My Feed URL

As I’ve now dropped the index.php bit from this sites URLs the RSS feed has moved too. I’ve just added a redirect and then updated feedburner to use http://www.upthejunction.com/feed

Hopefully, all is well

Merry Christmas

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Server Swap

I’ve changed hosts for this site over the last 24 hours and I’ve rejigged the posts and categories a bit. If you spot any funnies or 404 errors please leave a comment.

I think I’ll be reviewing my categories again soon as I’m not 100% happy with them. I was kind of forced into doing something with them because when you import a wordpress extract file it doesn’t keep the same category numbers …that’s a bit of a pain really.

Hyperlocal Weather Forecast

Us Brits have a reputation for talking about (moaning about) our weather – hot, cold, wet or dry the current weather is always of interest. For that reason I’ve been wanting to add a weather forecast to my local sites – it could be one way of building a returning readership.

I’ve found a great wordpress plugin that does the job pretty well – it’s called wp-forecast and it uses Accuweather for the data. I’ve used the accuweather plugin for firefox for a couple of years now and the forecasts are usually pretty good. The wp-forecast plugin is easy to configure and you can even tinker with the CSS if you feel inclined (I haven’t yet).

You can see the plugin in action on my work-in-progress site about West Kirby, Wirral.

If you know of a better weather plugin for wordpress let me know.

Scary Google Sitelinks For BBC News

I usually check the BBC news online a few times each day but for whatever reason I didn’t get around to it yesterday. So in the evening I asked Sarah what was in the news today and she told me that a plane had crash landed at Heathrow!

I checked the teletext …no mention of it. I watched the ten o’clock news, again no mention of it. So I went online and looked at the BBC site – again, nothing. I quizzed Sarah about where she’d seen this plane crash news and all was revealed ! 

If you do a google search for “bbc news” you currently get this:

…spot one of the site links to an old news story from the crash landing that happened back in January.

Meta Tags For Geo Location

As a little test (and this is a reminder to myself) I’ve added geo meta tags to a couple of my hyperlocal sites this afternoon.

If you enter your desired location over at mygeoposition you can simply copy and paste the tags that it generates for you into the head section of your page.

Here’s an example for a well known London address:

<meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Downing St, Westminster, London, UK” />
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”51.503207;-0.127162″ />
<meta name=”geo.region” content=”GB-Greater London” />
<meta name=”ICBM” content=”51.503207, -0.127162″ />

So now I’ll wait and see if the tags generate any attention.