Sidepodcast

Daily: 17th January 2010

Thankfully there were no announcements from Autosport International yesterday that made us scratch our heads. I mentioned in the comments that in prepping for the offline podcast this week, Mr C couldn't stop swearing when it came to talking about the rankings. Stay tuned for whether he manages to tone it down in the podcast or not! Meanwhile, here's what we're talking about:

• Pat has done the sensible thing and moved his website over from Blogger to Wordpress, and with a new title as well: I Watch Too Much Racing. Make sure you bookmark his new home on the web. Likewise, my own personal blog has made the switch back to hosted Wordpress, but it shouldn't affect your rss feeds, if you subscribe. Yay for Wordpress! (You don't hear that often round these parts so make the most of it!)
• It looks like Steven's wish could soon be granted and Paul di Resta will make the step up to Formula 1. At the moment, though, he's looking like filling the situation vacant as Force India's reserve driver, which doesn't really get a lot of miles under one's belt. Still, getting into the paddock is the first step, and di Resta is confident that's about to happen.
• A new blog has been brought to our attention in the best way possible - Ken asked if he could use one of our Flickr pictures as his header. You certainly can, Ken. He also has an interesting idea to compare the qualifying results rather than races - well, qualifying is the best part of the weekend, so I can't blame him.

That should do it for now, hope your weekend is going smoothly, let us know either way and I will see you in the comments.

Daily: 30th December 2009

In my research for daily facts and figures I have come across the best one ever. From the people's encylopedia, today is the day in 1853 when a dinner party was held inside the Iguanadon in Crystal Palace Park. We knew this! Mr Giggles took us to see those dinosaurs and told us that fact! In your face, Wikipedia! Eh-hem, here are some more F1 related things:

• I posted the Best of Debrief show yesterday - 2009 in Audio. It's a great trip through memory lane - the entire season crushed down into a twenty minute show with the best bits picked out by you guys. Thanks for all your submissions, and for the motivation to get the show complete. Couldn't have done it without you all.
• I'm contemplating the Best of Sidepodradio now, so if you have thoughts about what should go in that show, I am all ears. Simply post them in this thread and tag them #sidepodradio so I can pick them up later. Best of shows are hard work, but they are always worth it in the end!
• Mr C also wrote a brief update on some of the things we've been doing behind the scenes on the website. The graph included in that post is pretty cool, showing how much performance has improved since we started fiddling, and, well, basically stripping out Wordpress. Now things are so snappy round here, it's time to look at new stuff. Yay!

That should do it for now, let us know what you're up to and whether you have tired of your Christmas presents already. I'll see you in the comments.

WordPress Widget for F1 Minute

Near the end of last year we mentioned that we were busy learning the finer details about WordPress installations. We were doing this mostly so that we could build the theme Christine could only find in her head, but also because we wanted to extend the platform a bit further.

Today, we can announce the first of those extensions, the F1 Minute Player.

Sharing

You may remember a while back that we made F1 Minute available to any website wishing to use it.

Embedding "bytesize Formula 1 news", involved copying and pasting a small block of code, which wasn't particularly onerous, but now we've made it even more straightforward.

If you have WordPress installed it's just a case of copying some files, before dragging the player into position on your page.

Plugging In

More information can be found in the the plugin directory, including detailed installation instructions, various configuration options and a couple of screenshots. There's also further information on the F1 Minute site too.

If you have a web site that's running a recent version of WordPress, and your Theme is relatively modern (e.g. it supports widgets), then you have all you need to get started. Feel free to give it a try and let us know what you think.

Feedback

This initial release is just the first step, a stable platform to build upon. We're already running the widget on the sidebar of this site and there's much more to come in the future.

As always, your thoughts / ideas / comments / criticisms are most welcome.

New Year's Reconstruction

You may have noticed a new theme around these parts.

We're working on upgrading everything about the show, and the site was the first step. I wanted things to be a bit more orderly, because I am a control freak, so I spent a while looking around for new themes. I say a while, I mean a few months.

The thing is, there are so many themes out there that have interesting ideas or good designs attached, but none of them quite do the job for me. I found a couple that were contenders, but there was always something irrefutably wrong with them that couldn't really be fixed without major work.

The solution, it seemed, was to write our own Wordpress theme. So that's what I've been doing over Christmas. Fun! This is my punishment for being a control freak.

Actually, it was interesting, and although I can't claim to have done it all by myself, a lot of the CSS is written by my fair hands. So if you find anything irritating, I guess you should point your complaints at my good self.

Seriously though, it's still a little baby theme, with tweaks happening all the time, but if you see something you think could be done a better way, or any constructive feedback you'd like to make, we're open to any suggestions.

The quote button that was requested for the comments a couple of posts ago is now up and running, it has issues, but it works. We're hoping to bring some more buttons to make commenting even easier.