we’ve got a brand new link on the left that i’m really excited about. it’s the equivalent of an lj friends page, only my clever fella made it especially for me out of stuff we found lying around on the internet*, isn’t he clever?

i don’t like huge long blogrolls (and i particularly hate that word), although i appreciate the desire to link back to people who inspire you. i just don’t find them particularly useful as a visitor. occasionally i will pick a random link from a sidebar to follow, perhaps a name i’ve seen in a couple of different places, but in general i don’t find them a good way of finding new blogs. i do like friends pages though - i love having the chance to browse through posts at random until i find one that interests me enough to check out the blog. browsing content rather than titles works for me.

so after much swearing and googling we’ve got a whole page devoted to my daily reads but it may need a bit of tweaking. i’ve set the options to display the 20 most recent posts from all the blogs i subscribe to (listed at right, apols for css alignment nightmare, is on the list), and i’ve chosen to display full posts rather than excerpts.

i would really appreciate some feedback on this - is the page taking too long to load? should i have fewer posts? would excerpts work better and do the same job of giving people a chance to browse and find fantastic blogs they may have missed?

*to be fair, it’s a wordpress plugin called friends rss aggregator, but it’s not the most straightforward thing in the world to install, and i’m a hard task mistress, so it doesn’t make him any less clever

another simple but recommended project, especially for preschoolers who recognise some letters but aren’t yet reading. i wrote out the words we needed, we identified the letters together and went through a pile of catalogues from the recycling finding nice big colourful examples. placing each cut out letter in the appropriate spot on top of my written example made it easy to spot which ones we needed next.

it’s good for looking at different type styles and capital vs small letters. M loved spotting the different letters and felt very clever when she deduced a new one (she doesn’t know “r” yet, but could work out the sound because she knows “oo” and “m” and what the whole word said). it also introduced some new punctuation - she recognisies “explanation marks” and that question marks usually mean “what?” (thanks to asterix) - but this is the first time she’s encountered an “impostro-me”

we enjoyed finding the letters so much we decided to add an extra word, it was M’s suggestion to make it fantastic. i can’t claim originality for this idea, it comes from crafty ideas from junk, recently picked up in a charity shop.

oh and i get that this rather lets the cat out of the bag on M’s identity, but i figure that pictures aren’t searchable, so once this drops off the front page she can return to her shadowy secret life just out of the frame in my photos (lol, if photos had a soundtrack you’d certainly hear her singing in the background on most of mine).