Charities have been running online shops for some time, and beyond the basic sales of fundraising items in recent years they have moved to offering real life solutions (or ethical giving) to their cause – buy a goat for an african village, teach a classroom with a supply of textbooks.
Oxfam have expanded their store even further by linking into their highstreet stores and posting second hand items on their site. Instead of browsing through rack of cloths and shelves of book you can now search online for unwanted gems. It’s good to see charities join in the full service experience blending their offline and online services together. Considering the complications of running second hand shops where you never know what might be on the shelves one day from the next I think this is an especially impressive move forward from Oxfam.
And I notice Oxfam use twitter in their media centre. Good to see these services getting picked up more and more.
I’ve applied a new theme to the blog to bring together a few ideas I’ve had about the site. The new theme is called Agregado and is a free offering commissioned by Smashing Magazine created by Darren Hoyt and Matt Dawson.
In the previous design of the blog I had used a feed syndication pluggin called Feed Wordpress which let you import content from RSS feeds and show them as posts in the blog. There were a few problems with this, I wanted to show information on my blog from other sites which I’d found online (particularly posts from other blogs I’d found on google reader) but also wanted to make sure that posts which were imported could not be mistaken as my own work and had to be credited to the original author.
This was partially achieved used a magazine style theme called Victoria which let me categorise posts to show in different areas. My own writing could appear completely seperate to posts which were imported.
This didn’t work out exactly as planned as various problems with importing feeds from google reader, flickr, youtube etc meant that feeds were rarely displayed in a consistent design.
This new theme lets me focus more on my own writing and content and has a distinct section for a lifestream of information from other sites. I am also in the process of redevopling my main site www.tomsteel.co.uk and I will feature more detailed lifestream content there. In the meantime I use friendfeed.com to bring together my ‘online activity’.
I read a story in September that was quite unbelievable. Mike Mitchell, who writes for the Online Photographer was sent a package from China by a fan of his. But the details involved of how, why, and what are quite remarkable. It gives you a hope for the little things in life, and help you remember that not everyone in the world is an arsehole.
Yes, posts have been pretty scarce recently, and like 90% of bloggers this is not intended and I plan to get back on the blogging roll as soon as possible. Honest. Really.
But my writing hasn’t just faded for no worthwhile reason, I have just been working on a new site which launched this week: the RNID Impact Report – www.rnidimpact.org.uk. I’m very pleased with the site, it gives RNID a good voice to show the work it does with real people telling their own stories. Take a few minutes to look around the site and watch some of the videos.
A friend of mine who also works in web has launched a similarly themed site for The British Heart Foundation – www.bhf.org.uk/annualreview2008/. It’s a very different site but I like the way the content flows from one area to another, whilst showing clearly what you’ve already seen and what you can look at next. Very nice.
My writing should pick up speed again soon, there’s a great story about a Bulk Film Loader which I want to share as well as a great new do-it-yourself B&B site which I hope will catch on. Check back here soon…
