Vivid Friday Favourites

Hilary:

• I love the fact that it’s Autumn which is my favourite season – the colours, the leaves on the ground, the low sun. Fantastic walking weather!
• I’m also really pleased that Sandbag, Dirtbag and Royal the dogs and Hesco the cat have arrived safely in the UK from Iraq - http://bit.ly/VNoqM. Even better, it looks like they've been given homes in Gloucestershire! However, it would be nice to see animal welfare being taken more seriously around the globe.
• I’ve enjoyed listening to John Hellings waking the Cotswold Way on BBC Radio Gloucestershire. Glorious!

Caroline: http://glumcouncillors.tumblr.com/ This hilarious site is dedicated to photographs of councillors looking gloomy... we had a look through our archives to see if we could find any of our own to contribute, but I'm happy to report that Tewkesbury's councillors are a cheerful bunch!

Holly: I'm not deaf! That's definitely made my week. I've always been a bit concerned that excessive exposure to loud music has caused some lasting damage, but whilst researching online hubs for the deaf/hearing impaired for the HPC I came across this deafchecker from the RNID. Awesome. http://bit.ly/q9c44. Also the fact that we're leapt from google obscurity to front page loveliness purely because of our blog and twitter account (@wearevivid doncha know). Def good for my ego :-)

Happy Friday all... this'll be the last week Friday favourites is here.... next week we make the move!

TVT xx

Bye bye blogger...

Can’t believe it’s been a month since I started work! Crazy how the time goes non? One of my tasks since becoming part of the team at Vivid has been to develop and maintain our blog. Definitely loads of fun. Recently though, I’ve been debating jumping the Blogger ship and finding a different platform from which to launch our tidbits of loveliness.

Why? Partly it’s to do with aesthetic preference. I’ve been using WordPress for my own site, www.dirtyenid.co.uk, for a while now and for me it’s far and away the better looking dashboard. To suddenly be faced with Blogger is a bit of a visual kick in the stomach by comparison. A little bit eye-vomitty, with too many colours, and way too much bold font. By comparison, WordPress keeps it nice and simple. Grayscale palette with the occasional splash of colour. A bit like Schindler’s list.

The other reason is formatting. Is it just me, or does the Blogger software have some kind of blind spot when it comes to calculating how many lines you’ve left between each paragraph? It’s a minor annoyance having to keep re-editing everything you write so that the spaces between the lines look right, but after a while it gets pretty tiresome. Tiresome enough to move when something better comes along, and a real indicator of how the small details can make a huge difference.

So it’s time to starting packing up and moving on. But it’s not WordPress I’m defecting to, despite its legions of fans and the fact that even Google’s Matt Cutts rates it the highest in terms of SEO. Oh no. There’s a new blog kid on the block. Enter Posterous. Launched in July 2008 by super-smart computer duo Gary Tan and Sachin Agarwal, Posterous is beautiful in its simplicity. It’s based around email – email for setup, email to post, email to share music, videos and other media.

It’s this simplicity that I find so appealing. It terms of implementing a blog that every member of the Vivid team can use it’s pretty unbeatable. Whilst getting to grips with creating and posting blogs takes time if you have no experience, everyone is already familiar with email. Whilst I’m totally in favour of pushing people out of their comfort zones when it comes to social media, sometimes it just makes sense to go for the simple option.

To conclude… adios Blogger. Posterous here we come – I’ll let you know once the move’s all sorted. In the meantime, I’d love to know if anyone else has been using Posterous for a while, and how it’s shaping up long term (and if anyone else agrees about the ugliness of Blogger…)

Hx

P.S... if you're still confused and wondering how to pick a platform for your own blog, check out this super informative post from the problogger team.