New and less new blogs

Now that I've finally undone the damage WordPress 2.1 did to my sidebar (My Link Order was the answer), it's time to add a few blogs to it. Some I've only found recently, others I should have added ages ago.

Like everyone else, I've quickly become enamoured of Paleo-Future, partly because I've long been interested in how the future used to look (one aspect of which I'm exploring in my research), and partly for pure nostalgia. I myself have given up hope of seeing the skies filled with flying cars, but Futurama-style city-wide transportation tubes would save on shoe leather.

My continuing quest for quality modern British history blogs (other than those concerning war) has yielded The Victorian Peeper, the blog of Kristan Tetens, a cultural historian at Michigan State. Another (ok, not so modern) is Antiquarian's Attic. The mysterious Antiquarian researches Anglo-Saxon decorative metalwork, but posts on many subjects and periods.

Now to war (broadly defined). I've previously recommended Christopher Knowles' How it really was, where he is research-blogging his MA on the British occupation of Germany after the Second World War -- so I should have added it then! Victoria's cross? is a very interesting project, examining the proposition that the Victoria Cross is awarded for political reasons as much as for military ones. It's written by Gary Smailes, a freelance historian and researcher. And Thoughts on Military History is the, erm, thoughts on military history of Ross Mahoney, a further education lecturer in Cornwall as well (later this year) an MPhil student researching the role of the RAF during the Dieppe raid -- so as one of the airminded, he's already off to a good start as far as I'm concerned!

Finally, something a bit different: Larvatus Prodeo, an Australian group blog which admittedly is mostly political, but sometimes has posts on history. It also has the occasional post on Australian defence procurement which can be fun to try and derail with the help of fellow devil-may-care flying fools!

Update: oops, I forgot to add the new project of my R&D associate, Alun Salt: Clioaudio, a history podcast. Probably not something I should attempt, as a native Strine speaker. In fact, aorta mica Laura genst it.

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4 thoughts on “New and less new blogs

  1. What on Earth happened with the new WordPress version anyway? I had set up a listing of 'Clippings,' which were just stories from various press sources about the things I write about. And it was easy to set that up with the newest stories on top and the oldest gradually disappearing, so that 15 were always available at any one time. Then with the new version of WP I found I couldn't order them properly, and I wound up doing away with the whole category. Aggravating! I'll look at the plugin you mention. -- Paul

  2. Post author

    Yeah, it was most annoying -- seems they changed the function which deals with the links order (which is not itself the main problem) but then for some reason removed the ability to control that order from inside the WordPress admin pages. It seemed unnecessarily thoughtless to me.

    I suppose users are supposed to find other ways of controlling the link and category order -- either in the theme or with a plugin. I was nearly about to roll up my sleeves and start playing with PHP when first I realised I was wearing a T-shirt, but more importantly I found My Link Order, which elegantly solved the problem for me. I don't think it will work for a more dynamic sidebar like yours though! It still should be possible -- the new function wp_list_bookmarks has an orderby=updated option, which sounds like what you need ...

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  4. Another WP glitch: I used to be able to move back and forth between the editing field and the preview field while writing a post by simply clicking on a preview button. But the button is gone in the new version. Now I have to slide down the page each time to find the preview, then back up to continue editing. Most annoying!

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