This is a new weblog

This is the first entry in my new weblog. I have set up this weblog to discuss and evaluate CALL activities. This weblog is run with Movable Type, which I haven’t used before. It seemed pretty easy to set up. I have tried to keep the interface as plain and simple as possible, though I can add a lot more functionality if needed.

Any suggestions about how this could be improved? Does it work OK for you? Leave a comment.

The rest of this message is technical.

I will be adding a better looking header with a menu bar. At the moment there is only one page, so there isn’t much for a menu bar to do. But I will shift things from the side bar to the top of the page, and add links to other content.

I have added a newsfeed, which took a lot of setting up but seems to work OK. I wanted to convert the newsfeed myself rather than depending on another site to do it for me. I tried a lot of different ways to do this and finally got it working with RSSMonkey. It took a lot of experimentation, but it does seem the easiest to use and it automatically caches the feeds to a file, which saves time. This is something that will be useful since I can use the same program to add newsfeeds to any of my web pages – something that I have been wanting to do for some time.

What I would really like to do is limit the newsbox to a limited selection of three stories from the feed, rather than include them all. In this way there would be space for news from more than one source. I have looked at the code but it is a little beyond my grasp – I know virtually nothing about perl. It doesn’t look too difficult, and I am sure it is possible, but it really helps if you have some idea about what you are doing, and I don’t.

I am not very happy with the comments pop-up and will probably change it so that the comments appear at the end of a page. If people have disabled pop-ups on their browser this might be a problem??? What would be nicest would be to have the comments entry page written dynamically within the page – in other words it appears when needed and then disappears.

A spell checker would also be a nice addition. I have the plug-in but haven’t got around to setting it up. If it is anything like the newsfeed, I will probably leave it for a while.