Ventnor Blog

Hip, hip, hurrah for all of the VentnorBlog Forum members who have posted messages since it was born on 11 October 2005 - the General Chat area recently nudged over the 10,000 posts level. Well done all.

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We’ve noticed on the VentnorBlog Forum recently, that many people are using the board to seek out recommendations.

The variety of recommendations is wide, from dressmakers to builders, aga servicing to pest control.

Because of this, we’ve decided to break out some of these recent posts and start a new board called Recommendations?.
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Regular readers will know that there’s a lot of articles coming out on VentnorBlog daily during the week.

Scarily there’s between 10 - 17 pieces a _day_ flying your onto the site, and we know that it can be a little difficult staying on top of all of these (just imagine what it’s like writing them!).

So you don’t miss out on any stories, we’ve just introduced a newsletter that will deliver a summary of the previous days stories to you — complete with pictures — into your email box before 7am every morning.

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We haven’t written a great deal about the how and why of VentnorBlog, so forgive us this slight indulgence.

How we got here
We’re on the Island due to a night of insanity, when, in the course of a single evening, we decided to sell our place in London, leave and move to Ventnor, lock, stock and barrel.

Sal had never been to the Island and I’d only been a handful of times, starting with the classic school trip, including the inevitable Blackgang Chine visit, way back when I was around ten.

Moving in didn’t go as planned, due to an increasingly awkward house vendor (thanks Eva!)
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The VentnorBlog Forum went bonkers over the weekend with the whole of the first page of the General Chat discussion area being filled with conversations that were active - that’s over 50 separate subjects being discussed over the weekend.

Over the 2+ years that it’s been running, the Forum has gone through busy as well a quieter periods, but never has it been quite _that_ busy over a couple of days.

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We’re finally get back into the swing of things after our extended Christmas break and Simon has been busy adding extra features to the Blog.

Following a suggestion on the forum from Starheliomos, we’ve added the ability to skip through stories simply by clicking on links at the head of the piece (pictured).

In our never-ending quest (or at least it feels like that!) to bring you more, we’ve added a few more features to the site.

If you hold your mouse over the headlines after the main story, you’ll see the first chunk of the text appear in a floating grey box, giving you an idea of what the piece is about. (more…)

Now that the new layout incorporates quick links to previous articles from the home page (we will be sorting out navigation between articles soon), there doesn’t seem much point in having the daily roundup post.

Afterall, you get to see what we published the day before just by looking at the latest 5/30 headlines.

We’ve had a few people crying into their handkerchiefs about the loss of the old VentnorBlog jumble of letter, that we used to call a logo.
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If you’ve cleared the sleep dust out of your eyes this morning, you may’ve noticed that VentnorBlog is looking a little bit different.

We thought it was time to freshen things up and the forthcoming Ventnor West elections were a great excuse to do so.

We hope that you like the new look, at the moment, it is a ‘work in progress’ and we’ll be adding to it over the coming week, updating some of the functions and tightening things up.

As always, we’d love to hear what you have to say, so be sure to leave us a comment. Let us know if there is anything missing or what extra features you would like.

Hey! all of you VB Forum users … after quite a few requests for it, in particular from dear FarmersBoy, we’re pleased to announce that Forum members can now attach a small graphic to their profile.

In tech speak, it’s called an Avatar.

Once you’ve set it up, when you post to the VB boards, your chosen graphic will appear next to your posting.

The selection of what you choose to represent you is totally up to you, it may be a photo of you, or an object that you feel represents you, or something completely disconnected.
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We’ve had email contact from Jo Macaulay that, after 18 months of her initially registering on the VB forum, she’s now found difficulty logging on.

If you’ve had a similar problem, rather than take the approach of telling people that you’ve been barred, just get in touch with us and we’ll get your password reset so you can log in again.

Peace & Love?

We’ve been adding a few more bits to VB (got a little bored of typing VentnorBlog too!), with the most recent being displaying the latest comments that have been added to posts on the Blog.

They’re sitting in the right hand column and if you hover your mouse over the name of the person who posted the comment, you’ll see the name of the original story and the date it was published.

Clicking the name will take you direct to the comment, enabling you to read the post and, if so driven, add your own comment.

Of course this will never replace the Forum discussions, but comments give you the ability to add your thoughts direct to each story.

Perusing the Ventnor Angling Club Web site, we saw they had weather displayed at the bottom on the home page.

It’s something that we’ve been meaning to add for ages, so being it’s Friday afternoon, we thought we’d grab the time to get it sorted out. The result you’ll see in the right hand menu of the Ventnor Blog our home page.

Longer range weather guesses forecasts can be got to by selecting what you want in the drop down menu, and clicking the Go button. A new window will open showing the details, but fear not, VentnorBlog will still be there, waiting patiently for your return.

We’re not too convinced how accurate it is, as the sky we can see hasn’t got a cloud in sight. Let’s see how it goes.

We’ve got another weather-related treat up our sleeves, but it’s taking a bit longer to setup than originally anticipated. Oooh, the suspense …

After coming back after a weekend away, we found 66 spam account created on the forum - and three ‘real’ people creating accounts. Welcome to the real ones.

The spam accounts are created by people purely wanting to post adverts, normally for p0rn or drugs, and take a huge amount of time to sort out and get rid of.

By way of trying to reduce the spam account applications (you’ll never get rid of them all), we’re making some changes to the way registrations work on the forum.

Hope it doesn’t impact the service, but if it doesn’t, just bear with us, as we’ll be sorting things out as soon as possible.