9 posts tagged “vox”

So I'm thinking about moving my personal blog to my own domain, alex.leonard.ie, for no major reason but it feels like it's the right thing to do.

I've had a few people mention the fact that they have to join vox to comment here, and I don't want to think that I'm excluding anyone ;)

Also, I have that domain name sitting their idle and it feels like a waste.

So I went looking for a method of exporting my blog posts from Vox and lo and behold one doesn't exist. It's a bit of a shame - I didn't realise my posts would be locked in here, so I'm faced with two options.

1. Wait until the Vox team create an export function.
2. Go through every post on this blog manually, copying and pasting it over to my own domain.

Neither option is ideal really, as I don't know when option 1 might happen, and option 2, well, copying and pasting over 200 blog posts might take a while..

Any suggestions anyone? I'd be planning on keeping this vox account so that I can comment on my neighbours vox's, but other than that I think I'd be doing everything else over on my own domain, and would love to see some people from vox drop a comment in on occassion!

Vox-banner

Well, possibly for the first time, I've actually used one of my own photos as a banner image on this blog. I think it fits in fairly well with the black theme, and I'm pretty happy with the photo as well.

It's a shot of the sun going down (really?), taken yesterday standing in a field beside our new place in Longford, Ireland.

I've just signed up to participate in Blog Action Day on the 15th of October. I think someone has come up with a very good idea here and if people put a bit of thought into it we could see some very interesting discussion sending a wave through the net on the 15th.

Perhaps the Vox Team would be interested in getting involved and therefore encouraging Vox users to lend their combined posting support :)

What is it?

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Blog Action Day Banner

http://blogactionday.org/get_involved

If you are a keyboard short-cut aficionado like me, I have a tip for all you Firefox users out there.

I often find myself jumping between Vox pages (reader overview, recent-activity, compose, groups etc) like a jumping bean, and being that I love not moving my hands to the mouse the whole time I thought it would be easier to sort the common Vox pages into easy keyworded bookmarks.

Firefox Keywords

How to add a keyword

One of the often overlooked functions built into Firefox is the ability to add a keyword to a bookmark. This allows you to quickly navigate to sites that you frequently visit.

It's something that I use more and more for my common sites - and if you're a Firefox user, you should too!

How does it work?

If you edit the properties of a bookmark you'll see a keyword field. Type something short in here - v for vox maybe - and then click ok. Back in your browser, press Alt+D or Ctrl+L to jump to the address bar, now type "v" and hit return. Voila! You are brought straight to www.vox.com. Nice.

My Vox Keywords

My Firefox-Vox keywords

I've taken a screen shot which you can see on the right, so you know what I'm talking about, and for your further convenience there's a list below.

I used these keywords as they seemed to make sense in my head, but obviously you can use any that make sense to you.

• My Blog - http://yourblog.vox.com - Keyword: vb
• Vox Compose - http://www.vox.com/compose/ - Keyword: vc
• Vox Organise - http://www.vox.com/organize/ - Keyword: vo
• Vox Home - www.vox.com - Keyword: vh
• Vox Groups - http://www.vox.com/groups/ - Keyword: vg
• Vox Explore - http://www.vox.com/explore/posts/ - Keyword: ve
• Vox Watch - http://www.vox.com/reader/ - Keyword: vw
• Vox Watch - Recent Activity - http://www.vox.com/reader/recent-activity/ - Keyword: vra

Double the convenience pleasure!

Flat Bookmark Editing

Just to help out a little more: there's a handy firefox extension that makes bookmark editing much quicker and easier.

Flat Bookmark Editing

This Firefox extension alters the way the bookmarks are displayed by adding the properties box to the bottom of the bookmark manager. This way as soon as you select a bookmark you can tab down to the properties box, make your changes, and then use the up and down arrows to switch to the next bookmark and make another change.

This makes for very quick assigning of keywords!

Hope this is helpful to people - and to those IE users out there: what are you doing?! Get Firefox!

Well my favourite photo storage solution just got better! Picasa Web Albums just increased its free storage offering to 1Gb (and there was I starting to think that it would be good to subscribe to get more storage space).

To the people at Vox: I would love if you included Picasa WA in the photo accounts along with Flickr and Photobucket. I'm not sure if there would be as big a user base, but I'm sure there must be people out there who use it. Any other Picasa users care to comment?

For those of you not familiar with it, Picasa is a free photo organiser that Google bought a year or two ago. It's by far and away the best organiser I've used, with excellent speed, search, and very useful quick editing tools. When they integrated their web albums I was delighted, it meant that I could easily sort out sharing some of my many many photos with people, and it is so easy to quickly create albums (tagged, grouped, and captioned) in Picasa and then just upload the whole lot.

Picasa Web Albums Screenshot

Check out my web albums here

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this. I haven't been very active the last while but somewhere between the 6th of February and yesterday something has gotten messed up in the Vox code that has made Vox unusable in Firefox (version 2.0.0.2).

The compose window is now broken. When I go to compose I can type in a title but if I try to either tab or click into the main text window I cannot get into it. I cannot type anything. So for the time being I am using IE7 without error. I have noticed that I also cannot leave comments using Firefox.

Has anyone else noticed this? I have sent feedback to Vox pointing this out. I know they are busy working on the new Control Strip (which you can turn on in beta - more instructions here), so perhaps something has gone screwey in Firefox in the meantime.

If you've noticed this as well, let us know and more importantly let the Vox people know! I don't like being outside of Firefox too much!

Well, this is fun. Just after I blogged about not being able to customise the look of our own themes, Vox have made it possible to use our own banners along with a neutral colour scheme.

For the time being I have picked a simple picture from Deviant Art (I hope the artist doesn't mind) - you can view the original here:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/49704906/

And if you've never checked out Deviant Art, I highly recommend it. Great place for desktop backgrounds etc.

Just thought I'd ask an open question.. does anyone know how you go about submitting designs for the Vox Blog templates?

I've submitted a question on this one ages ago and have had no response. Is it a closed thing or can anyone send in design concepts?

I must say I love the Vox look, but I know if I was allowed to I would definitely get in underneath the hood and start tinkering!