Liveblogging the National Puppetry Festival

As with my trip to UNIMA 2008 (a festival for which, UPDATE 30 July 2009: the site is no longer available), I’m liveblogging my trip to the National Puppet Festival in Atlanta. This means daily updates of what I’ve been doing, show reviews, pics and general diarising. I have internet access all the way through my trip, so everything will be posted as it happens (or at least the day of the event).

I have set up an entirely separate blog page for the National Pupppetry Festival stuff. A complete diary, Flickr gallery, relevant links, etc, can be found here. If you prefer, an RSS feed has been set up for that page alone, so you can subscribe to the NPF Diary without having to receive all other updates from the Puppets in Melbourne website (if you’re already signed up to PIM RSS feed, you don’t need to subscribe to the separate one; the aggregator for the normal RSS also catches the stuff from the liveblog). Please pass the message on to anyone who might be interested in subscribing. The diary also has a completely different layout to the rest of the PIM website, to allow for maximum effect of photos, liveblogging, etc. Under each blog entry, there is a link to my Flickr set, where I will be uploading all of my photos from my trip; there’s also a link under every blog post to my itinerary, so you can keep up with what the next day brings, what I’ve just done, etc. There’s a calendar in the right hand menu so you can read a day’s activities by picking a date. There’s a Flickr gallery slideshow in the side menu as well, as a teaser to read other blog posts or browse around. Plus, everything is categorised so you can pick and choose what you want to read, as well as following day-by-day posts. For instance, you can read reviews under the ‘Reviews’ category, or choose workshops. By picking the ‘Handy Links’ category, you can have easy access to the NPF website, sightseeing stuff, or whatever I find useful. And finally, there’s main menu links to the normal PIM site stuff, so you can browse back and forth.

Once I am closer to leaving, I will link the diary page from all the other PIM pages. Also, as with the Perth trip, I will be creating a ratings system for my reviews. (This time it would probably be a good idea not to go outside the system. I marked three shows with ratings above 5/5…)

… After doing the liveblogging from Perth, I decided that this would be an improvement. Easier to follow for my readers, easier to work with for me. Having permanent links to the gallery and itinerary means I don’t have to retype everything when I upload new posts; plus with the new tagging/related posts plugin, I don’t have to manually link the day’s events with a review, or a link with a workshop, etc.

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