion process took a few minutes and as far as I can tell the blog looks just as it was before unless anyone else can spot any problems. Still contemplating a possible move to wordpress although I shall see how how the new blogger goes first.

New Blog Design

Having fiddled about a lot myself I have brought in an expert to gave the blog a professional makeover

Changes include : -

• The new header
• A move back to one sidebar
• A consolidation of all the links into drop downs
• The introduction of categories or tags

Hope everyone likes it - let me know what you think

Help - How do you create topics and a topic index

Does anyone know how to create topics and a topic index and then code each post with the topics it is related to? The idea is that I could have a list of topics (or codes or tags) such as Politics, Lib Dems, Football, Bikes etc etc and then code each post with the appropriate topic codes. There would then be a list of topics in the sidebar and people can click on the relevant topic to see posts related to that area. I am not sure if topics is the correct term but if anyone can point me in the right direction I would be most grateful.

RSS Feed?

Does anyone know how to add an RSS feed to a template in blogger. I was hoping to add the Liberal Democrats National news feed to my page but I cannot see how I do it.

http://www.libdems.org.uk/

When I click on the RSS feed link on this page it comes up with a lot of code most of which seems to be sections which relate to the current news items on the page. Do I chop out most of this and if so which bits do I need? Any help most gratefully received.

Redesign launched - comments welcome

I have redesigned my blog. Please feel free to have a look and all comments positive and negative would be most welcome. I know nothing about templates but found some information about a three column layout and customised it from there. So I am slowly learning about html and tags and colour codes etc. Anyway suggestions to improve this version would be most welcome