Dona Nobis Pacem

Some small changes to my blog

Thanks to all the poodins who left nice messages on my 100th post. Furry much appreciated!

I've made some small changes to my bloggie recently. The linkies list of blogging poodins was getting furry long, so I decided to convert it to one of those expandable lists, like Hot(M)BC's has. I try to keep the linkies up-to-date, but if there's anyone I've missed, please let me know and I'll fix it!

I've also adopted a Virtual Maukie. She is sitting in the sidebar underneath the profile box. She likes to play, so if you wiggle the mouse cursor around her, she'll try to catch it! She likes pats too. If you pat her head she'll meow, and if you pat her tummy she'll purr. She's such a nice little kitty.

I've been thinking about updating the template for this site too. Problem is that it's such a big task, much more than just modifying what's already there. Might keep thinking about that one...

One hundred posts!

I'm furry excited because this is the 100th post on Fluffy Feline Friends!

I've met so many nice poodins and beans through the cat blogosphere. It's been so wonderful to see how much love and support all the poodins and their beans give to each other. We've loved reading all the stories, celebrating the good news, and helping poodins through things like Artsy Catsy's Mu Shue Bookmark Benefit and sponsoring Ramona's Top Cats. We've also been touched by the sad news and hope that the purrs we send out help even just a little bit.

One of the most wonderful things for me was helping find a furrever home for Mr Crumples. I'm so happy that my little bloggie helped find a good home for a poor abandoned poodin.

Purrs to all my poodin friends, and thanks for making the cat blogosphere such a wonderful place!

Firefox is kitty friendly

Many poodins have said that they often have problems with blogger not letting them post blog entries or post comments on other bloggies. Jasmine and I don't have this problem and we were wondering why.

We always use Firefox, not Internet Explorer -- does this make a difference? Other specs about the computer is that it's a PC running Windows XP. Are the poodins who are having blogger troubles using IE, Macs other operating systems?

We like Firefox. One of the reasons is because you can turn all the browser buttons in poodins! Here's a sample. Note that these buttons are from the first version, the kitty buttons for Firefox v2 are even better!

From left to right these buttons are: back, forward, refresh,
stop, home, progress of downloads, mail, open in new window.

From left to right these buttons are:
open in new tab, bookmarks, recently viewed pages, cut, copy, paste.

Skeezix's Cat Help blog: fav icon

Skeezix has set up a Cat Blog Help site for us poodins. Isn't that nice of him? If you are a bit confuzzed about how to do things on your bloggie, you can send Skeezix a question and he and his friends will try to help you.

I've already used Cat Blog Help to learn how to add a fav icon to my bloggie. Thanks to Rocky for posting this bit of advice!

Further update on migrating to Blogger Beta

It's now been a few days since I migrated to Blogger Beta. It's been mostly okay, but not entirely without problems. As reported by other poodins, I've had some hassles leaving comments on non-Blogger-Beta blogs, but if I purrsist I've been able to get through.

The thing that's bothering Jasmine the most is that the RSS feeds from Blogger Beta blogs don't play nicely with the RSS aggregator on her iPAQ (she's been using Egress). Do any of your beans use PDAs? If so, do any of them use an RSS aggregator? If so, which ones and have they had any troubles?

Jasmine wondered if the RSS feed problems were related to having an old Blogger template (or something based on an old Blogger template). She wondered because she wasn't having the problems with the RSS feed from CatZee's blog, but she was having it with old blogs (with old templates) which had been moved to Blogger Beta.

In Blogger Beta there's an option to 'upgrade' the template. There's a fair bit of customisation in this blog, so I was skeered to 'upgrade' it since all the customisations would have to be re-done. I told Jasmine that if she wanted to test out her theory with the RSS feeds, then she can experiment on her own blog.

Made it across to Blogger Beta okay

I migrated to Blogger Beta last night, and it's okay so far. Jasmine also upgraded her blog. I'm glad we waited a while because the poodins who migrated early seemed to have lots of trouble, but the poodins who've migrated recently seem to have come through relatively unscathed.

The main feature that Jasmine is happy about (more for her own blog than anything else) is the label feature. She has a few favourite topics that she writes about (e.g. Rubik's cubes, iPAQs) and she was keen to have a way to quickly sort these. She even wrote to Blogger ages ago asking if they could please add a label feature! Jasmine was also happy to see that it's possible to bulk 'label' past blog entries without having to individually open and re-publish each one. She spent some time last night categorising her old blog entries. Don't know if I can be bothered to do this for Fluffy Feline Friends.

Something I like about Blogger Beta is that the Dashboard has more information, for example, it lists the number of comments against each blog entry. This one is more interesting to me than to Jasmine because my blog gets more comments than hers. (I guess I'm just more popular!)

Other thing to mention is that you have to have a Gmail account to upgrade. Jasmine already had one, but I didn't, so she created one for me. I might continue to use hers for a little while though until I'm completely convinced by this whole Blogger Beta thingy.

So, poodin friends, my preliminary finding is that Blogger Beta seems to be okay, and does offer some extra features which are useful. However, I'll wait till I've used it for a little while before giving it the full paws-up.

Upgrading to Blogger Beta

Hi Poodins. Blogger is telling me that I can now upgrade to Blogger Beta. In some ways, this is exciting, but in most ways, it's skeery! Lots of other blogging poodins have had lots of hassles upgrading their bloggie. I realise that I can't put this off forever, so I'm going to take the plunge. If you don't hear from me for a while, you'll know why...