Jonathan Waddingham

Author: jwaddingham

  • The Times they are a chargin (yeah someone else has probably done that already)

    I’m intrigued by the new Times website, and whether it will work sitting behind a paywall, so I’ve subscribed to their email updates. Here’s one I received today:

    Dear Jonathan,
    As a sneak peak of the video soon to be available at thesundaytimes.co.uk, we offer you a glimpse inside Downing Street on that momentous day.
    It is the creation of photographer, Alison Jackson, renowned (and notorious) for her Fake Take videos, and is exclusive to the new site. You can see more of her work during your preview of thesundaytimes.co.uk, as well as a wealth of other exciting and intriguing video.
    Your free preview starts soon. We hope you enjoy it.
    The Times and The Sunday Times

    So, you’re the first major newspaper in the UK to start charging for content and you entice readers to pay for access with… fake videos of David Cameron and Nick Clegg playing cricket?

    Is that really the best they can do?

  • Choosing wordpress designs is hard (and time consuming)

    And it can be quite boring if you’re not quite sure what you’re after, but you know what you’re not after.

    Here’s what this blog first looked like:

    JW blog old 1

    And I don’t know how long it will stay like this – or even whether it’s that much on an improvement. Either way, I’m on self-hosted wordpress now so it should be easier to change.

    Having said all that, searching for a new blog design is less boring than reading about someone searching for a new design.

    So, er, apologies for these two minutes that you’ll never get back.

  • WordPress designs (boring)

    Wow, there are a lot of wordpress designs. I decided to update this one today, but haven’t finished.

    One day, I will make enough time to do something with this blog… One day.

  • New year, less cheese

    For some strange reason, I’ve decided to give up one of the great pleasures and passions of my life (cheese) for January. It’s a new year’s resolution, but for a good cause. In my case, the cause is the charity Good Food Matters.

    I’m raising money for them because they work with people who aren’t as fortunate as I am to help them enjoy food and learn all about the wonders it holds. They do this by educating young people and children in Croydon on how to cook as well as providing information on nutrition, health and wellbeing. Here’s a slideshow of what they do.

    Needless to say, I’m raising money online and you can help me help Good Food Matters help disadvantaged young people by sponsoring me on my fundraising page.

  • Musing on blogs (aka the self-indulgence starts)

    It is really stupidly easy to start blogging on wordpress.com. It’s been a while since I blogged at the old JG blog (which is still live, and shouldn’t be…) which was a hosted wordpress.com site. Now our blogs (all 3 of them – for runners, the main blog, and for charities) are self-hosted, so we have  more flexibility, but I wanted to get something up quick; hence being here.

    The first blog I ever wrote (it was fairly shameful, although I’m a little sad that it’s gone to the great content graveyard in the sky…) was on community server software back in 2006. I vaguely remember that it wasn’t great to use. From there I took over the runnings of the JG charities blog (on Typepad – http://justgiving.typepad.com/charities) and started to get a better understanding of what I wanted from a blog, and what they could do.

    Anyway, I wanted a theme with a few columns so I could pull in feeds from all the other places I write content (laziness ftw!) so I’ve gone with Fjords04 by Peterandrej (who I want to think is an Eastern European Peter Andre lookalike). I was tempted by Grid Focus by Derek Punsalan but it’s a bit too plain, however much I love clean and simple web design.

    So now I’m here. But I’ll probably move to a self-hosted blog sometime soon. At which point I’ll probably write an equally riveting post about that process…

    There’s nothing like being original and ahead of the curve (as the lovely Annie Mole wrote aeons ago):

    Britain Going Blog Crazy - Metro Article

  • My (by no means) first post

    I don’t really have anything more to say than I say in all the various places I write online, but thought it was about time that I collected it all in one place. In the unlikely event that I think I have something interesting to say that is, well, not relevant to or appropriate for those other places, I’ll stick it here. M’k?

    First Post by Scribe on Flickr