Documentation

As there is a lot of progress here, I'd like to adress my readers again to inform you about the latest news:

1. Layout
The first layout was nice, but not quite the way I wanted it to be. I now chose a different one, which is less colourful, but smoothly uses colors to reach the plain and coherent "look-and-feel": headlines held in red, links in blue, background white, text black.

2. Comments
You might have noticed that the original "leave-comment"-button doesn't appear in the bottom of the post when viewing the blog's main page. This is due to the implementation of third-party-scripts - a problem well known to blogger, but not yet fixed. The walk-around appears to be manually adding a link to the bottom of the post ("leave a comment"). Feel free to make use of this and contact me.

3. Recommendations
Since I started using Google-Reader in combination with my DA-News-Pipe on (almost) daily basis, I decided to make use of the "recommend article"-functionality and to add a gadget on the blog's sidebar ("Recommended articles"). Here you can now find noteworthy news and articles on topics related to development cooperation and my projects. I choose articles that might be useful if you are i.e. studying political science with focus on development cooperation and want introductions or to keep up to date (preparing your final exams?). Maybe you'll even like to subscribe to my recommendations?

4. Blogroll
One of the major features of blogging is networking. If you are familiar with this (if not, here's a short explaination), check out the newly implemented and growing "Blogroll".

5. Language-tags
Another important feature of blogging is "tagging", making it easier to search for and read through certain posts. As I provide information in both English and German (my mothertounge) language, I decided to add Language-Tags ("lang=en", "lang=de").

------------------(updated May 2009)------------------

6. Static Pages
One problem with "blogger" is the lack of what in wordpress calls "Pages": the possibility to link to static pages (like "About the blog", "Contact", etc.). But there are walk-arounds. Thanks to Blogger Buster, you now have easy access to important blog-posts from within the header.

Further adjustments will follow and be commented on when appropriate.

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DA-News

As announced recently, I started building sub-pipes to my "News-Imp" and am now happy to present first results. Below you'll find a gadget with weekly news on development assistance & -cooperation: "DA-News (beta)".

To get started, I combined strict searches for queries:

- "international+development+cooperation+assistance+foreign+aid"
- "development+cooperation+agency+assistance+aid"
- "Entwicklungszusammenarbeit"
- "Entwicklungshilfe"
- "Entwicklungspolitik"

Results are then filtered for unique titles and sorted by publishing date and language in descending order.
English language only; German language only; Both German and English language

DA-News (beta):
please allow scripts

view source; get as RSS

(updated Wed, Feb. 18th 2009)

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Up next

To make use of the flexibility of my news-fetching Yahoo-Pipe, I will now start preparing several news-dossiers. First of all, I will focus on German and international development aid ("DA-News").

If you are interested in using the Pipe yourself, feel free to do so or
contact me to ask about the possibility of ordering your individual dossier.

(updated Tue, Feb. 17th 2009)